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Flawed Science Fiction

cryonics movies science fiction

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#1 Mind

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Posted 30 December 2011 - 10:45 PM


I was vegging out in front of the TV for a few minutes, flipping through the channels, and stopped to watch the last few minutes of Starship Troopers. Watching the movie, it dawned on me how so many of the very popular sci-fi movies do not anticipate a future with cryonics. If future societies were advanced, you would think that soldiers, jedi-warriors, time lords, whoever, would immediately put into cryo when they are injured, stabbed, dismembered, shot, whatever. You would think that future medics would have portable suspension technology to put people into stasis on the battlefield and then into the deep freeze in the hospital until some point in the future when they could be repaired. Instead, most of these movies (for dramatic purposes, of course) show slow deaths and friends agonizing and future physicians decrying the fact that they cannot save them.

If a few more sci-fi writers were worth their salt, there would be more cryonics technology in the futuristic movies.

Is Demolition Man the best movie for an example of a future world with cryonics?

I suppose Han Solo was preserved in Empire Strikes Back. But oddly, that was the only cryonics reference in the whole series.

Star Trek is oddly devoid of cryonics. They should have been able to cryo-suspend Spock at the end of Wrath of Kahn. Right? of course he lived anyway.

Megatron was frozen in the first Transformers movie, but I don't think that counts because he is robotic. Doh!

I know there are a lot of great books with cryonics as a central theme and some other small time sci-fi movies, but none of the blockbusters.
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#2 okok

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Posted 31 December 2011 - 02:46 AM

There's hardly any movies nowadays that make sense. What's mindbending is how twisted and subjugated to simple sensationalism and clichés the storylines are. And anyway, most SF tell more about the time they were made in than the future. (How 60ies does star trek tos feel?)
Btw. the only real SF movie that comes to my mind is Star Wars, the rest is a mix of other genres, mostly horror, with some effects mixed in.
The real stuff are books. And as for cryonics - this is what Arthur C. Clarke thought about it. I concur to some degree, but it's a gradualist question.

Edited by okok, 31 December 2011 - 02:52 AM.


#3 mcell

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Posted 02 January 2012 - 06:16 PM

i think the cryo is very important for the somone people that want discover more of the universe,

#4 mikeinnaples

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Posted 03 January 2012 - 01:00 PM

Minority Report had a form of physical (not mental) suspension for criminals that were about to commit crimes. I was fairly pleased with their version of the near future outside of the central plot line at least in regards to all the other technology.

#5 solbanger

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Posted 03 January 2012 - 05:55 PM

Yea cryonics is well known as a future technology, but also you have to think about the actors. How are you going to explain a visibly graying Han Solo when technology in his time is supposed to confer perpetual youth? So for the sake of the franchise writers often just overlook these conundrums.

Also as a story point it's typically used to bring old baddies into the present storyline. Nobody thinks of freezing as a "healing device" Cryonics is such a well-known concept in sci-fi and adventure films (Alien films, Jason X, Idiocracy etc...) Austin Powers even parodied the oft seen melting procedure with the World's Longest Pee.

#6 Mind

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Posted 12 February 2012 - 10:45 PM

When I read this article about fast robots: http://www.physorg.c...test-world.html, I made a note to myself that stated "we have no chance against robots", and it reminded me of this thread. A lot of sci-fi portrays humans in cooperation or in opposition to robots. Somehow we are their equal or humans are able to defeat the "evil" robots. This is flawed science fiction. Once robots achieve our level of intelligence or maybe even before, their physical capabilities will far outmatch anything humans can do. We would be toast in a war against robots.





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