Sci-Fi Moments

[wakela]

In the intro for "Other People's Money" Steve describes a feeling most of us have had, of suddenly realizing that while we were going about our daily lives, the future caught up with us and surrounded us.  When this happens to me I call it a Sci-Fi moment.  Like the other day when my wife called me on my pocket video phone just so my daughter could see my face before she went to bed.  The Jetsons couldn't even do that.  Or the times I would work from home and keep in contact with the office through phone, email, and IM.  Several coworkers didn't realize I wasn't at my desk.

What Sci-Fi moments have you guys had?


This topic seems familiar to me, but I couldn't find a duplicate one on a search.  I apologize if I'm being redundant.

[Russell Nash]

First, I think we had things like SF cityscape, but not moments.

I get the feeling alot, but that's because I have two little kids.  There's always a lot of thinking, "wow, when I was a kid we didn't…".  I was 14 or so before we had our first VCR, so everything with TV other then watching a show live gives me the feeling a little bit. 

A couple of weeks ago my boy fell off a bed and cut his head on a radiator (At his grnadmother's. I was no where around.  It's still good for making my mother-in-law feel guilty.).  When he got home I took a picture and sent it to my mother.  She was looking at it in a couple of minutes.  I still shoot film sometimes, so that always makes me smile.

[Heradel]

I saw someone with one of these in Chinatown last month. Not quite that feeling of technology surpassing Sci Fi, but considering I'd seen Blade Runner's Final Cut the week before freaky nonetheless.

[gelee]

Hmm.  A couple of things that just stop me in my tracks sometimes:
The camera in my phone.  I did not see a cell phone in person before I was 17, and that one had a chord and a satchel, like something you'd carry if you were storming a beach head.  Now I have one with a camera in it.  Oh, and I could fit the whole works in my mouth if I wanted.  Yeah, that impresses me.

Also, digital video picture frames.  I don't know why, but that just seems so damn Star Trek to me.

[Ocicat]

I gave up on that sort of feeling when we entered into the 21st century.  That's basically by definition Sci Fi.  Plus, there were spider goats.

In early 2000 I read a story about a Canadian company that wanted to make bullet proof vests out of spider silk.  That's some of the strongest stuff known to man, but spiders are hard to raise and very hard to harvest from  - especially since you just want their support stuff, not the sticky stuff, and spiders make both kinds together in their webs.  But they noticed that the genes for web creation were similar to the genes for certain enzymes in goat's milk.  So they spliced some spider DNA into goats, and presto!  Goats that made spider silk in their milk.  Just strain it out and make something from it.

Spider Goats.  Welcome to the 21st century.  The future is now, and it's weirder than you thought it would be.

[Leon Kensington]

I had one when I heard about that new particle accelorator in Europe.  I just thought, "Wow, the future is now.  So when the frak do I get a pet Cylon?"

[wakela]

I get the feeling alot, but that's because I have two little kids.  There's always a lot of thinking, "wow, when I was a kid we didn't…".  I was 14 or so before we had our first VCR, so everything with TV other then watching a show live gives me the feeling a little bit.

I get it with my kid a lot, too.  She's 1 and a half, and, as much change as we've seen in our lifetimes, she is going to see much more, much faster.  She'll grow up with the Internet already around like we grew up with TV.  And the Next Big Thing will come out sometime in her lifetime that I won't be able to use. 

When I was a kid the shows I wanted to watch on TV came on at certain times.  If you missed it you just had to wait until tomorrow.  For all I know my mom could have lied to me about whether or not something was on to get me away from the box.  My kid has no sense of this.  The shows she likes are on DVD, and she knows we can make them happen whenever we want. 

Also, whenever she gets a new toy, she looks for the part of it that is small and hard and shiny, and she presses it with her index finger.  So many of her toys have buttons that do fun things when you press them.  So when her stuffed octopus doesn't do anything when she pokes it in the eye, she gives it to me and waits to see how I make it go. 

[Russell Nash]

I had one when I heard about that new particle accelorator in Europe.  I just thought, "Wow, the future is now.  So when the frak do I get a pet Cylon?"

How long after that does the Cylon rebel?

[Leon Kensington]

Not my problem.

[Russell Nash]

Not my problem.

If it's your pet, you're the first victim.

[Darwinist]

My family and I were vacationing in a tiny Mexican town on the West coast.  For 4 or 5 days there was no TV, radio, and very little English heard.   We just sat on the beach, read, and bummed around town - and then my brother-in-law showed up with his laptop.  We picked up a wireless signal and all of a sudden the world was at my fingertips again after days of quiet isolation.   I had to check the weather back in MN, my email, etc.  I just couldn't resist the information. 

[Chodon]

When my niece was born this spring she had some serious medical issues.  She was on a machine called "ECMO" (extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation) that essentially did all the work of her heart and lungs while she rested.  As though "extra corporeal" isn't sci-fi enough!  It was amazing to see this tiny little baby hooked to about 300lbs of machinery standing six feet tall totally connected by a mass of tubes.  And that was one of the many machines she was hooked to...amazing.  It wasn't very Star Trek, but it sure seemed like something out of the future to me...

[wakela]

Chodon Jr., the cyborg.

That reminded me of the commercials for Biorad I hear on the Nature podcast.  They are indistinguishable from the commercials-of-the-future we see in old (and not so old) SF movies.

iQ5: 5 Target analysis capabilities for multiplex, real time PCR and gene expression analysis.

[Thaurismunths]

Digital music players get me.
Phonographs? No problem
Records? Still with you
Cassettes? A little woggie, but ok.
Digital? WTF you mean there's a stack of switches smaller than they eye can see that tell the wires to hum Bach to me??

