Replicators, Teleportation, Warp Drive and More: How likely is science fiction to come true?
Science fiction shaped all my ideas about human society as a child. From Star Trek to Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, I was raised on a steady…
Science fiction shaped all my ideas about human society as a child. From Star Trek to Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, I was raised on a steady diet of the future. The beauty of science fiction is that it can imagine future worlds that incorporate fantastic tech and sometimes even anticipate technology. Captain Kirk’s communicator anticipated the flip-phone. The ubiquitous PADs of Star Trek TNG anticipated the iPad.
One of the difficult jobs for any science fiction writer who wants to portray a future world is to evaluate technologies and determine whether to include them in the story.
Obviously, if your story depends on traveling to alien planets, you might need some advanced form of propulsion. If it’s a story about robots, you need advanced AI. But plots rarely hinge on most of the technology in science fiction. The rest of the technology is part of world building. You want your story to be, in some sense, removed from the present day. The more “out there” your science fiction is the more removed you want it to be.
The best world builder in Science Fiction in my humble opinion is Frank Herbert, whose Dune series invented numerous little details to create a fantastic future interstellar society, even as it played out a modern story. Another is Neal Stephenson’s parallel universe Anathem. Jumping over to TV, there’s Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek which built up its world over many decades.
All of these and many others introduce technology that is sometimes just convenient for the plot as transporters originally were in Star Trek to save production time on takeoffs and landings from alien worlds. Sometimes it is based on real science. Sometimes it goes directly against what science says is possible.
One of the interesting features of science fiction, therefore, is that some technology is fantastically unlikely to exist in a future world while other technology is probably not that far around the corner.
In this article, I want to take a look at a variety of science fiction technologies and, using my background as both a physicist and an engineer, explore how difficult they would be to achieve and what might be required in terms of engineering problems to overcome and new science that would have to be discovered in order to make them work. These are in order from “easiest” to achieve to likely impossible and then some that are so far out there that we can’t even begin to imagine if they are possible. As you will see, none of them are “easy”.
Energy weapons
Energy weapons are already a reality as the U.S. Military has been experimenting with high powered lasers to down drones and poke holes in boats. Given the complexities and expense of directing physical weapons at things, energy weapons have a number of advantages. They can be pointed at an object and be sure to hit it no matter what the weather conditions are. They are almost impossible to evade. And you can’t outrun them.
The biggest problem with these weapons is that the energy requirements are huge. Until people are packing matter/anti-matter power packs with them, I think that we won’t be able to create energy sources compact enough for people to carry directed energy weapons. The other problem is heat. They get extremely hot and there is the potential for radiation. Still, none of these is entirely insurmountable. Still, ship-borne and land-based energy weapons are a reality in 2020.
Rating: Likely
Extra-sensory perception
Will we be reading each other’s thoughts one day? It turns out we already are. Experiments in transferring thoughts from person to person and from person to machine and vice versa are now underway. While the technology is crude, we may find that we will be practicing telepathy one day. Reading a person’s thoughts without their cooperation might run into difficulties however. Currently, telepathic communication requires a great deal of practice.
What about other forms of ESP such as knowing the future? I think that is highly unlikely. We currently have no way for information to be transmitted into the past outside the quantum realm where it is entirely random and so gathering information that would actually be useful from the future is probably impossible.
Rating: Likely for cooperative telepathy, and Impossible for clairvoyance
General Artificial Intelligence
From Asimov’s robots to Star Trek’s Data to Cylons, AI as a concept has been around for a long time. Unlike most of the following, I’ve worked, on and off, on AI in my professional career for over 20 years, so I have watched it grow up from a topic that people laughed at in the ‘90’s to one of the dominant areas of industrial research in the present day. Most people focus on Neural Networks and various adaptive statistical technologies these days, but AI is a much more general umbrella covering everything from logical rule-based systems to deep learning. The question everyone is asking these days, however, is when will machines actually think?
Alan Turing actually came up with a test for this back in the 1940’s called the Turing test in which people had to have a conversation through some distance mechanism and try to decide if they were talking to a machine or a human. This so-called “Turing Test” would decide if the thing were generally intelligent.
It turns out that Turing’s test is too easy to game however and was beat in the 1990s with a chatbot. A real “Turing test” turns out to need more than just a conversation. It needs to involve a host of other abilities such as complex problem solving, generating ontologies (ways to understanding what exists), and lateral thinking.
