Sports Changes

Soccer and football are something most of the world likes together. They have been around for over 100 years and I wonder what the future holds for sports in general. Will we have something new develope like Podracing in Star Wars or something more chill and less... Dangerous?. Looking into news on sports lately, a lot of changes and questions revolve around the safety role in sports. The rise in safety concerns isn't due to these sports being safer, rather the reason is it's easier to detect problems or health damage. If anything sports have gotten safer over the years. Look at football uniforms from 20-30 years ago and compare them to now. They are much more bulky and padded than before. Over time, sports will inevitably get safer just because of better health practices and treatments. But with them possibly being a problem, could it lead to something else playing the sport. With robotic advancements possibly the future would have Robot fighting sports, like Real Steel. Without having to pay contracts to robots like human players, it would be cheaper, it also eliminates the health concern, plus it would be cool to watch. But if mankind devolves into madness or some economic depression hits us, leaving us to worry about more important things like food on the table and not about others bruises and scratches, then possibly we could get some interesting Jabba the Hutt mobster sports...

VR and Rambling

A virtual reality. As if it were real life but in something like a videogame or movie, anything virtual, it lets you feel like youre actually there. Technology like the Oculus Rift which augment your vision so when you look around in real life, you look around in the game. Its just a helmet with a screen in it that displays the game, alone I dont see much of a future for the Oculus Rift because it doesn't quite blow television away, alone at least. But think of the possibilities if we combine that with a 360 degree treadmill. I'm honestly not quite sure what the actual name is for these devices but they are a treadmill you can run in any direction. Not much work has been done in this area, and it is really quite obvious. If you find pictures of it online it looks like a baby chair and I'm sure would feel equally ridiculous to use as is appears. So as long as nobody ever sees you using this it is the coolest thing ever...

I hope in my lifetime technology can reach the peak of virtual reality. I want to be able to go home from work and get immersed in a game literally. I could get sucked into the game and run around inside of another, more interesting, more engaging world. Not to mentions the benefits of this compared to modern day gaming. If the treadmill does end up being used, imagine the health benefits. Gaming sessions can last hours at a time and if your running around for hours it would make the ideal "gamer" much more fit, while at the same time making running and working out that much more interesting. Multiple studies have shown that videogames along with relieving stress, also help brain function and activity. Combine that with now physical fitness and gaming would be quite the recreational activity. That is probably the outcome I look forward to the most about this. Gaming has such a negative connotation with most people. When you say I'm a gamer to someone, the general population begins to think, "lazy", "stupid", "slacker", or/and "obnoxious". Although those stereotypes are true for some of the more, vocal gamers, it isn't true for all. My group of friends and I are all gamers and we are straight A kids with jobs, and although sometimes we wish games could be a priority it never is over our work. Gaming is growing and with that the stereotype will decrease, and if gamers become the majority, they also become the smartest and most fit aswell. I'm just waiting for the day when I can 'step out of the shadows' if you will and not hide behind my other interests in hope that people don't think negatively about my true pass-time. A time where all of us can come out of the dark and talk publically about the new Halo game or the unreal trailer for The Division or that incredibly card draw in Hearthstone, that will be the day...

Affordable Spaceships

Sadly, we live in a time where space travel isn't something that is available to anyine. It also isnt a fast or efficient way of transportation, but I want to know, when will the public become able to fly through space, as simply as driving on Earth...

This is a pretty insane concept and idea, just because of how little we are actually prepared for space travel. Think about air travel like planes. You need certain permits to fly a private plane, there are restricted areas that are no fly zones, and other similar issues that arise, but at least there are laws. If space travel somehow got to the average middle class person or even just a couple thousand rich guys, it would be chaos. There are little to no laws in space so what happens if one of the space ships go around and break all the satellites and TV for thousands is out. Is it illegal, if so, who's laws are they breaking? American laws, German laws, Turkish laws? Does the UN punish them? It is a very open ended question that doesn't really have an exact answer. So we really aren't ready for the future like this. Maybe there should be no laws in space because there is little to no way of enforcing any laws in space. All of this is just something to think about because a future like this really isn't as far away as it seems.

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.