Science fiction often reflects a vision of what humanity and the world might be like if things were different. Most often, it projects years into the future and imagines how technology or future events might have shaped us. There are some famous examples of when science fiction predicted the future. Star Trek gave us wireless phone communication that looked almost exactly like flip phones in the 1960s, decades before the first mobile phones were invented. However, there are also those inventions and ideas that missed the mark. From flying cars to floating cities, older science fiction tended to overestimate how advanced technology would be in the early 21st Century.
Now that we’re a couple of years into the 2020s, its safe to safe that a few of these fantastical tropes can be debunked. Perhaps we don’t have the technology yet or the principles behind these technologies or scientific discoveries have been proved unsound. Perhaps the past predicted a pessimistic dystopia, or even a far too optimistic utopia for the 21st Century. Here are some of the old sci-fi tropes that either haven’t manifested yet or likely never will.
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5 Existence of Fully-Functional Androids
Via MGM
Androids are one of the few old sci-fi movie tropes that we cannot be sure won’t exist sometime in the future, but that were plenty of films that were a little too optimistic when it came to the date that we would get access to the technology to build them. Sci-fi classic Westworld (1973) was one such movie, projecting a future in the 1980s where humanity has developed the technology to make lifelike androids that are functionally indistinguishable from human beings. These androids are congregated together in an amusement park that simulates several historical time periods, including the Wild West. Of course, these androids end up going insane and running wild.
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What makes this technology tricky is that two convergent branches of science have to be very advanced in order to make true androids. The first is the human-like artificial intelligence, which, while not implausible, has been out of human reach for a while. Then, there is also the technology to produce human-like bodies for this AI to pilot. There are also countless questions, both philosophical and practical, as to what would constitute a human-like android in the first place. HBO’s Westworld TV show raises some of those questions. While always an interesting possibility, androids haven’t been developed yet, and it is unlikely they will be ready for mass production anytime soon.
4 Cyberpunk Megacities
The Ladd Company
Some elements of the cyberpunk movie genre have mirrored our reality: that we’re more connected to our technology, and that technology is more interconnected than before, much like the cyborgs and networks of cyberpunk worlds. However, one mainstay of cyberpunk cities, the Megacity, has not come to pass. The sort of architecture that appears in 1982’s Blade Runner, for instance, is very uncommon. The Harrison Ford movie had some of the most iconic and inventive cyberpunk city vistas ever seen, and those sorts of dark, ornate, and often ostentatious designs are so different from how technology and architecture is in our time.
Despite the fact that neo-noir is a popular genre, it’s not really something that is as impactful on urban architecture and technology design as other aesthetic considerations. Though there are likely some buildings influenced by cyberpunk, the general trend doesn’t seem to be going there. Besides, urban alteration and building on the level of Blade Runner would be very expensive — and it would take years.
3 Successful Cloning
Universal Pictures
Another technology that’s within the realms of scientific possibility, which also shows up in a lot of science fiction, is cloning. This technology is scientifically sound, but like androids there are issues that prevent its usage currently. The most famous movie to make use of cloning would be Jurassic Park, which used DNA frozen in amber to clone dinosaurs that had gone extinct millions of years ago. Once again, the scientific creations ended up turning against their creators and running rampant. Later Jurassic Park movies went steps further and began to genetically engineer these dinosaurs to be even more terrifyingly deadly. Given the technological advancement displayed in the series there’s also a lot of untapped potential in the premise for these dinosaurs to be engineered in strange and terrifying ways, given the possibilities genetic engineering would allow.
While you may know that cloning is ethically dubious, just ask the Clone Troopers from Star Wars. More than that, cloning is also scientifically dubious. According to a Business Insider article, the main practical issue with cloning is the high failure rate and the fact that it isn’t very cost-efficient. Funding cloning simply hasn’t been the most lucrative choice, and science often goes where the funding goes.
2 Anti-Gravity Hoverboard Technology
Via Universal
Ducking the much more scientifically complicated trope that is time travel, the Back To The Future franchise has a prime example of another sci-fi technology that seems feasible, but is more impractical than it seems: hoverboards. Though there are technically hoverboards in the 21st Century, real anti-gravity skateboards have eluded the engineers of our current time period. Back to the Future Part II, however, has hoverboards in the year 2015 that propel themselves off the ground with an invisible force.
The issue with hoverboards is that though the technology to make things hover does exist, the design of a board isn’t necessarily conducive to those designs. Popular Mechanics explains that hoverboards don’t have the room for the skirt needed to trap air blasting out of the hovercraft that keeps it afloat. They did posit a possible alternative, whereby one could use magnetism to float a hoverboard, but they mentioned that this kind of technological solution would make it so that the hoverboard could only travel in one direction. The technique to making a skateboard that can levitate, it seems, is not yet clear.
1 Alien Invasions
Via 20th Century Fox
Alien Invasions are one of the doomsday scenarios there were commonly projected by science fiction. There is something terrifying about advanced aliens coming to earth and taking over our world. One of the most dramatic of these was the movie Independence Day, where an alien fleet comes to earth and launches a simultaneous attack on multiple countries, blowing up landmarks like the White House in the process.
Alien contact is one of the interesting tropes, in that it represents something of a paradox for scientists. Despite the fact that the universe is so large that it wouldn’t make sense for us to be the only sapient beings in the universe scientist have yet to find any real evidence that there is anyone out there. This phenomenon, explained by the New York Times, is called the Fermi Paradox, and it describes the gulf between the science that says there must be life out there, and the science that says there isn’t. Whatever the case, aliens have yet to make contact, and even if they did, it would be more than 20 years later than they did in Independence Day.
