Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Theoretically, we can time travel!


The first thing I noticed when Fry travelled in time, was how the city changed over 1000 years. It was interesting to see the writer’s take on how the future will happen, in a sense that history will just repeat itself. Seeing that from an urbanized and modern world, it will all be destroyed and the city will return to the medieval period of castles and kings, but will then be destroyed again, but this time by aliens, which will then be built to what is known as Futurama in the year 3000.

The entire show is actually a playful and creative take on science and the future, with the existence of aliens and suicide booths. It also has an interesting take on time travel. The normal concept of a person fast forwarding through time and space was not used by the show, instead, the person would be frozen for a certain number of years and will remain unchanged once defrosted, despite the normal course of time. It’s actually a concept being used and applied currently by scientists to “legally dead” bodies, which is called cryonics, but no human tests have been made. It’s a technique used to store a persons body at an extremely low temperature with the hope of one day reviving them, though the technology is still at its infancy and has not yet been done successfully on humans, but has been proved to work for some living organisms (source).

Seeing that we are already on our way with this technology, it’s not far that some random pizza guy in the future might “time travel” 1000 years later. Sadly, if ever he’s hoping to change and revamp his life in the future, the possibilities of that might be less than cryonics as according to Futurama, the problems of society (with crises on identity, depression, and career choice) are still evident even in a thousand years.


Reaction paper for Futurama

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