Finished watching Devs. And once again, I catch myself thinking that I find it difficult to watch science-popular films where the idea is full of holes, and nothing fits together, and the authors do not explain it at all. Take the worlds of Tolkien or George Martin, which are fantastic, but overall consistent. Here, various theories are taken, which the audience will not understand anyway, mixed together.
In my opinion, if you tackle the theory of determinism and the idea of Laplace’s demon, then come up with a solution for the causal loop that all time travel theories inevitably encounter. For example, what prevented people from making choices, knowing in advance what was “predetermined” for them? There should have been a law of nature that counteracted this. For instance, the projection of the future comes/is induced only in a state of sleep, but reliably disappears upon awakening, leaving only the memory of the fact. Or at the moment when a person learns about their future, the universe in which they exist at that moment simply shuts down (though it’s unclear how then anyone would learn about this law), and the universe where they have not yet learned about it continues to exist. But most likely, everything will end much earlier: to “calculate” the future, it is necessary to gather information about the state of the entire world, and this is impossible because you cannot take a snapshot of the world. Information gathering cannot be instantaneous at least due to the finite speed of information transmission, meaning information about different events will be asynchronous. That is, absolute simultaneity is impossible – Einstein showed this, and therefore it is not possible to create what the series talks about.
I miss proper science fiction. Of all the films over the last ten years, “Interstellar” came closest. But “closest” does not mean “very good.” “Interstellar” also had a lot of inconsistencies.
It would be wonderful if through science fiction films, real ideas and concepts from scientists were visualized. Let them be fantastic, but at least consistent and not “holey” for people who understand the subject. That is, a scientist comes up with some string theory, which cannot be proved, and a movie is a great way to reveal it to the public. And together with someone who can come up with scripts, it forms the basis for a movie. And so, that the scientist’s name would be in the credits. Then they wouldn’t let nonsense through. For example, it would be possible to make a movie about a twin of our universe made of antimatter, where time flows backward (google CPT-Symmetric Universe) or about a world in which all molecules of organisms are twisted in the opposite direction (google homochirality). Of course, my level of education is not enough to create a full scenario without “holes,” but that’s the challenge.
Well okay, these topics are too complex. But it would be possible to make sci-fi about people who from birth (or even earlier) were trained to perceive signals from artificial sensory organs, much richer than our “built-in” ones, resulting in their brains developing differently, and they would grow up with super abilities, capable of solving problems of a completely different quality than us. This is a perfectly “possible” scenario, though not yet tried in practice. Or take the theme of creating people with artificially altered DNA. Or take Elon Musk’s neuralink and fantasize about what happens when everyone can get their implant and order a program for it online. Or make a movie about a world where organ transplantation has become very simple and cheap, leading to a huge crisis, a fracture of society into castes, and a war in which everyone eventually killed each other and humanity started all over again, from caves and the invention of fire.
This is the kind of science fiction I want. To be “without holes” and closer to science.
Hi, I'm Rauf Aliev. 