Birthdays
Andy Hallett b. 1975 died 29 March 2009 (Angel)
Daniel Dae Kim b. 1968 (Lost, Star Trek, Angel, Spider-Man 2, Hulk, Crusade (Babylon 5 spinoff))
Mr. Kim's career has a lot of work in genre TV and film, but I gave Andy Hallett the Picture Slot because I liked the character of Lorne better and I was very sad when he died four years ago.
Many happy returns to Mr. Kim.
Movies released
Terminator 2, 1991
Prediction: On August 4,1997 Skynet is launched.
Predictor: Terminator 2, released 1991
Reality: This is not the first film to predict everything would go to hell exactly six years after the movie's release date. We will get another such prediction later this month from a movie made in the 1960s.
As I look at science fiction from the past, whether it's on the page or on the screen, the predictions about computers are clumsy. Before 1973 and the development of the the microprocessor, very few writers get the idea of how small computers will be or how useful in everyday life. Though I mock him mercilessly, Heinlein deserves a lot of credit for his 1950 prediction for small portable phones by 2000. He didn't know the guts of the things would be computers, but I won't quibble about that. Arthur C. Clarke predicted HAL in the late 1960s, but HAL was still an enormous object. After 1973, a lot of the predictions about computers are clumsy in the other direction, assuming artificial intelligence or virtual reality would happen a lot sooner than they have.
Blogger's note: The date from the original Terminator of the year the solider and the cyborg are being sent back is 2029, so that date is a little too far in the future for the purposes of this blog. 2020 is my forward limit, 2025 maybe if the prediction is really good.
Looking one day ahead... INTO THE FUTURE!
Another prediction from the pages of Popular Mechanics.
Join us then... IN THE FUTURE!
I didn't realize Hallett was dead. Very sad. Well deserving of the picture slot.
ReplyDeleteOne of my favorite 'future imperfect' anachronisms is in supposedly advanced space stations or space ships, data screens are clearly CRT tubes. Alien particularly springs to mind.
I realize, of course, that the screens were special effects in Star Trek, but at least they were shown as flat screens.
Also, Yeoman Rand carried an iPad.