Rogue One

It has been a decade since the last Star Wars movie, episode III. There has been a Star Wars 'drought' if you will, but like the prequels did, a new trilogy is bringing Star Wars back, again. This time, it comes back with even more. Disney is taking their newly acquired property and running with it. Along with the new trilogy, Disney has announced that multiple spin-offs are planned, including the newly announced Rouge One.

 Rouge One is supposed to feature the famous Rouge Squadron from episode IV, and have little to do with the main cast at all, hence it being a spin-off. It's exciting to get to dive into these new sections of the Star Wars universe we have not been familiarized with yet. It would be sad if in the end if Disney's episode VII flops, making all of these planned movies do worse, but ill keep thoughts like that away for now. 

Think about what this means for Star Wars in general though. Think of any area of Star Wars you want to dive deeper into, but know it's not enough for a major movie. There have been rumors of a Boba Fett spin-off, which would be incredible, since he is hardly in the movie. Other cool spin-offs could be Darth Maul, Count Dooku, or even as simple as life as an average Stormtrooper would be really interesting. With this in mind, I am carefully, cautiously, hyped... I don't want my hopes to be incredibly crushed when Disney doesn't deliver, but thats not to say they are destined to fail. The way of going about all this new Star Wars news and rumors is simple. Don't dive in, don't expect something that is impossible, just expect nothing. If the prequels taught us anything, it's that we need to expect nothing going in, so everything good about the movie is a bonus, and if it is bad, we don't feel robbed. It's hard be calm, to not board that hype train. But I promise it's not taking you anywhere you want to go.

Halo Today

If you know anything about science fiction, or videogames, or most likely both, than you know Halo. If you don't than get out. Close this window and/or look up what it is because A. I don't have the time to explain EVERYTHING, and B. Its awesome and you should know about it. Ill give you a little info... In Halo humanity has created super soldiers named Spartans. They are incredibly strong, quick, and deadly. And these guys are needed to fight aliens, so they gotta be good.

Spartans are genetically modified, and that is how they are incredible at all attributes. In Halo, this Spartan program is seriously ethnically and morally wrong because the Spartans were basically kidnapped as children and turned into soldiers. In the world we live in it would be morally wrong as well obviously but it begs the question, can Spartans be made? And if they could be, would humanity react the same way?

To answer the first question, yes, they can most definitely be created. Getting a really buff guy on steroids makes him stronger than the normal human. Combine that with Exo-suits modern scientists have been working on and we have a close similarity. It isn't quite battling the Covenant in space ready but still, it's an improvement on the modern soldier. But if they did exist in our world it would most likely be the way I previously described it. Our government's PR would have no excuse to back up why they kidnapped innocent children and trained them to be super soldiers, no matter what it was for. People would get enraged that the government has that kind of power, and they wouldn't be wrong in doing so. Many people are upset already with things like the NSA "spying" on them, even if it is for their own good. But to contrast with the popular opinion, creating these immoral super soldiers could end up being a necessary evil in order to keep humanity alive. My thoughts on this are, if a small sacrifice has to be made to save more, or that the pros do outweigh the cons, than take that chance. Nobody can be that selfish in saying their life or their child's life is more important than the human race as a whole. For this reason I'm going to have to side with the Spartan program, that I would hope humanity could muster up a fighting force like that. Wouldn't you feel safer, knowing we are prepared for a massive alien force, like humanity having a card up it's sleeve you didn't know about.

Traveling in a New Dimension

Time travel is something a lot of movies play around with. But time travel is nothing to play with in reality. It can influence the past, influencing the future, and present. If we go back in time, we could mess up the present. If we go forward in time, there is so much unknown that it would be extremely dangerous. So obviously it is a risky and dangerous idea in general. But, plenty of movies capture what would be wrong with time travel, think about it. There isn't a lot of time travel movies where the time travelers don't end up in some sort of predicament, I guess it wouldn't be interesting if they traveled back in time and everything went according to plan anyway.

So what is the point of time travel in general. Well, travelling back in time would be used to study history, prevent something historic from happening, or for self gain, kind of like the plot in Back to the Future movies. Honestly it wouldn't be that hard to make a living traveling back in time. If you just brought your cell phone back to the early 1900's it would amaze everyone. Go back any farther and it might scare people, some may call you a witch and burn you for your cell phone. But dangerous problems also arrive when traveling to the future. How do you know when you travel forward in time, Earth will even be there. What if aliens came with a death star and blew Earth up. You would have a giant problem as your gasping for air out in space.

But that brings me to my next point/problem/confusion about time travel. Say I traveled forward in time, 2 years. Assuming the time machine works the year would be 2016. But where would I be in 2016. When I came out of time travel am I where I was when I began traveling, because with Earths orbit I wouldn't be in the EXACT spot I was, again, I would be floating in space dying. So if a machine were to exist, we would need to make it place you on Earth, but even at that what if you time traveled back in time and you were placed inside of a building that used to be standing there. Not inside the building like in a room, but inside the wall of a building, or ceiling, or floor.

All of this is the confusion I have with time travel in general, and if you know the answers then go ahead and tell me. In my opinion, I hope that time travel never does exist, because if it did, all of these problems are a concern. But if you think about it, if time travel did exist, wouldn't someone from the future have traveled to the past at one point. Maybe there is a rule against it, or maybe, people from the future visit us all the time, we just don't know it. As long as they dressed the part for walking about in 1814 or 2014, there would be no way of telling where they came from, or WHEN they came from.

Flying without wings

I was shown some pretty cool cutting edge technology lately that the engineers are working on today. One thing that impressed me the most was a new display a mechanical engineer mentioned. They were on the subject of light displays like LCD/LED's and such. One said that there is work being made on making those into a heads up display, HUD. They are becoming small enough to bend and make round, we are already seeing this in newer, rounded, TVs. But that kind of technology is being put into a helmet. With said helmet on, the lights could project a virtual image of your surroundings. He gave the impression that there would be cameras mounted on the sides of planes and when flying, the image is brought up on your helmet and boom, youre flying through the air. Obviously this wouldnt be used on commercial airlines but more in the lines of fighter pilots. This would give an easier line of sight while flying and more awareness.

It would be cool to get the sense of flying at the same time, like truly flying through the air. Can you imagine, obviously it wouldn't be for the lighthearted, but technology like this could let us live lives that we never could before, simulating flying would be insane! Almost like Total Recall where you can get memories of doing something, but you didn't actually do it.