Sci-Fi and Smart Living are two concepts that appear to go hand in hand this century.
Today we enjoy an easier living than our ancestors and most of it is thanks to the technologies we created to help us in our daily lives.
Smart living is a trend that basically promotes original and innovative solutions with the purpose of providing benefits that will make life more efficient, sustainable, productive, etc. in other words creating new smart ways of living.
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Inspiration from Sci-Fi
People may not believe it, but technologies of today were mostly influenced or inspired by Science Fiction (Sci-Fi). Most people believe that the technologies they use today are the products of the workings of ingenious innovators as they work on their research labs aiming to invent new products to solve problems.
However, today’s pioneering inventions had initially little to do with science and technology. The truth is they were born out of the imagination, talent, and inspiration of those people with the ability to create future worlds in their minds outside the constraints of the present world.
Where did today’s technologies come from? Who inspired them? Sci-Fi is the source of ingenious gadgets offering convenience in your everyday life. It undoubtedly inspired people to create once unimaginable gadgets that change lives to smart living.
Today people enjoy the Sci-Fi gadgets they only once saw in movies including Portable phones, Flat Screen TV, Tablets, Security Camera App and more. Movie & TV franchises like “Star Wars” and “Star Trek” have accurately predicted and cemented the path towards the era of technology.
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Sci-Fi Gadgets turned from Fantasy to Reality
“Star Wars” (once one of the leading movie franchises in history) successfully changed all sorts of things in society. It changed things including fashion, merchandising, product design, and movies.
As it got bigger and bigger, “Star Wars” influence got deeper and deeper too that it has now become inescapable. It is evident how sci-fi movies highly influenced the way people live and you are wondering how important science fiction is in the evolution of human society.
Another important and great example is the “Star Trek” Franchise starting with the original series in the 1960s that inspired the smart living way. Many Star Trek gadgets that were once just Sci-Fi, today these gadgets and technologies exist.
A few examples of these “Star Trek” gadgets are the popular Food Replicators (3D printers), Universal Translators (Voice Translators), Tricorders, Tablet Computers (iPads), Holodeck (known as Virtual Reality Goggles), Communication Badge (Vocera), AI Assistant (Siri, Alexa, and Cortana) Hypospray (Jet Injectors), Big Screen Television (LED Television), Communicators (Cellular Phones /Flip Phones), Hand Free Phones (Bluetooth Headsets), Video Conference (Skype), Phasers (Tasers), Portable Digital Storage (Floppy discs and USB drives), Voice Activation Technology and GPS.
Of course creators of “Star Trek” were inspired by the existing Sci-Fi ideas established way before the 1960s. The list can go on and on about all the gadgets and technologies that were inspired by Star Trek: a goldmine of a once considered futuristic technology.
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Influence of Sci-Fi
Sci-Fi’s influence on people’s way of living is essential for a number of reasons. For one, science fiction can inspire you to become a scientist, to become the inventor of new technology or product that the future will reveal.
If you ask scientists and inventors you know, it is very likely you will meet a fan of science fiction stories. You will probably meet a person that drew inspiration from reading stories such as Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1984 by George Orwell, Starship Troopers by Robert A. Heinlein, etc.
Perhaps, the most important influence of Sci-Fi is being the only genre depicting the way society can function differently. From the wild imaginations of Sci-Fi authors, people are able to somehow take a peek at how the future looks like.
More accurately, Sci-Fi authors give people the ability to imagine the kind of future they want and think of the ways they can work towards realizing it. In addition, it gives people the awareness of the kind of future they want to avoid or prevent and the way to do so.
Final thoughts
Just think of the way that people live today and compare them to the stories you read before. They are remarkably similar and wondrous that it may not be an impossibility at all that soon we will reach the time of flying cars.
The world today continues to develop new technologies and products that most people do not think possible and those are enough testaments of all the things that people can achieve and improve like self-driving electric cars and drones.
Truly, human’s limitations are only the depth of his imagination, and Sci-Fi authors have profound imaginations of the future. Like for example in the technology used in Her (2014) is similar to Amazon’s Alexa and Alexa came just two years after the movie was released. What a coincidence, right?
One Sci-Fi inspiration that everyone is expecting to flourish and became reality is the flying car. The possibility of actually having a flying car is getting closer and closer with research companies investing in projects that will take the project forward.
A flying car, an idea that was just an illusion of a futuristic future in the 1960s through the TV show “The Jetsons”. True it may take a while for us to create to infrastructure for flying cars but it’s not a far-fetched impossible idea anymore.
