Movies and Real Life Future - Part 2

After Earth (2013)

Although this movie didn't do very well at the Box Office, there was something about this one that had struck me as another movie trying to predict our future. In the movie, we are shown that Earth's atmosphere has now become inhospitable and so the 'Earthians' have moved away to some other planets and spaceships. However, when Will Smith and Jaden Smith arrive at Earth, in one of the conversations, Will tells Jaden that Earth's atmosphere changes so rapidly now that during the day, it will rain during some hours, then it will be extremely hot and during the nights, it will be excruciatingly cold and it might even snow during the nights. 

If you notice carefully, we've already started to see the initial signs of such a behaviour. We already see temperature variances of 20Deg in cities like Pune (min temperatures of 20 deg and max of 40 deg in summers, for instance). This phenomenon was surely not present about 20 yrs back when we were all kids. So this surely indicates we are heading towards an 'After Earth-like' scenario. The rate at which we are using up Earth's resources, the rate of ice melting in the polar regions, the global warming, etc, I think such a day is probably not more than 50 yrs from now, which means our next generation is in danger!!!

Wall-E (2008)

As of June 2016, this is the last of the movies that I tried to co-relate with the reality. For those unfortunate folks who haven't yet watched this beautiful cinema, here is a brief summary of the movie along with its correlations with reality:

In the movie, the Earthians have deserted our planet Earth (once again, LOL) and have been living aboard a spaceship for over 2000 yrs. Humans have left autonomous robots to clean up their mess left back on Earth and when the Earth is deemed hospitable again, the humans were to return. However, this never happens. This is because the robots that were left on Earth themselves couldn't survive the gradually worsening harsh conditions and eventually all (but one) of those broke down. So Earth was never revived. And now it only this tiny little 'Wall-E' series robot is still working to clean up Earth. The reason why this robot survived is because 'he' was able to find interesting objects that Earthians used, like the Rubix cube, the TV, video cassette player, etc. He has a whole plethora of such objects as his collection and he hopes to have a human-like life and that is how he manages to 'inspire' himself and work continuously.

The spaceship of the Earthians regularly dispatch a new genre of robots called 'Eva' to Earth in search of life (read plants). Eva ends up finding one such alive plant in Wall-E's collection. Humans aboard the spaceship are shown to be enjoying all things while being 'seated'. They order their food through 'an app' and the food arrives through a robot for them. They move from one place to another using some hoverboards. Humans have eventually become extremely fat and have even forgotten how they were supposed to use their feet!!!

Looking at the extremely rapid de-forestation of our planet Earth, especially over the last 20-30 years, the rapid urbanization, improvements in transportation and the transportation speed. With such rapid automation in all aspects of our lives, even the jobs or work that is prevalent today will cease to exist and new forms of jobs will start to appear*. Also the sudden explosion of the Android and iStore Apps facilitating 'home-drop' services of tasks like 'buying vegetables and fruits' to buying all sorts of gadgets and electronic material. These are things that we are getting so used-to that probably the next generation or may be the one after that will even forget what it was to go to a vegetable market. Not that I am asking you to re-invent the wheel for showing that even we can do the work that our earlier generation did, but I think this is high time we started thinking about striking the right balance between using the modern-day facilities as well as sometimes resorting to the old-fashioned way of work. While it is good to buy the groceries from an app and utilize the time saved there in some other creative way, it is also sometimes a fair experience to walk to the vegetable market and choose some veggies for yourself. While it is good to Facebook, it is sometimes also good call up your old friend.


* I just found these links that show how our future jobs and transportation might look like. Worth taking a look:
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2014/03/162-future-jobs-preparing-for-jobs-that-dont-yet-exist/
http://www.futuristspeaker.com/2014/03/the-next-bold-step-in-transportation-personal-rapid-transit-systems/

Movies and Real Life Future - Part 1

Some movies may be warning us about the future but are we alert about them? While writing, I realized there are too many examples. So I thought of covering this topic in a multi-part series. A few examples that I have so far thought out:

Equilibrium (2002), Avatar (2009), Hunger Games series(2012), Elysium (2013), Divergent series(2014) and Maze Runner series (2014)

All of the above movies are based on a common premise: There will be another World War in the near future - the cause of the war is immaterial - and in the aftermath of the war, the World will get divided into factions / divisions / districts. The rich and powerful will try to exercise control and even this will work for some time. However, there will always be a revolution. My father always says, 'too much of anything is bad for the human race'. In most cases, it is oppression. BJP's thumping win in the 2014 General Elections in India was one such real-life example where, in the opinion of the masses, the earlier ruling party had exercised extreme corruption / malpractices and people wanted a revolution. Therefore, this is supposed to be a warning for people who rule the others or who are the oppressive bosses in their office. 

Resident Evil (2002), I am Legend (2007) and World War Z (2013)

This is the movie genre that shows that attempts made by scientists to solve medical problems of humanity and the subsequent experiments that have gone wrong in a not-so-distant future. On similar lines, I am sure a lot of people have experienced over the last 5-8 years that a person who catches cold and cough can't recover as fast as the similar person did, probably in the 1990s. Here are some links that depict this phenomenon:

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/whooping-cough-has-evolved-response-its-vaccine

http://www.fiercevaccines.com/story/whooping-cough-mutations-may-be-weakening-vaccine-effectiveness/2014-04-16

http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30551093

Then there are the newly emerging types of diseases like Swine Flu and Bird Flu. These are all, IMO, results of experiments that have been going on around the globe. Scientists, in their quest to solve the critical problems of curing incurable, widely spread diseases like Cancer, AIDS, Hepatitis, etc. have been performing experiments and I think this has led to increase in variety and effectiveness of the diseases. 

This is something that I have experienced first hand. There may be many such examples of which we do not know yet. All this just raises 1 question in my mind: How long before we end up being in a situation like World War Z? 

Quantum of Solace (2008)

James Bond is seen travelling to places like Bolivia where it is shown that there is acute scarcity of water. Imagine what would be the situation in African countries, where the rainfall is already scanty. In India too, we are already witnessing string of low-rainfall years for the past decade now. And we know that sea and oceans have salty water that cannot be consumed but we don't even, yet, have a technology to convert this saline water into pure, drinkable water. Just imagine what would happen if India didn't receive Monsoon rainfall for 3 consecutive years? 

We already see the Tanker Mafia (at least in Maharashtra state) who, may be artificially, create shortage of drinkable water and then force us to make use of tanker services. Quantum of Solace depicts exactly this same scenario. It may not be long before we realize that Water has become the single, most-expensive resource that this World ever imagined. We need the innovative solutions like 'water harvestors from air' which is fast gaining popularity:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fog_collection

http://inhabitat.com/mit-develops-advanced-fog-harvesting-material-that-pulls-5x-more-water-from-thin-air/

http://www.fogquest.org/

http://www.gizmag.com/fontus-airo-ryde-self-filling-water-bottle/41545/

Scary, isn't it?

But wait.. there's more to come.. Watch out for my Part 2 on this series!!!