If you’re having a bad day, watch this: A skilled drone
pilot launched a drone that buzzed the space needle.
I don’t know if this is the same flight where the police
tracked down the hotel room the drone emerged from and had a good talking to
with the owner, as mentioned in my previous blog post. There are the usual
concerns: I remember the scene in the movie 1984
where a helicopter operated by the Thought Police looked in the window of
Winston Smith’s apartment. And this makes it easy for a terrorist, whether
domestic or foreign, to drop poison in a city’s water supply.
But see the beauty of this shot. Also, consider how this can
revolutionize search and rescue. The common use of some drones will also make a
dividing line between stories.
I watched a rerun of Buffy
the Vampire Slayer in which a couple of her friends were kidnapped. When
she saw they were missing from the library, she thought they might be out
looking for someone. I thought, “Why doesn’t she call them?” Then I realized
the Buffy series was before cell
phones were in common use.
This is an enormous divide in movies and TV shows: pre-cell
phone and cell phone. (I know that smart phones also make a divide, but not as
drastic.) The same is true for novels. And in the near future, novels will be
viewed as pre-drone or drone. If some child is lost in a city or a wilderness,
readers will puzzle over why no drone was sent out. To spy on someone who is
sunbathing or unloading supplies from a ship, readers will wonder why a
satellite had to be co-opted rather than just use a joystick and drone.
And for novels set in the future, 3-D printers will
manufacture military drones for the battlefield or exploration drones to send out
from spaceships that have landed on planets. Drones are the wave of the future,
or perhaps I should say waves of drones are the future.
It is funny to watch movies and shows that are out-of-date with technology. It's like a blast from the past, "Oh, so that's what it was like. Now I remember. How strange!" haha
ReplyDeleteVery interesting point. It's hard to imagine a time when there weren't cell phones even if I lived half my life in that non-mobile-using time. Great post!
ReplyDeleteThat is true--as I type this, I'm watching Melrose Place. Last night there was an episode where a woman was kidnapped on a boat. I kept thinking, "Okay, now she can just dial 911 on her cell." Honestly? I never did un-think that. I kept waiting for her to do it until I forgot about it. Now when a writer is creating a scene like that for tv/movies/books, he/she has to find a way to explain why the cell phone couldn't be used--mostly that there was no cell signal. In the future, the bad guys will use tech to scramble that signal (same with drones, probably--bad guys will learn to make all the drones go offline temporarily or even go bad and kill us all!).
ReplyDeleteRight, Stephanie. I'm planning a future post based on real-life jamming of cell phones. Completely illegal, but that doesn't stop it from being a plot twist.
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