5 Absurd Sci-Fi Scenarios Science is Actually Working On

5 A Lab Is Brewing Apocalyptic Superdiseases

The Sci-Fi Premise:

Movies about a worldwide superplague seem to come along every few years (see: last year's Contagion), but within that genre is the more cynical and outlandish "Lab creates and accidentally releases a pandemic" subgenre, like Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Stephen King's The Stand.

The premise is flawed from the start, as is typical of apocalyptic movies. Why in the hell would the government allow a top-secret lab to create a world-killing microbe in the first place? In terms of movie logic, it falls right into the category of "Hey, let's turn our nuclear arsenal over to Skynet" and "We should absolutely take this huge, destructive monkey back to New York."

The Reality:

And thankfully, for once, we're right! There's no top-secret lab creating an apocalyptic disease. Because the lab is not secret at all, and it's located in Rotterdam.

That's right, in a lab comfortably decorated with a disco ball and functional beer tap -- because if you're going to be working with ridiculously dangerous viruses, it's best to do it while drunk and listening to the one genre of music most likely to destroy your faith in humanity -- virologist Ron Fouchier has experimented on the feared bird flu virus, creating a new mutation that's more dangerous and potentially more contagious than the already-deadly original. In his experiments infecting ferrets with the virus, it eventually became airborne, so direct contact was no longer necessary for infection. The victim just needs to breathe the same air.

The details of Fouchier's work remain unclear, mainly because the voice of reason that is America's National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity has said, "Hey, guys? What you're doing is cool and all, but couldn't terrorists get hold of this and kill basically everyone?" Even if they couldn't break into the lab, there's already evidence that groups like al-Qaida are trying to recruit college-educated members who majored in mad science with a minor in playing with deadly viruses -- so what can't be stolen can still be replicated.

Fouchier's work hasn't been published, mainly to prevent someone from copying it and using it less in the pursuit of science and more in the pursuit of the end of the world as we know it. Meanwhile, we hope they've got some amazing locks on that place.

The Sci-Fi Premise:

James Cameron's obscenely successful film Avatar involves soldiers traveling to a distant world in search of a valuable resource. The environment and the natives are hostile, however, so they train soldiers to remotely operate avatars: They hook their brains up to a machine and effectively become the artificial person on the other end (you may also remember a similar "humans control avatars with their minds" scenario in the Bruce Willis movie Surrogates, except you probably don't, because who the hell saw Surrogates?).

However, you might have been too caught up in the 3-D and fighting cat people to stop and realize what an amazingly useful (if creepy) technology this would be for a military that wants to keep its "real" soldiers out of harm's way.

The Reality:

But the Pentagon sure as hell realized it, as evidenced by their aptly named Project Avatar. That's the thing about having R&D budgets in the billions: If you see a movie you like, you can just call up a few scientists and say, "Make all the badass parts actually happen." Thus DARPA, the hive of batshit insane supervillainy that develops cutting-edge tech for America's armies, has budgeted $7 million to fund robots that work just like avatars.

We're not talking about remote-controlled drones, either. Those are old news. No, DARPA wants to "develop interfaces and algorithms to enable a soldier to effectively partner with a semi-autonomous bipedal machine and allow it to act as the soldier's surrogate."

"Bipedal" is the key word there. That means they want a walking humanoid robot to do all of the things a soldier would do if he or she were there. And no, it doesn't sound like they're talking about handing the soldier a control pad and letting him play his robot like a video game. They refer to developing the technology of "telepresence" and letting the robot act as a "surrogate" body (damn it, Bruce Willis, if your movie had only grossed more you could have gotten this whole thing named for you).

How would that work? Well, as this Wired article points out, DARPA has already been developing robots that can work on mind control alone. Whether or not you think any of this is creepy depends entirely on whether you're imagining a platoon of mind-controlled robots with red glowing eyes kicking down a terrorist's door or kicking down yours.

While we're on Avatar, we should probably bring up ...

3 Investors Are Already Funding Off-World Mining

The Sci-Fi Premise:

The idea of mining other planets/moons/asteroids for minerals not found on Earth wasn't invented by Avatar -- that's what the robots in Blade Runner were built for, after all. But it's never good news -- these movies are always about a dying Earth sending astronauts to go exploit space rocks for the resources we've drained from our own planet. It's what the ship in Alien was doing before the aliens arrived, and it's the backdrop for the video game franchise Dead Space.

Note that it always ends in a horrific massacre at the hands of otherworldly monsters.

The Reality:

James Cameron, not content to get his hands on just one Ridley Scott sci-fi franchise, has partnered with several other mega-rich investors to bring Blade Runner's dystopia one step closer to reality. Planetary Resources -- a company that was founded two years ago but kept secret until very recently (because that's completely normal and shouldn't creep you out in the slightest) -- plans to make up for our severe shortage of unobtainium here on Earth by sending robots to mine nearby asteroids.

With guys like Ross Perot Jr. and Google's Larry Page also pelting the venture with obscene wads of cash, the company isn't wasting any time: They plan to launch their first test craft within two years, and from there, they're looking to aim for near-Earth asteroids, with on-board robots (sorry, they probably won't look like Rutger Hauer and Daryl Hannah) setting up bases to get down to some off-world mining.

