Welcome to sci fi support.

So we have a question here from Jack Hayes, sci fi, Why you got to be the most pessimistic genre?

Jetpacks don't make up for totalitarian ism.

I think there's a lot of pessimism and science fiction about our social systems, but hard to not be pessimistic these days.

You know, I mean, I think that the apocalyptic nature of science fiction is always a comment on our on our times and I'm feeling particularly apocalyptic right now.

Let's move on to the next official Be Ray.

Alright, what the is a tractor beam And why does every sci fi film have one?

Well, I actually haven't made a sci fi film yet that has a tractor beam in it.

But tractor beam is mythical technology where you can reach out with some invisible force and grab something and pull it to you.

The tractor, the tractor beam is obviously a technology we don't have.

But there is this little thing called called flux pinning by the way, when you have a type two superconductor in a powerful magnetic field.

Get this thing called the Meissner effect, which means that you can actually lock onto it and hold it in place and manipulate.

That's a tractor beam in a sense that works over a very short distance.

So maybe we'll be able to figure out a tractor beam Tony oh, Tony of earth like that.

That's good, artificial intelligence is not going to end well.

Have these engineers watched any of the terminator movies?

Yeah, actually they do.

It just doesn't dissuade them in sort of military think tank circles.

They actually talk about the Skynet problem.

It doesn't dissuade them from developing this stuff as fast as humanly possible.

You know, at the time the terminator was made and 1980 for the idea of killer drones in the sky was was pure pure science fiction, the next big stage is gonna be, when do we give kill authority to an actual robotic intelligence?

People are seriously arguing the ethics of that.

The point is even if we were to suddenly grow a moral conscience here in this country and decide that it's a bad idea to develop an artificial general intelligence, somebody else is going to do it and then the military will will justify us developing it because if we don't do what the other guys will do it.

So it is going to happen.

The people who are working at the forefront of artificial general intelligence say it's not if it's when And they're outside prediction is 50 years and they're inside prediction is 10-15 years as a civilization that's going to profoundly alter the nature of our existence, I believe, and you know, better wake up.

I think we're doomed personally.

Okay, this is from melo so why does every sci fi show do this whole android becoming human trope as opposed to an android which looks human not becoming human somehow.

That's not as interesting, I guess.

I think we just endlessly explore this idea of the human appearing machine and it's our way of dealing one with our angst about where robotics might be going.

I think historically it was more about just kind of playing with these ideas that you can't trust people.

That's what it all boils down to kind of at its core.

It's that we've we've got 100,000 years of not trusting each other.

Mico koala.

My question.

How do you think the popularity of sci fi in the mid 20th century has played a part in our 21st century obsession with actually creating real robots?

That's actually a really intelligent question.

I think that a lot of the 20th century science fiction about robots actually has prepared us very well for imagining society in which robots play a real role.

I think we're just kind of drumming our fingers impatiently waiting for the tech to get worked out.

And you know, I think we've all seen the advancements in in technology.

I see us now moving into essentially, or already living in a science fiction world Vojtech, cuba multiple concepts from science fiction, i.

E tablets, rockets, autonomous drones are now reality.

Well, we have alien like monsters to I think science fiction is very interesting in the way that it predicted something's highly accurately and didn't predict other things very well at all now in terms of will we have alien like monsters, the alien and by the way it's cap.

So they're I think they're referring to the alien to be very literal about the answer you'd have to go out into space to encounter that type of alien, some kind of hostile alien life form based on some completely different kind of biology.

Probably in our lifetimes, we're not going to get much past the orbit of mars, maybe to the asteroid belt to jupiter.

We're not progressing in terms of human spaceflight very fast.

So in terms of us going out and being in jeopardy from an alien with a capital a um I don't see that happening very soon.

I think it's interesting to point out that we have not one of the not one tiny shred of evidence of actual life beyond the earth.

We all would love to see it, but we have no evidence whatsoever mega knocks.

Why does the sci fi fantasy film never win the Oscar Exactly Megan what I'm saying, costumes makeup, right?

It drives me nuts every year.

The first time I noticed this was when I was just a movie fan and not a practitioner yet when Star Wars, which to me was the ultimate science fiction film in its day.

So this would have been 77 probably the Oscars of 78 lost to Annie Hall, a little cute relationship story and Star Wars like what the are you people thinking there's this attitude that, that science fiction is not humanistic enough, that it's not, it's not about real people, but there also is science fiction that plays by the rules of good drama and is important conceptually and says something about our society and has great characters and is well made and so on.

The academy just has a blind spot about it.

So they typically will award uh, you know, technical awards, but not the real stuff, not the acting people seem to think that you can't do a humanistic movie if you're standing in front of a green screen, which is not true at all.

All movie is artifice.

You know, you're, you're recording on a cave, got a script, it's all written down and you're you're doing take after, take after, take after take and cutting it all together.

So it's, it's innately artificial.

The truth underlies the artifice.

The truth of what you're saying is the direct connection with the, with the audience.

Science fiction can do that as well as as any other genre and filmmaking.

And so I think this is an oversight.

Okay, time travel movies always seem to make no sense, terminator still confuse me.

How can Kyle Reese be john Connor's father if he has to t travel Well, you have what's called classically in science fiction.

The grandfather paradox.

And it basically says if you build a time machine and you go back through time and you kill your grandfather before he met your grandmother, you'll cease to exist and therefore you've never built the time machine.

So therefore you you didn't go back and kill him, so therefore you do exist.

You wind up with these endlessly recursive causal loops in time travel.

No science fiction author has ever resolve this.

And in fact, most physicists will tell you that time travel certainly into the past and altering our present is impossible, but that's no fun.

That's no fun.

So we're doing time travel.

So just shut up.

That's my answer to that one.

But if you want to get technical about it, I would say that time travel works like quantum superposition.

So you have a number of hypothetical futures, but until the whole thing plays itself out, it hasn't collapsed down to that future which actually persists and prevails and goes on from there, and all the other futures that might have been possible, even if people thought they were alive in them simply cease to exist.