Part of the joy of science fiction is seeing all the awesome toys, and imagining how they could exist in the real world. And so many of science fiction’s coolest gadgets have come true, including Star Trek’s PADDs and communicators.
But the sad truth is, a lot of the most fantastic technologies in science fiction are fantastic for a reason — they can’t ever exist in reality. Here are 5 amazing technologies that will never exist in real life.
1. Lightsabers
Aside from the sheer impracticality of this weapon — and not to mention how hazardous it would be to wave one of these around — the Star Wars lightsaber will almost certainly never come to be. The first engineering challenge would be in figuring out a way to stop the beam of light about two feet from the source. Light simply does not work in this way, unless there’s something to obstruct or absorb it. Similarly, a highly concentrated beam of light wouldn’t be able to cut through materials, or face resistance when striking another lightsaber. Assuming, therefore, that it’s not actually a “light” saber, but rather some kind of plasma-beam saber (one that’s available in a delicious assortment of colours), the intense heat would likely melt the handle — and possibly burn the Padawan to a crisp. There’s also the power source to consider; these suckers pack quite a punch, deflecting laser beams and cutting through solid metal walls, so they would likely require something substantially more powerful than a pair of double-A’s. A power source that powerful doesn’t, and can’t, exist.
2. Human Teleportation
A staple of the Star Trek universe is the capacity to beam, or teleport, humans from one location to another. As legend has it, Gene Roddenberry came up with the idea as a work-around to filming expensive scenes involving ships taking off and landing. But his idea slashed both the budget and common sense. Yes, quantum teleportation has been demonstrated in the lab — but spawning a pair of entangled photons across vast distances is a far cry from teleporting an entire human body. Moreover, Star Trek’s teleportation scheme involves what’s called “destructive copying,” meaning that the source person must be obliterated (as evidenced in the TNG episode “Second Chances” when you accidentally get two Rikers). So, even if teleportation is somehow possible, it doesn’t solve the problem that you’d be stepping into a suicide machine. And finally, the physical and energy requirements of teleportation simply won’t allow for it. The system would have to be capable of the instantaneous scanning, recording and relaying of all 1045 bits of information that make up the human body, then transmit all this data to the destination, and finally compile the person without so much as putting a single molecule out of place.
3. Time machine
Thanks to Albert Einstein we know that time travel is possible. If you think about it, we’re all time travellers, inexorably moving forward into the future without even having to think about it. But more conceptually, Einstein’s theories have suggested that “wormholes” can connect two disparate regions of space and time, potentially allowing for the creation of time machines. Okay, great — so knowing that, now what do we do? Well, according to physicist Michio Kaku, we would need to extract the energy of an entire star or black hole — easier said than done. And then there’s the challenge of stabilizing the wormhole and ensuring that the aperture (or wormhole entry point) remains open for the return journey (one way trip into the past, anyone?). But even if physics is on our side, metaphysics is not. The “grandfather paradox” suggests that any technology that lets you kill your own ancestor can’t possibly exist, because it would break the cosmos. But there’s an even tougher paradox to consider: If time travel is possible, then where are all the time travellers from the future?
4. Personal force fields
While it is certainly conceivable that a spacecraft could eventually surround itself with a protective layer of charged plasma or a powerful electromagnetic force, the idea of a personal force field poses a different problem altogether. The very essence of the force field is to either absorb or reflect massive amounts of incoming energy. Consequently, it would have to exert an equal or greater amount of force outwards to prevent the energy from passing through the shield (yes, I know — physics is ruining everything). The only cosmological force suitable for a personal force shield would be electromagnetism, because the other forces, namely gravity and the strong and weak forces, are either way too weak or are constrained across short distances. The problem with electromagnetic force, however, is that it only works on charged objects — and humans are electrically neutral. Moreover, even if we could somehow develop a device that envelopes a person with a powerful shield, there’s no guarantee that the person inside it wouldn’t be fried by the thing; it would be impossible to make the force field omni-directional.
5. Continuity of consciousness after uploading
While the prospect of uploading our minds into supercomputers remains a distinct possibility, it’s an open question as to whether or not we’ll also be capable of transferring our consciousness as well. Most uploading schemes describe the copying of neural information from biological to digital substrate — but what’s often lost in the conversation is the question of how a person can suddenly be in two places at once. Destructive copying (similar to the teleportation problem), will still result in a perfectly replicated person who will adamantly insist that they’re the genuine thing — but so would the other 50 copies. As for the original source consciousness, it would cease to exist. This is what’s referred to as the “continuity of consciousness problem,” and it’s a matter of great contention in the philosophical, neuroscientific, and AI communities. Part of the problem is that we still don’t have a developed science to explain the nature of consciousness, so we’re left guessing. As futurist John Smart told io9, it’s likely an issue that will never be satisfactorily resolved. “This is an issue that will eventually start to take on religious or spiritual connotations,” he said, “people will just have to take a leap of faith and make the jump.”