And no, this isn't just a case of bajillionaires not realizing when they can't accomplish something just by tossing cash around: The company was co-founded by Peter Diamandis, who helped start the X-Prize competition to spur nongovernmental space flight -- remember how that turned out? And MIT Professor of Planetary Science Richard Binzel agrees that seeking out things like water and metals on asteroids is a step that humanity must take sooner or later, especially if we want to stake our claim to more of the cosmos. A trip to Mars, for example, might be made possible by stopping at the occasional asteroid to refuel the ship and pick up a latte at Starbucks (come on, you know it'll happen).

Of course, some of the comments by people involved with the project break away from "progressive, forward-thinking science" and veer more toward "Holy shit, that's totally batshit insane" territory. For example, one of the company's apparent goals is to "capture" a small asteroid and draw it into the moon's orbit so that we can have our very own dangerously-close-to-Earth asteroid to study whenever we want. That can't go wrong, right?

But don't worry, it'll probably be at least a few years before we have to worry about the robots that they send up to live on our new pet asteroid going all psycho when they discover their own mortality. We'll have accidentally opened the portal to hell long before then.

2 Iris Scanning/Invasive Advertising Is Here Now

The Sci-Fi Premise:

In Minority Report, Tom Cruise is a wanted man who needs to clear his name by playing with huge touch screens and doing lots and lots of running. In one scene, Cruise undergoes black market eye-replacement surgery -- not to swap his out for a less crazy pair, but because the cities of the future come equipped with hidden iris-scanning technology to identify fugitives on the run.

And in the future Earth of Minority Report, that technology is everywhere -- billboards even use it to say your name and make personalized sales pitches as you walk by. It's not just Big Brother that electronically tracks your every step, it's Lexus.

The Reality:

So, how far off do you think this technology is? Minority Report took place in a weird future full of psychics and impractically futuristic cars and force field guns. That film was set in 2054, but governments and advertisers in the real world certainly aren't going to wait that long.

In fact, the city of Leon, Mexico, partnered with biometrics firm Global Rainmakers Inc. to install iris scanners throughout their city in an attempt to make it the "most secure city in the world." While the firm is busily installing their Big Brother boxes all over the city, the city is building an iris database, starting with criminals -- the idea being that if, say, a wanted man tries to escape by plane, iris scanners at the airport will find and track him, allowing security and police to easily detain him. But to make sure regular law-abiding citizens don't feel left out, they can have their irises scanned into the database, too -- presumably to make it easier to check into places on Facebook. Jeff Carter, CDO of GRI and former member of a think tank involving Bank of America, Harvard and MIT, predicts that "Every person, place, and thing will be connected within the next 10 years."

While that's all well and good ("well and good" in this case meaning "pants-pissingly terrifying"), it's not the final step. What about those creepy-ass personalized ads? Well, Tokyo, for example, has installed billboards that examine the faces of those looking at them to determine that person's age and gender, and then adjust the advertisement on the billboard to something targeted at that demographic.

And this isn't going to be restricted to Tokyo, either. America, sick and tired of being out-crazied by the Japanese, will soon have it as well, thanks to Immersive Labs, who plan on implementing the technology in busy sections of major American cities. While the facial scanners won't identify the specific person looking at the ad -- yet -- they will determine what "consumer category" they fall under and present content tailored to that person's predicted tastes.

It's like the ads on Facebook, only way more embarrassing, because everyone around you can point and snicker when a billboard assumes you're clearly in the market for a Fleshlight.

1 Designer Baby Clinics Are Already on the Way

The Sci-Fi Premise:

In the future envisioned in the biopunk thriller Gattaca, old-fashioned racism and homophobia have made way for a new, innovative form of prejudice, thanks to the existence of clinics that allow parents to maximize the genetic potential of their children.

While a world in which the genetically engineered among us look like Uma Thurman and Jude Law and the non-engineered among us still get to look like Ethan Hawke doesn't seem like such an awful place to live, this "build your own baby" scenario is still unsettling -- a baby is supposed to be the natural product of either two adults who love each other or two adults who make bad decisions while stinking drunk. Anything else is trying to play God.

The Reality:

Based in Los Angeles, the Fertility Institute plans to use methods originally designed to check your unborn child for disease risk to allow you to select your child's sex, hair color and eye color. Blond hair and blue eyes for everyone! Well, those who can afford it, anyway.

Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg heads the Fertility Institute and claims that the science is so fundamentally sound that in the very near future, we'll be able to decide on a baby's sex with 100 percent accuracy and eye color with 80 percent accuracy. And apparently, he's right. Even doctors who think he's exaggerating his timeline still admit that what he's claiming is not only possible, but inevitable.

The next question is, of course, why stop at superficial things like hair color? Do you think for one second that nobody is going to take advantage of all of the world's rich people who are willing to pay good money to make sure their kid is a tall, beautiful, genius Olympic athlete? That's right; in the future, the rich kids won't just have the best jobs, they'll have the best bodies and brains as well. In the meantime, those whose parents couldn't afford to make them members of the master race will have even more limited mobility, since they'll have to compete for jobs and opportunities with people who have literally every advantage over them from birth.

Then again, with looks, intelligence and physical traits all up for in vitro upgrades in the near future, those of us with puny, non-scienced-up genes can at least look forward to watching some unparalleled modeling, sports and Jeopardy! on TV. So ... win-win, we guess?

To read about a sci-fi scenario that hopefully doesn't come true, download Joe Oliveto's post-apocalyptic short story for the Kindle. You can also follow his blog.

For more science fiction that's becoming reality, check out 5 Famous Sci-Fi Weapons That They're Actually Building and 6 Eerily Specific Inventions Predicted in Science Fiction.