It also requires understanding hidden information such as interpreting social situations and anticipating outcomes from social scenarios correctly. Mr. Data from Star Trek was famously poor at the latter, showing he hadn’t quite progressed to what humans would call generally intelligent.
It is also hard to design a test that some human beings would not fail and so it may be like the definition of obscenity as given by the Supreme Court: “I know it when I see it.”
Advances in computing technology from faster processors to GPU coprocessors to neuromophic chips have given AI a huge boost. Back in around 2001–2, I remember remarking to one of my advisors at the University of Texas that slow computation was the main thing holding AI back. I’m glad that has been vindicated.
Faster computers will eventually unleash AI’s full power and sooner rather than later. Combined with better ways of curating and processing data, I anticipate we will see general AI somewhere between 2040 and 2060.
Rating: Likely
Replicators
I have always wanted to be able to have my favorite meal prepared to me in seconds. From the Jetson’s foodarackacyle to Star Trek’s replicators, being able to manufacture almost anything instantly is something that is already being innovated with 3D printing. Still, 3D printing is pretty crude compared to having the ability to create anything out of raw materials or from pure energy.
Matter-energy conversion is, I think, an unlikely form for replicators to take since such a process would be incredibly inefficient and generate a lot of radiation. Rather, replicators are likely to be based on nanotechnology and the ability to assemble complex structures from constituent molecules kept in storage tanks similar to how printers work.
A molecular scan of a master object would be input into a computer and its AI-powered nanobots would learn how to assemble it, perhaps directed by lasers. The same could be done with food as well, even meat, since these are formed of complex proteins that could be provided to the printer.
This is already off to a good start, and I think that by 2060 we will see something complex enough to be called a replicator.
Rating: Likely
Disease Immunity
As the present pandemic suggests, people have a long way to go when it comes to disease immunity. But even in my lifetime, medical science has progressed enormously. When I was a kid, AIDS was a death sentence. Viral infections were only handled by vaccines. Nobody thought that antivirals would come so far as to make it mostly a chronic disease.
Likewise with cancer treatments, from proton therapy to immunotherapy to miracle drugs like Gleevec, which treats a kind of Leukemia, have all come a long way. It seems only a matter of time before we learn how to treat all diseases.
New innovations in genetic engineering and gene hacking such as CRISPR and advanced synthetic biotechnology may allow bacterial and completely synthetic microorganisms to do our bidding inside the body. Stem cells (which need not be embryonic) also enable doctors to replace or regenerate organs and even limbs using a person’s own DNA, ensuing that rejection is unlikely.
Whether people will ever be completely immune to disease is unknowable, since the battle against disease is always a battle of mutual adaptation. It is likely, however, that nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and AI will advance medical technology to the point where many diseases will become chronic rather than deadly and curable in many instances.
I would imagine that if such an innovation were achieved it would take some time, so I’m guessing 2080 to 2120.
Rating: Likely
Time Travel to the Future
Traveling in time is a fantastic premise for a story which is why so many science fiction stories use it. We are always traveling to the future. Can we get there faster as in Back To The Future II?
Yes, says Einstein (the man not the dog). If you can accelerate near to the speed of light and decelerate again, you can travel into the future faster. This is the famous twins paradox of relativity.
If, for example, I travel 4 lightyears at 99% the speed of light, it will only feel like 7 months to me. The closer to light speed you go the less time it appears to take when you return. If you wanted to travel 3000 years in the future in 1 day, you would need to travel 99.99999999995% the speed of light!
Will humans ever travel to the future this way? I think it is plausible that we will, perhaps as a side-effect of traveling to the stars, but to travel at these speeds would take technology so advanced I wouldn’t even guess when it would be available.
Rating: Plausible.
Teleportation of the Body and/or Mind
Teleportation has been a staple of science fiction for decades but none popularized the idea as much as Star Trek. As I mentioned before, transporters were originally a cost saving mechanism, but later on became a signature feature of the show.
But how likely is it that we will be streaming our bits across space? It turns out that the answer is: very unlikely.
I think there are a few pieces to teleportation that we need to understand first. Teleportation, as I define it, is the conversion of matter into information which is then transmitted or stored and used to reconstruct that matter in some other place or time. There are other forms of teleportation such as are included in the faster than light travel category where there is no conversion. You just step through a portal and appear somewhere else. I’m not talking about that here.
