Stunted Future

By | January 18, 2011
2 Comments

Dr Who

Image by aussiegall via Flickr

I’ve been watching Dr. Who a bit lately. My older daughter is quite a fan of the show and we’ve been catching an episode or two whenever she comes over. I have a lot of catching up to do as the current run has been around for five seasons now and I am barely into season 2 (or ”series 2″ if you prefer the British  way of describing these things.)

I watched a few episodes of an older incarnation of Dr. Who back in the early-mid 80′s and I remember thinking at the time that the storylines were as flat-out preposterous as the visual effects were enthusiastically cheesey.

Not much has changed in the intervening decades. Even with state-of-the-art CGI, the visual effects manage to come off looking silly, and the stories are as ridiculous as ever. Which is not to say that I don’t enjoy the show or that it is not great fun. I do and it is.

But I do have a big problem with Dr. Who –  its handling of time.

For those of you unfamiliar, the Doctor is a Time Lord, and with his trusty Tardis he can travel anywhere in space and anywhen in time. Over the years, he has taken advantage of that capability and witnessed the very beginning of the universe and the death of planet Earth some 5 billion years in the future.

You have to love a show with that sweeping of a scope.

But there’s the problem. It’s just not that sweeping. If you read through the timeline linked above, you’ll note that the Doctor has made relatively few stops between the years 5000 and 5 billion. Now, granted, that’s a lot of time to cover and it would be hard to do it justice.

What bothers me is that the future of 200,000 years from now and the future of 5 billion years from now look roughly equivalent. And I should point out that the future of 200,000 years from now looks like the kind of world I would expect to see in the next 200 years (even without the Singularity or something else really crazy happening.)

I realize that it’s not easy trying to imagine, much less describe, how radically different the world might be in the distant future, but it would be nice if they would try. I get the impression that the creators of the show don’t quite grasp how much change might occur in the next century, much less two thousand centuries from now — not to mention 50 million centuries from now.

Madonna and Austin Powers star Mike Myers in t...

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50 million centuries, not years, centuries — that’s how long five billion years is. In one of the shows set in that unimaginably distant future, a human from our time meets an alien who works as a plumber and is delighted to learn that there are still plumbers. 

This occurs on an inhabited space station of the sort I predict we will have within the next two centuries. Will such space stations have plumbers? Well, somebody or something will perform that task. But I don’t think it will be a dedicated human staff member. Maybe a robot. 

Or maybe the intelligence to repair any possible problem will reside inside the plumbing itself.

Raymond Kurzweil, an American academicand author.

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Dr. Who gives us a future in which machine intelligence has very little role to play. But that’s okay, it also gives us a present in which Earth is under frequent attack by aliens who want to take our stuff our rule over us or whatever.

Fun and entertaining, but in desperate need of an overhaul. It’s the 21st ccentury, and the Doctor still inhabits a world from the 60s — even its future is from the 60s. The Docotor is no doubt great friends with Austin Powers.

And, heck, who wouldn’t be? 

I’m just thinking he might benefit from meeting some new people.

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  • blwang

    I have watched quite a bit of Dr. Who.

    Some of the second doctor. Almost all of the third through the fifth doctor and I have watched a lot of three of the five years of the latest run.

    The thing is that they want sweeping stories but have to leave it at a personal mostly mano a mano conflict with the Doctor. Thus the big enemy the Dalecks are somewhat hardened rolling trash cans (now they can fly).

    Also, the Doctor virtually never uses time travel itself as a weapon – ala Back to the Future.

    It is like teleporters in Star Trek – mainly a story device to get to the desired place for the story.

    I cannot think of much fiction where there was any real effort put in by the writer to consider a society that had human equivalent or better AI, full use of nuclear fusion, full molecular nanotechnology and space travel. Full molecular nanotechnology also provides immunity from aging. A society that had all that with a dynamic economy and enabled progress. Usually when a writer has all that the human or alien society ends up being static. At that level and not changing much.

  • bananahbee

    I think that you hit the nail on the head when you said that The Doctor’s future is a 1960′s future. The writers, however lazy this might make them, have pretty much decided to run with that idea of the future. It’s part of the character of the show and of the Doctor. Lets face it, I think that there is little The Doctor as he existed in the original series (equipped with sonic screwdriver and Tardis) could affect in the year 5 billion.

    Furthermore, they need a hero that we can relate to and so they need a future that we can comprehend. I think that it is fair to say that any realistic idea of the technology of the year 5 billion would simply look like magic to viewers, as any sufficiently advanced science will. So in what I’m going to call a twist of irony (though it is a dangerous word to use) The Doctor, a Time Lord, is trapped in a world stunted by the imagination of 50 years ago.

    Although I have to admit that I find a certain charm when the elements obviously taken out of the original run show turn up in the new seasons. Just personal preference.

    RE using time as a weapon…
    The reason provided by the show that we don’t see this is that the doctor is highly opposed to using any kind of weapon. He almost always fights the bad guy by turning their own evil plot around. He does, however, reference the fact that both the Time Lords and the Dalecks used time as a weapon during the Time War – creating paradoxes and time loops and the like.