Often, science fiction contains some pretty interesting ideas about what the future might be like, and sometimes it hits the mark. Here’s a list of some cool inventions that came straight out of popular sci-fi movies and books.
For anyone who is wishing for the 2015 depicted in Back to the Future, there is one thing that exists: self-tying shoelaces. This one was less a prediction of the future, and more a self-fulfilling prophecy. In February 2014, Nike designer Tinker Hatfield, who designed the original Nikes featured in the movie, announced that the self-tying shoes would become a reality in the next year. Just this October, on Back to the Future day of course, Marty McFly himself tweeted about receiving the first pair. According to Nike, the shoes are officially going to come out in spring 2016, so start saving your thousands now.
Of course, there is a less cool, but also cheaper and probably more practical option on Kickstarter. For 8 bucks a pop, Xpand lacing system, which consists of small specially designed pieces of plastic, keep your laces adjusted forever, so you never have to tie them again. Not exactly self-tying laces, but at least you don’t have to tie your shoes (if that was ever a problem).
If there isn’t a Kickstarter for it, then maybe there’s an app. One app, called Lexiphone, is similar to the babel fish from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In the novel the characters put the babel fish in their ears, and it instantly translated any alien language so they heard all speech in their mother tongue. Lexiphone can do the same thing, with human languages, while you are on a call. Next thing you know there will be elevators with feelings (one of the alien technologies in the Hitchhiker’s series).
From the voice activated computer system (not unlike Siri or Cortana), to their communicators, there are a lot of technological parallels you can find between modern technology and what they had in Star Trek. One of the most interesting of those technologies is the replicator system, which essentially appeared to make almost anything out of thin air. That is actually impossible, but 3D printers come pretty close. In addition to plastic devices, it’s possible to make pizza, and even grow human tissue. Maybe one day 3D printers will even be able to make tea, including the plate and cup, just like the replicators.
One thing that you probably take for granted is earbuds, but those didn’t exist in 1953, when Fahrenheit 451 was published. In the novel, Ray Bradbury predicts the use of small seashells, “thimble radios” that you can put on your ears to hear “an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk…” Which, if you think about it, is not so different from the concept of earbuds. In the novel, people don’t necessarily have as much control over what they’re listening to, but it’s still interesting to note that some of the critiques of earbuds – basically that they allow you to tune out the world – are somewhat similar to what the author was saying about the seashells (and TV) – they’re a distraction so you don’t have to think.
However, technology wasn’t always electronic or software based. In Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, the use of a mood-enhancing drug called “soma” is widespread. When characters took soma, it “raised a quite impenetrable wall between the actual universe and their minds”. This book was written in 1931, two decades before scientists began experimenting with antidepressants. Today people everywhere use them, both legally and illegally.
These technologies only begin to scratch the surface of what is in sci-fi. Some argue that Orwell’s vision of a surveillance state in 1984 is pretty similar to all of the government surveillance we have now, what with us being tracked on the internet, by our cellphones, and via traffic cameras almost wherever we go. Similarly, in Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner presents a vision of America lead by president Obomi in which people drive cars with rechargeable electric fuel cells, young people eschew marriage for short term hookups, people are plagued by acts of violence such as school shooting and terrorist attacks and Detroit is an abandoned wasteland.
What is interesting to think about is that some of these technologies may have become reality because they existed in fiction, while in other cases it is very possible that the fiction really did predict the future. Perhaps the future isn’t as unpredictable as it seems.
Leave a Reply