January 12, 1992: HAL 9000 becomes operational (per the movie).
August 4, 1997: Skynet comes online and takes over U.S. defense decisions from humans.
January 8, 2016: Incept date of the first NEXUS-6 replicant.
These are dates that live in science-fiction infamy. And to this short list—this rogue’s gallery of robots gone awry—we must also add November 2, 1999, for that is the day the world learned that robots had begun eating animals.
Sure, it was a modest beginning: Engineers at the University of West England’s Intelligent Autonomous Systems Laboratory constructed a little rollie ‘bot that could grab slugs, bring them to what may’ve been the world’s first slaughterhouse/charging station (methane from the slugs’ rotting flesh was passed through a fuel cell to produce electricity), and refill their batteries. Nothing here seemed especially threatening: The SlugBot had .01 megapixel vision, it looked kind of like a record player, and it could only catch and digest slow, boneless, dumb animals that might just be an exception to that survival-of-the-fittest thing people are always talking about.
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A recent episode of the “This American Life” podcast (episode #329: “Nice Work If You Can Get It”) opens with an amusing rundown of what astronauts actually spend their time doing now that there are almost no manned spaceflights. The answer was mostly: go to lots of meetings in Houston.
The more interesting revelation was that the astronauts get their vicarious space thrills by watching Farscape and Battlestar Galactica. Aside from being “hugely jealous” of the capacity for interstellar space flight, one of the astronauts pointed out that classic BSG Viper/Star Wars X-Wing Fighter design is pretty dumb:
“All of those shows assume that there is some sort of magical gravity thing so that when you’re in your vehicle, you know, everybody’s all walkin’ on the floor. Well, not in our space program.
“They’ve got fighter jet flying. They have pointy noses and wings and they make them look like fighters. None of that is any advantage when there’s no atmosphere.
“You could be a box and have the same maneuverability. The Borg had it right. They’re a big cube and they’re perfectly maneuverable, as opposed to the little star fighter with the pointed nose and the wings and the engine in the back.”
In Pixar’s robot love story WALL-E, the Earth is surrounded by a dense field of orbiting junk. (Incidentally, you know you’re a geek when you’re the only one laughing in the cinema because you recognise one of the satellites that WALL-E has to brush out of his way as Sputnik 1.) But while things today aren’t quite as bad as depicted in WALL-E, space debris is still a big problem, as can be seen on a real plot from NASA of the junk orbiting overhead.
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Are you into Battlestar Galactica? Are you rich? If you answered, “Yes, extremely,” to both questions, I’ve got an important piece advice for you: Go buy yourself a life-size replica of a robotic cylon. For only $7,900 (I say “only” because we’ve already established that you’re financially endowed), you can have a 300-pound, seven-foot-tall fiberglass figure–complete with Kitt-style, sweeping-red-light eye slit–made by “Robot Man” Fred Barton himself.
Not having that kind of cash just sitting around (yet), I haven’t bought myself one of these, so I’d be interested to hear how the thing looks. Unfortunately, there don’t yet seem to be such realistic toy versions of the skin-job cylons. Then again, considering how weird it is to have life-like dolls around, maybe we’re better off without them.
On the Popular Mechanics Web site, Eric Sofge complained a couple months ago that big, lumbering comic-book movies are sucking the life from the already shaky genre of intelligent Hollywood science fiction movies. His concern is not just artistic: He worries that the rise of the Iron Men and Spider-Men and the vanishing of think-oriented movies like Blade Runner is taking away the one piece of Tinseltown culture that inspires viewers to think, and maybe even act, like scientists.
It’s a clever, well-intentioned argument. I just don’t buy it for a minute. The line between smart scifi and dumb superhero scifi is not as clear as Erik tries to make it. Where would you put RoboCop and Total Recall, for instance? Lord of the Rings nurtured many a science nerd, even though there’s not a speck of realism in it; on the other side, Star Trek (original and all other flavors) has plenty of mumbo jumbo moments in it to rival Iron Man’s suit or Bruce Banner’s irradiated cells.
To my mind, the most effective scifi stories depend on two key factors: dealing with imaginary science & technology in a logically consistent manner, and being sensitive to its human implications. That’s what made Blade Runner and Terminator so great. At their best, the Iron Man and Spider-Man comics worked because they weren’t about the science at all; they were, like Batman, about life-transforming events that caused their heroes to deal with issues we all deal with, but on a wildly magnified scale. In short, they were almost all about the human side. Sure, their attention to realism was abysmal, but they were quite appealingly attentive to the idea of having to rely on your wits to succeed.
Is it so bad to tell kids to look up to a brilliant but socially awkward kid who used his smarts to fight crime and social injustice? And does Erik Sofge really want to argue that Outland and Saturn 3 were a big help in furthering the cause of science education in this country? If so…well, good luck with that, Erik.