What technologies inspired by Sci-Fi movies or television shows did impress you the most? Which gadgets are you happy to have now in your lifetime? Could you imagine a life without those gadgets? Feel free to leave your comments. I would love to hear from you.
So true. Gadgets that we saw in yesteryear movies/series like Startrek, Back to the future, etc. have now become reality. Indeed, the seeds of imagination now will design the future.
Very aptly written article. Congratulations!
Cheers
Hi Deepika,
I am very glad you enjoyed it. Thanks for your comments. Much appreciated!
I, too, have taken notice of this correlation between Sci-Fi movies and the advancements of technology.
I also believe that everything that we have has started off as an idea in someones head before it was brought to life and I think that Sci-Fi’s are the perfect medium to see what people think is cool and what we’d like to have.
I think that personal drone market is leading the way in this field as of recent. I often see many similarities in the video games I see and movies I have seen in the design of these quadcopters.
I’m still waiting on my food replicator (an actual one!) Every time I see that in a movie I always think “Pepperoni and pineapple pizza!”
I think that it’s going to take some real convincing to allow for the flying car. I could only imagine how awesome those people felt when they put one into the air.
Hi Justin,
Thanks for sharing your thoughts!
I think the food replicator is closer than the flying car. I believe we can adapt 3D printer technology to reproduce food.
When I first saw Iron Man’s armor in 90s cartoon I just fell in love and for years I have been wondering why they make it a movie and I was only 6-7 years old and knew that it can be awesome. So I would love to see Iron Man’s suit/armor in real life.
Hi Furkan,
Maybe one day we will see it, who knows with the rapidly changes that are happening maybe we won’t have to wait that long.
Thanks for sharing your views!
I love this article! Great speculation on what might be next, and love how you connected the dots between technologies that are commonplace now but have their origins in fiction, at least in concept.
I don’t know about the flying cars (or should I say self-flying cars)…I mean, we already have planes. What I want is probably a bit more interlinked with advances in animal science in technology: I want a translation helmet for animals, so we can have two-way speech-based communication. I’d also like facial recognition software that could be tapped into at any time. When I see a person or an animal who reminds me of another person or celebrity, I like to be able to show why, and it always requires pause, google, and discussion. It would be nice to just say something to the TV (or Alexa, or Siri) and have a pop-up of what I’m looking for appear on the same screen for comparison purposes. Neither of these is world-changing technologies…but hey. you asked!
Hi Penelope,
Thanks for sharing your views on how you see the technology of the future. I have to say your idea of a translation helmet for animals is awesome, that will definitely help us taking better care of our animals.
Voice recognition will probably happen, we just don’t know how much it will influence our daily lives so it still have the possible of becoming life changing.
Thanks a lot for stopping by!
Hello Dira,
It is really amazing how sci-fi influences our way of living and in some ways, it shapes it.
Just remember how Isaac Asimov’s once imaginations present in his books are now incorporated in our everyday life. He predicted so many things.
So it is true that sci-fi has inspired the invention of many technologies. First it sounds like sci-fi and then it becomes reality.
I’d love to be able to teleport in near future for instance. It would be so cool to see this crazy thing that we see in many sci-fi movies to become part of our lives.
Hi Asen,
Thanks for sharing your views. It’s true, many of Isaac Asimov’s ideas became a reality. It would be awesome to teleport but I think the flying care will come first, once we realize we don’t need cars for transportation then we will accept the teleportation technology.
Great post on sci-fi and smart living!
It’s amazing how sci-fi books/tv/movies have inspired us to be imaginative and create those things.
One of my favorite movie is Blade Runner and I was thinking how awesome it would be to have technology so advance in artificial intelligence that you can’t tell if it’s a real person or not. Do you think that will be possible one day?
Hi Dinh,
I believe we may not be that far from that. We have seen human like robots in china and we can create the technology for A.I. The combination of those two would create what you are referring to. The problem of when it’s going to be public is another story. The technologies exist but they are available only to those who can afford it. To answer your question: yes, such technology will be possible but it will not be available for everyone.
Those gadgets from early Sci-Fi always seemed so way out and out of the realm of realism. But like you wrote, many of these far out futuristic technologies have come to fruition! To think we will have a flying car in the near future is becoming more of a reality and when I was young watching the Jetsons’, it seemed like a far-out and far-fetched idea. Truly the minds of the Sci-Fi greats were ahead of their time. My favorite Sci-Fi futuristic technology was the computer.
Hi Linda,
Thanks for sharing your views. We have indeed gained a lot from Technology.