It turns out that while teleportation is possible for quantum matter. It is not possible for matter that is not is a “pure quantum state”. That would require something being completely, 100% isolated from its surroundings.
Even if you could put a person in such a state, converting all their trillions upon trillions of subatomic particles into information would be virtually impossible. Reassembling them on the other side without errors would also be an enormous undertaking.
The idea that you could just beam a person down to a planet is completely ridiculous. You would certainly need some tech on the other side to reconstruct them also in a pure quantum state.
Another option may be that, instead of teleporting the person’s body, you could just teleport their mind and place it into some kind of artificially intelligent brain or the brain of another person. We understand so little about the mind that it is hard to say if this is possible or not, but I think, on the whole, it is more possible than physically transporting a person.
The key would be whether the human mind can be reduced to mere information. If so, this might be a potential means for interstellar travel if you could somehow ensure that the person’s mind didn’t get scrambled in transit.
I am going to rate complete teleportation as “virtually” impossible since I can’t say it is completely physically impossible. Consciousness transfer I’ll just rate as unknown since we don’t quite understand all that would be involved but more plausible.
Rating: Virtually impossible for physical teleportation and unknown for transfer of consciousness but more plausible.
Faster Than Light Travel and Time Travel to the Past
So many science fiction stories from Asimov to Star Trek and Stargate rely on FTL travel. It is so important to being able to tell stories about alien worlds but, at the same time, we do not know of any physics that would even allow it.
I wrote an article recently on why FTL travel was impossible. Known physics rules it out completely. This turns out not to be because of Einstein’s relativity, which gives us the speed of light as an upper bound but allows loopholes if we change space itself. The problem is actually with the rest of physics which tells us that there is no way to warp space or time to travel faster than light. All these methods require exotic forms of energy and matter that don’t exist, even within quantum physics.
I put time travel to the past in this category too because from a physics perspective traveling faster than light and traveling back in time are the same thing. That may be why they are both impossible. For these to become possible, we would have to discover new forms of matter or energy that don’t obey the same rules as all the laws of physics we currently have.
Rating: Currently physically impossible
Instantaneous Communication
While Star Trek uses a form of communication called “subspace” which appears to be FTL but takes time if you look at the Voyager series, other science fiction has communication between stars that is instantaneous. Orson Scott Card’s ansible is an example.
It turns out that instantaneous communication in the sense of sending information instantly from one place to another is just as physically impossible as FTL travel. Sending information faster than light is the same as sending it potentially back in time, so again physics rules it out.
We do observe instantaneous communication between particles in the form of quantum entanglement, but no information can be sent through that mechanism. Things can affect one another instantaneously but they can’t exchange anything you didn’t already know.
Rating: Currently physically impossible
Travel to parallel universes
As much as I love stories about parallel universes like the His Dark Materials series, Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and numerous Star Trek episodes about the Mirror Universe, these story telling mechanisms depend on something that we have never observed. Other universes are one way to explain what we see in quantum mechanics, but there has been no evidence that they exist, and there are alternate explanations for quantum theory that don’t rely on them.
If parallel universes do exist, how would we travel to them? One way might be through wormholes where one side exists in our universe and the other in theirs. I suppose this might happen through some quantum experiment like Schroedinger’s cat. Schroedinger’s wormhole?
If we can keep the wormhole ends connected through some form of quantum observation where one end stays in our universe and the other ends up in the other universe, we would have a means to travel to the other universe.
This wouldn’t necessarily “violate” the laws of physics because it really gets outside of known physics entirely. Unlike FTL wormholes, it is unclear if such a wormhole would violate causality (cause paradoxes) since there is no causal relationship between the universes after they split. Even with the multiverse explanation of quantum physics, we have no idea how universes relate to one another other than that they somehow split off from each other when you observe mutually exclusive quantum outcomes.
I am going to suggest that this is currently unknown.
Rating: Unknown
Conclusion
These are just a few examples of advanced technologies that might be realized in the future. There are many more. Probably one of the most significant changes for future society will not be technological but social. Technology is only as good as how well it is used and how freely available the bounty of the future is to all. In a post-scarcity society, it stands to reason that nobody should be hungry, poor, sick, or forgotten. No matter how likely a technology is it will be important to make it benefit everyone.