Friday, July 12, 2013

What the futuristic sci-fi movies fail to envision ?

Recently released science fiction movie Pacific Rim caught my attention, I have not watched it though. I could just not stop myself thinking why a writer / creator of a science fiction who envisions the earth say 500 or a thousand years from now would fail to create the artificial / robotic all mighty fighters who can fly, swim and fight even on territory more realistically or appropriate way. All such creations in all such movies (well almost) imitates humanoids.


 Human evolved from apes, the day the first humanoid stood upright the evolution got faster and here I am an evolved ape writing this blog. What happened was standing upright helped the brain grow faster, creating balance as walking was done on two legs so that hands can be used for other work. Magnificent design from nature. But why we evolved that way is not for us to become better predators, but for us to have more developed brains and hence get multitasking and use brain rather force to get things done. Coming back to the robots of future who is made for battles, why such a robot be made in human form? That would lead to unnecessary problems of maintaining the balance, to move it will mean two of the most powerful parts are blocked and to fight while on the move will mean enormous energy wasted just to maintain balance. It will slow the speed down as well. why is a Cheetah more agile and powerful and not humans? I believe the future robots will be a designed in a hybrid manner, where it will imitate the ambidextrous animals who are more agile. Progression of a generation (technologically) is directly  proportional to the ability of harvesting power / energy. Given the importance of energy, engineers are less likely to create a design that have to move fast yet far from being aerodynamic. Not being upright can give a more aerodynamic structure. As its anyway a robot and it doe snot have brain in head that needs to evolve, upright structure makes it weak and vulnerable. Hence in a real world such a structure being created is very unlikely.  It might be argued that such a structure catches the fantasy of current day viewers but the logic that today's science fiction shapes future's creation is defied in this case.

Truly
Abinash

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