Why are there old people in science fiction movies?
Why are there old people in science fiction movies and on TV? Why, for instance, does Jean-Luc Picard, commander of the Enterprise in the Star Trek television series, appear to be middle aged? Do people think we will still be trapped by our natural life cycle, even 300 years from now?
Written fiction tends to be a little better than the movies. In Larry Niven’s novel Ringworld, the main character is 200 years old, but still basically young:
Despite his age, Louis turns out to be in perfect physical condition owing to a combination of advanced medical technology and boosterspice, a drug that extends human life.
Still, Niven is an unusually thoughtful sci-fi writer. One can find old people in written sci-fi, but I’ll skip over the issue for now. The problem is much, much worse in the movies and on TV. That sci-fi is full of old people. There are older characters in The Fifth Element, Logan’s Run, Back To The Future, etc. It’s a long list. In Star Wars, the character Obi-Wan Kenobi is old, which raises the question how a civilization manages to become advanced enough to go faster than the speed of light, but is still unable to heal the simple genetic defects that lead to aging?
In the movies I list above, society has some amazing technologies, but their medical technologies are not much better than where we are at in 2009.
At one point in the past, much of sci-fi was focused on imagining the near future:
”…The answers we seek will be found in the near tomorrow… Let us explore together the future. A future not of dreams, but of reality. For much of what we are about to see is even now beyond the promise and well on it’s way to tomorrow’s world…”
For some reason, that interest has faded. It seems likely that the next 100 years will see dramatic advances in medical technology. It is curious that so much science fiction refuses to allow that probability into its works.
On a related note, Virginia Postrel quotes Joel Garreau about the changing vision of the future on display at Disney’s Tomorrowland:
Disney …is now presenting not so much the future, but the future that it thinks we want. Wander around Tomorrowland and it no longer gleams with white plastic and blue trim. No “2001.” It is an antique future, a bronze future, full of things that look like astrolabes channeling Leonardo da Vinci.
The future of the future is in the past?
“This is an aspirational future,” says Disney spokesman John J. Nicoletti….
But this is absolutely not the future in the research pipeline. No genetically modified critters here that eat carbon dioxide and poop gasoline. No nanobots smaller than blood cells, cruising our bodies to zap cancer. No brain implants that expand our memory. No cellphones that translate Chinese. No dragonfly-size surveillance bots, no pills that shut off the brain’s trigger to sleep, no modified mitochondria sustaining our energy while making obesity as quaint as polio.
Apparently that tsunami of change doesn’t sell. That disturbing but dazzling future rumbling our way is distinctly different from the soothing one Disney thinks we crave.
And then there is this quote from Danny Hillis:
“What I think it says is that we are nostalgic for a time when we believed in the future. People miss the future. There’s a yearning for it. Disney does know what people want. People want to feel some connectedness to the future. The way Disney delivers that is to reach back in time a little bit to the past when they did feel connected.
“It’s a bit of a cop-out. There was a time when the future was streamlined jet cars. Rather than create a new sense of the future, they say, ‘Ah, remember when we believed that the future was streamlined jet cars?’ It’s a feeling of connection to the future, rather than connection to the future.
“It’s a core ache. Something is missing that we’re searching for.”
All of which leaves me wondering why the public may have lost interest in the near-future as it will actually be. We can expect some amazing advances in the coming decades, but compare the public mood now to what it was 50 years ago, and clearly the public has less of an appetite for the (real) future than it once did.
I wonder why?