Science Fiction

4 posts

In A World Where Time Is Literally Money

Imagine a world where the aging gene has been isolated and deactivated for everyone on the planet. Everyone ages normally until they turn 25, and then aging simply stops… forever.

In order to prevent a situation like Star Trek’s Mark of Gideon episode, a device is implanted in all citizens to control how long they live. Rich people can buy as much life time as they want, years and years if they so choose, and the poor, well, sometimes they wake up and don’t have enough minutes to last the day. To avoid overpopulation, time has become the currency and the way people pay for luxuries and necessities.

This is the world that Will Salas (Justin Timberlake) finds himself. Everyone is young, and since it’s Hollywood, most everyone is pretty. Will is a poor young man who is given a fortune of time, though too late to prevent his mother from dying. He ends up on the run from a corrupt police force known as ‘time keepers.’ Continue reading

Early Review of Real Steel

When I was in college, I had the privilege of spending a few weeks training to be a boxer. The guy I trained with was an amateur, but trained with pros in Chicago. He taught me how to move, how to defend, and how to punch. I’m not saying I could go toe to toe with anyone, but I had a ton of fun doing it. Consequently, I have a soft spot for boxing movies.

When I saw the previews for Real Steel a few months ago, I laughed. It screamed “poorly made kids movie designed to push toys”. Let me be the first to say I was wrong. I was very wrong, Real Steel is awesome.

Hitler’s Flying Saucers?

The image at the beginning of this article is of a site in Germany known as The Henge (Fly Trap) where a magnetic levitation device – aka flying saucer – known as The Bell was reportedly developed by German scientists in the late 1930’s.

I watched a program the other night which I was surprised to see was not on the SciFi (SyFy) network, but on Canada’s History Television, one part in a series on the subject of extraterrestrials.  What follows is the network’s description of this episode.

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Ancient Aliens: Aliens and the Third Reich

If ancient aliens visited Earth in the remote past, could they have given us advanced technology, passed down through human history?And could this technology have helped the Third Reich build mysterious weapons and crafts far beyond the limits of 20th century science?

During World War II, there were reports that the Germans built an operational flying saucer, known as the Hanebu, which was said to use mythical technology found in ancient Indian texts. Another craft was rumored to have been constructed with the help of psychics and mediums who claimed to have received detailed blueprints from extraterrestrial beings.

Is it possible Hitler’s quest for world domination was aided and abetted by ancient extraterrestrial technology that was rediscovered? And could the allegedly rebuilt alien devices developed in Germany have played a role in America’s ability to land a man on the moon?

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The program posited that a number of Nazi scientists were recruited by the American government after the fall of the Third Reich. According to the show, these scientists were almost entirely responsible for the technology that resulted in the U.S. space program and putting the first man on the moon, aided in part by alien intelligence which had been passed on to them.  They cited Adolf Hitler’s devotion to occult mysticism as the impetus for the extraterrestrial contact.

The episode ended by purporting that many Nazi officers who disappeared after the fall of Berlin had actually been whisked away in a time machine. As if by means of validation they mentioned that Albert Einstein had deemed time travel to be theoretically possible.

My questions to you interesting – and hopefully interested – folks are such: (1) Why was this on a history channel? and (2) How fine is the line between genius and insanity?

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