By Daniela Gómez S.
The future is not so close. At least not the future that cinema shows. A good example is Blade Runner’s temporality (Scott, 1982). The world created by Philip K. Dick, where people, androids and robots live together takes place in 2019. According to that, in five years from today, cars will fly, there will be robots as able and intelligent as people and colonies of humans will live in other planets. We know this is not going to happen because there is not that technology yet. It is a fact that science progresses slower than imagination. While writers and filmmakers build all kind of artificial worlds with words, images and sounds, scientists make experiments to find partial answers to our big questions.
Super technological humanity is further that we thought. What do we need to live in another planet? To create androids? What is it necessary to reproduce cells and to create human beings? We went to the moon but we have never been in another planet. Our major achievement has been sending a robot to Mars. Clearly, it was a big advance, but it is still far from the possibility to establish a human colony“off-world”.
Androids are a big topic too. Complex robots are part of production chains at factories, and there are robots able to help doctors to operate patients who are thousands of miles away from their hospitals. But they are machines. The artificial life that exists now is far from any kind of sensible and sensitive automata that could be mistaken for a person. The creation of life requires that scientists achieve to control cells growth and regulate its working. At this moment, there’s only tissues and organs made in laboratories.
The point is that the major part of scientific results are not so spectacular -like fliying cars- and don’t conduce, in an immediate way, to revolutionary invents. So, the dystopias based on technology are very enthusiastic about the speed of developments. In any case, the world that moving films show is not just around the corner.
Technology is not a threat to the future. The real dangers for human kind are two: inequality and ignorance. If each person could enjoy of a portion of resources (food, water, clean air, a good home and opportunities to study and work) we would live in a perfect society. But every time privileges are concentrated in fewer hands. So, in the future, very few people will have all they need to live. Their lives will be comfortable and longer than they are now. The bad news are: the rest of the population –the poor people- will live in worse conditions due to environmental degradation. So, the perspective doesn’t depend on technology, it depends on economic and political system. Besides, how many people are able to understand scientific developments? They are a minority. A little group of educated persons makes science while the rest live under the tyranny of that knowledge.
The only way to have a different planet will be starting to think about common good. But it doesn’t look like it is going to happen in the near future.
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