Tomorrow’s Tech … Today!
Many futuristic inventions have come to pass,
while some may never be realized.
WEATHER CONTROL
In
Star
Trek’s “The Devil in the Dark,” Dr McCoy jokes that he’s beginning to
think he can cure a rainy day. Weather control is often a feature of
pie-in-the-sky techno-futures.
Superman’s Silver Age bottle city, Kandor, even had a mini-sun on a sort
of roller-coaster track.
Of course, some may call it cheating if you’ve got a closed
environment, such as Ray Bradbury’s domed cities on Venus, or those featured in
Logan’s
Run.
You could
call terraforming a type of large-scale Weather Control, as discussed in
Dune
or as delivered with a bang by
Star Trek’s Genesis Project.
In the
1900s, a German chocolatier,
Theodor
Hildebrand & Son, produced a series of views of the Year 2000,
including a Weather Control Machine:
The classic low-tech example is cloud seeding, originating
in the 1940s.
Besides instigating
rainfall in dry areas, it’s also been used preemptively, for hail and fog
suppression near airports.
Did you know
that rockets were used for Cloud Seeding before the 2008 Beijing Olympics, in
an attempt to prevent rain over the Opening Ceremonies?
Many
conspiratorial types see attempts at Weather Control around us today.
Some warned that the HAARP project in Alaska
was also a secret government program to zap the US’s enemies with bad weather
vibes.
Similarly, the contrails of
high-flying jets are sometimes seen as weather or other climate-control
attempts.
Here’s
hoping that in real life, a little humility and awareness of the doctrine of
unforeseen consequences will prevent an artificially generated weather
apocalypse.
We’re still a long way from
Cloudy
With a Chance of Meatballs’ “Diatonic Super Mutating Dynamic Food
Replicator.”
Anyway, what if a colony of
vegetarians lives downstream?
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INVISIBILITY
Becoming see-through on demand was a property of the Cap of
Invisibility, used in various Greek tales of Hermes, Athena, and Perseus.
The concept is also featured in the Dragon Quest RPG and Percy
Jackson and the Olympians, after being earlier popularized as the Tarnhelm, in
Wagner’s nineteenth-century operas about the morals of power, Der
Ring des Nibelungen.
Other invisi-gadgets
abound. Harry Potter’s got a cloak that blots you out completely, while
Elven-cloaks in LOTR are great camouflage if you hide under one. As of 2012, the technology was
under construction.
And while the One Ring may hide
you from mortals, it unveils you to supernatural nasties that are far
worse. Tolkien probably drew this aspect of Sauron’s Ring from such artifacts
of myth as Plato’s Ring of Gyges, which was used as the basis for an argument
over how an otherwise moral person might
act if they knew nobody could catch them being naughty.
In HG Wells’s 1897 The
Invisible Man, and the TV or movies based on it, the usual emphasis is
likewise on the concept of this secretive power leading to moral
corruption.
However, there are
plenty of other invisible folks who get along just fine being able to sneak
into locker rooms — such as Sue (Storm) Richards, Violet Parr of The
Incredibles, or Danny Phantom.
The “cloaking devices” of Star Trek and other fiction usually mean
non-detectability to sensors and the like, not outright vanishing.
Modern-day research into the idea has resulted in various assemblies of lenses
to bend vision around a stationary object. We are probably far from the
day when you can spill “invisible ink” over something and make it fade away!
See you on Thursday with some more silly Amazon suggestions!
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