(I say this as I sit in front of the glass jar that shows me pictures and words from all over the world just by wiggling my fingers)

[Russell Nash]

Daniel Shore called the White House "Aegean Stables".  I said, "what??", and went to Google.  Three minutes later I knew the whole story.  Then I just marveled at how easy it was to get the explanation.

[Heradel]

Daniel Shore called the White House "Aegean Stables".  I said, "what??", and went to Google.  Three minutes later I knew the whole story.  Then I just marveled at how easy it was to get the explanation.

Unfortunately for Washington, the Potomac isn't that much cleaner.

Still, a small improvement at least.

[Planish]

Check out Douglas Coupland's Reverse Time Capsule. (from 1995, to be opened in 1975 )

The fiction:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycroft_Holmes_%28computer%29

Heinlein also proposed the use of advanced real-time computer graphics and speech synthesis techniques for portraying Adam Selene over video phones, techniques that were far in advance of the primitive line drawing CG capabilities of the time (mid 1960s).

The SF moment - when I first read about Kyoko Date - the first virtual idol.
see http://www.akadot.com/story.php?id=99
The plans they had for her were ambitious (like real-time rendering so she could be a guest on a live talk show) but her career apparently nose-dived before technology could catch up. Even so, the idea that it was almost done made me think of Mike's "Adam Selene" persona.
When I was a kid (late '50s, early '60s) I thought it would be cool to have a job involving space or computer technology. Now I do, but the satellite receivers and computers are such a trivial part of the job.
Lasers? As common as CD players, optical mice, and pocket laser pointers.
From Men In Black:
Kay [picks up a small disk]: This is gonna replace CD's soon; guess I'll have to buy the White Album again... Ah...

My iPod is well beyond that already.

[Bunter]

"Augean Stables".

While I think that cell phones have the most potential for sci-fi moments (with wifi computers being perhaps second), the most interesting thing about this phenomenon to me is how - by and large - these technological advances *don't* cause sci-fi moments.

Watch an episode of star trek (tos) and consider how the communicator is framed in the shot.  When Kirk (usually) needs to make a call (sorry, communicate with the ship), a shot typically shows him pulling the communicator from his belt and then zooms in as he flips it up and says "Kirk to Enterprise."  The communicator is basically given the same type of cinematic treatment that is reserved for, say, a handgun in a contemporary film:  when someone uses a gun on TV or in the movies, the camera will also often focus on the drawing of the weapon, and then maybe the cocking of the weapon, and certainly the pointing or shooting of the weapon.  Semiotically, this treatment is designed to front the object, to show that it is important and its use is significant.

But anyone who has been alive for the past 10 years knows that cell phones aren't used in this deliberate way at all - people use them all the time, in all sorts of inappropriate locations, and, I suspect, the most commonly communicated phrase is probably more akin to "Dude- WTF??? LOL!" than something conveying actual information.  If star trek were *realistically* portraying the future, as soon as everyone beamed down, they would all immediately open their communicators and call their spouses/friends and continue whatever conversations they were having.

And of course when Spock wanted to occupy the computers memory banks, he would probably have asked it to find all of the Britney Spears/Paris Hilton videos on YouTube rather than having it compute pi to some impossible digit.

Occasionally I do have sci-fi moments, typically involving my talking car navigation system giving me directions to some place I've never been before.  But more often than that, I consider how impressed the 1978 me would be with all of this futuristic technology I have now...but I have do this via mental time travel because, mostly, these items became mundane for me before there was the opportunity for sci-fi moments.

But if we develop transporters, I promise I'll be impressed by it and use it for important trips, and not just to go to the mall...

[Russell Nash]

"Augean Stables".

Wow, thanks for hi-lighting a typo.

You probably just waved a red flag in front of some of our more sarcastic posters.  You might want to double check your spelling for a while.

[DDog]

There is an xkcd comic for every life event:


http://xkcd.com/354/

[Chodon]

Another Sci-fi moment I just thought about:
In 2005 I went to the Takamatsu area and Tokyo and it looked like a scene right out of every anime flick I had seen.  In Tokyo there were enormous building as far as I could see, shops packed into every inch of usable space, and vending machines all over spilling their fluorescent light into the street.  At any moment I fully expected to see a giant robot lumber past.  It was a perfect science fiction setting.

[Bunter]

Wow, thanks for hi-lighting a typo.

You probably just waved a red flag in front of some of our more sarcastic posters.  You might want to double check your spelling for a while.

Yeah, I'm fare gaim, I guess.

Moderator: And your quoting, but I fixed this one without commenting on it.

[Thaurismunths]

There is an xkcd comic for every life event:


http://xkcd.com/354/

Drat! You beat me to it.

[wakela]

About 5 years ago I was working at an internet company.  The IT guy came to my desk and said that the Blast Worm virus is going around, and I need to run a scan of my system.  I complained that I had a lot of emails to catch up on and a meeting with a wireless phone company about the website we'd made for them.  Tough luck.  I had to stop what I was doing and run the scan.  As I watched the little bar advance in the Blaster Worm Scanner window I had my sc-fi moment.  I was pleased with myself that not only was I scanning my computer for a virus, but I had achieved Deckard-level world weariness of such a marvel.

[Tango Alpha Delta]

Alright, who do you think would win?  Daniel Shore... or Alan Shore!   

But I´m surprised Chodon didn´t see a robot rumble by in Tokyo.  I guess it´s the South Koreans who plan to have one in every home by 2013. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/02/world/asia/02robot.html