Sci-fi movies have been coming up with some rather incredible ideas for decades, and it turns out that some of them are actually real.
The strange passage of time
In 2014’s Interstellar, the astronauts visiting Miller’s planet experience something called time dilation. It essentially means that for every hour they spend on the planet, seven years pass back at home on Earth. Albert Einstein first suggested the idea long before the movie was made.
Scientists proved it was true by measuring the effect, using highly accurate clocks on Earth. But the movie’s extreme seven-year difference near a black hole is still entirely theoretical. Nobody’s been close enough to a black hole to prove it.
A conversation during sleep
The idea of speaking to someone while they’re fast asleep, like in Inception, seems almost impossible. Yet it’s completely real. True, we can’t enter other people’s dreams and control them as in the Leonardo DiCaprio film.
But in 2021, scientists conducted experiments across four countries that found they could communicate with people experiencing lucid dreams. They asked the dreamers simple questions, including basic math problems, and the dreamers answered by moving their eyes or making certain facial movements. How incredible.
Changing what the brain remembers
We see Joel and Clementine decide to erase each other from their memories in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind as a way to deal with their breakup. Currently, there’s no scientific technology that we can use to do that.
Researchers at MIT have, however, managed to create false memories using science. They used light to activate certain brain cells in mice and make them believe something frightening had happened to them. It didn’t. Still, the mice reacted as if it did, so the scientists were able to effectively create a false memory in the mice.
Testing before birth
Gattaca shows a world where having a baby involves a lot more than choosing a name. The film features parents choosing embryos based on their genes, hoping to give their children specific advantages. That can actually happen in the real world.
Yes, parents can screen their embryos for inherited conditions during IVF, and then they can select an embryo without certain medical conditions, like cystic fibrosis and Huntington’s disease. We’re still a long way off from choosing a baby’s future intelligence or personality, though.
Creating an animal from another
Animal cloning was already possible when Jurassic Park came out in 1993, although scientists hadn’t yet managed to clone a mammal. The scientists in the movie used cloning to bring dinosaurs back. Then, three years after the movie came out, something similar happened in real life.
Researchers used the nucleus from an adult sheep’s cell to create a sheep embryo, and Dolly the sheep was born on July 5, 1996. She became the very first mammal successfully cloned that way, and scientists have cloned other animals since. However, there’s been no word on any dinosaur cloning.
Making breathable air on Mars
In The Martian, astronaut Mark Watney has to deal with a bunch of issues after he’s stranded on Mars. One of the major hurdles is running out of oxygen. In real life, NASA has been working on making oxygen on Mars using the Perseverance rover, and it has succeeded.
The robot used a small machine called MOXIE to make oxygen from the Martian atmosphere. It began in 2021, and by August 2023, it had produced 122 grams across 16 experiments. No, that’s not enough for a permanent human settlement, but the fact is that we’ve managed to create oxygen on another planet. It’s quite an achievement.
Machines controlled by thoughts
We see Neo getting plugged into an enormous computer system in The Matrix, and the film shows humans directly connecting machines to their brains. They’re able to control computers using their minds in the 1999 film, and interestingly enough, there’s some truth to it.
In 2012, scientists conducted experiments with the help of two stroke patients. The patients had been paralyzed, but they were able to operate robotic arms using implanted sensors. One of them could even pick up a bottle and drink from it, just through their mind.
A planet with two sunsets
One of the strangest details about Luke Skywalker’s home planet in Star Wars is that it has two suns. For the longest time, it seemed like pure sci-fi nonsense. But then astronomers found something eerily similar to Tatooine in real life.Â
NASA announced in September 2011 that they’d found the planet Kepler-16b that orbits two stars. But that’s the only similarity it has to Tatooine. Kepler-16b is a gas giant around the same size as Saturn, and it doesn’t have a solid surface to stand on. So no, there are no desert homes.
The changing center of Earth
The big disaster in The Core has to do with Earth’s inner core, as it stops spinning and puts the magnetic field in danger. Thankfully, there’s no chance in real life that the inner core will stop rotating, although its movement can change.
Research on seismic waves from earthquakes found that Earth’s inner core began slowing down. This happened around 2008, and the core eventually began moving backward relative to the surrounding mantle. It’s not the same as stopping altogether, so there’s no need for anyone to drill down like in the movie.
The ocean beneath the ice
2010: The Year We Make Contact explores the possibility of life existing beneath the frozen surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft studied Europa between 1995 and 2003.
What it found was that, yes, there was strong evidence of a salty ocean beneath the ice. Scientists believe that the frozen shell is around 10 to 15 miles thick, and the water underneath stretches roughly 40 to 100 miles below. Whether anything lives in it is another question.
The ancient waterways of Mars
Mission to Mars features a similar idea, except that it’s, well, on Mars. The 2000 film suggests the idea that Mars used to have a very different environment, and that it used to be more similar to Earth. In 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover found evidence of that.
The rover discovered rounded pebbles that were shaped by running water, as well as over 1,000 feet of rock created from ancient lakebed mud. Scientists believe rivers and lakes existed in the area for at least a million years, proving that Mars once had a much wetter environment.
The ocean’s influence on weather
It doesn’t take very long for things to go completely wrong in The Day After Tomorrow, and it all starts with changes to the Atlantic Ocean. Enormous storms and freezing temperatures strike across the world, killing millions of people.
Real ocean currents do help regulate the climate, and they can change global weather. The difference is the speed. There’s no way that a continent could freeze over in a couple of days, and there’s definitely no chance of anything happening as fast as it does in the film. The theory itself is true, though.
A planet without a sun
Planets don’t always need a sun to travel through space. At least, that’s what The Wandering Earth suggested, as enormous engines push Earth away from the Sun. Science calls these ‘wandering’ planets rogue planets.
Of course, we don’t have engines powerful enough to push Earth out of its orbit today. Rogue planets in the real world are usually thrown out of their original solar systems by gravitational forces. NASA stated in 2023 that there could be trillions of them in the Milky Way.
Pushing an asteroid off course
In September 2022, NASA deliberately crashed a spacecraft into an asteroid as part of a mission called DART. They wanted to see if they could artificially change the path of an asteroid, and it worked.
It sounds a lot like Deep Impact, where astronauts try to divert an approaching comet using nuclear explosives. NASA didn’t use any explosives, and the asteroid in question wasn’t threatening the Earth, thankfully.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.
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