The Future Is Wow

What if the techy transportation of sci-fi movies isn’t as far-fetched as it seems?

We asked Seth Shostak, scientist and film consultant, to rate them on a scale of 1 (“dream on”) to 10 (“totally feasible”). Bring on the levitating cars!

Alien

Technology: Placing people in “stasis”—suspended animation—for long journeys
Release date: 1979
Future depicted: “sometime in the future”
Rating: 7
What’s the holdup? “Call me Pollyanna, but I give this a seven. The holdup is, no one knows how to put someone in a state of suspended animation. Pretty fundamental.”

The Postman

Technology Horses as a dominant transportation mode in a dystopian , antitechnology future
Release date 1997
Future depicted 2013
Rating 2
What’s the holdup? “Fuggedaboutit. Horses are kind of fun, and they taste good on whole wheat, but even if we let the nukes loose, we’re not going back to horseflesh transport.”

Back to the Future

Technology: Time travel
Release date: 1985
Future depicted: 1985 (and 2015)
Rating: 8
What’s the holdup? “That high rating is for traveling into the future. All that’s required is moving ourselves at a fair fraction of the speed of light—something we can’t do now, but maybe in a few centuries. Traveling into the past? I give that a two. It would require both new physics and exotic technology, and it’s not clear we’ll ever have either.”

Blade Runner

Technology: Flying cars and related infrastructure
Release date: 1982
Future depicted: 2019
Rating: 8
What’s the holdup? “You could do this and, indeed, people have made flying cars. Problems arise only when you have humans behind the steering wheel. Look at how many tens of thousands of folks manage to kill themselves on one-dimensional highways, and imagine what they could do given three dimensions in which  to make errors. Flying cars, if we get them, will be autopiloted, and that’s how they ought to be piloted, too.”

Minority Report

Technology: Magnetically levitating autonomous car
Release date: 2002
Future depicted: 2054
Rating: 7
What’s the holdup? “We need superconducting material that can work at high enough temperatures that you don’t need liquid helium to make your car work. The big advantage over conventional cars: faster speeds. Disadvantage vis-à-vis conventional cars: faster speeds.”

Star Trek: The Motion Picture

Technology: Transporter
Release date: 1979
Future depicted: 2273
Rating: 2 
What’s the holdup? “In the standard Star Trek model, there’s a disassembler that takes you apart at the molecular level, a transmitting device that sends these small parts somewhere else (usually to the surface of a planet that looks a lot like Southern California), and then a re-assembler that puts it all back together. Virtually none of these technologies is likely to be something that we’ll have in the foreseeable future.”

Logan’s Run

Technology: Travel by pneumatic tubes
Release date: 1976
Future depicted: 2274
Rating: 5 
What’s the holdup? “Pneumatic tubes at every residence would allow people to shop on the internet and have their products delivered without jamming up the roads with delivery trucks. But putting people into pneumatic tubes runs into problems both technical (you need pumps every few hundred tube diameters) and physiological (do you want to be stuffed into a small cylinder and sent at high speed around a bendy tube roller coaster?).”