posted
I have been wondering about this. Obviously some planets are more advanced than others, but for the sake of discussion let's try to address one world at a time, beginning with Earth.
It's obvious that the huge computers we see in Silver Age comics would not exist. We have Iphones right now, why would technology suddenly lose it's compactness?
We know that holographic games are popular, though I don't remember seeing a holodeck/danger room in the Legion. I wonder if there are restrictions on this technology for commerical reasons.
-------------------- Go with the good and you'll be like them; go with the evil and you'll be worse than them.- Portuguese Proverb
From: Illinois | Registered: Jun 2010
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Silver Age Lad
Part-time member living in another century
posted
I think the technology is limited by the imaginations of the wrters and artists. Technology took a great leap forward in Legion Annual #1 when Giffen/Levitz finally jumped beyond the 20th century.
More recently, if you look at page 8 of #2 of the current Legion series, Cosmic Boy is using a mission monitor display that is completely without physical parts.
-------------------- "Our devotion to each other was unexplainable" "You were kids" "No Batman, we were Legion"
From: Ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, UK | Registered: Aug 2007
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posted
I do remember an issue in the late 1980s where Sun Boy and Star Boy were playing a three-dimensional, holographic version of Dungeons and Dragons.
I also recall that quite often people were depicted reading what looked very similar to an I-Pad, only with the McCauley Industries logo on it.
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From: Freeville, NY | Registered: Nov 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
quote:Originally posted by Silver Age Lad: I think the technology is limited by the imaginations of the wrters and artists. Technology took a great leap forward in Legion Annual #1 when Giffen/Levitz finally jumped beyond the 20th century.
There was even a fun throw-away line lampshading it from Brainy, about how the team had survived all these years using archaic technology.
I'd hazard a guess that telepathic earplug technology comes from Titan, but technology levels are anyone's guess, really.
Flight Rings appear to be able to communicate at interstellar ranges, at speeds greater than lightspeed*, and they always seem to know who one is intending to speak to, even if you don't say their name first, suggesting some sort of limited telepathic utility there as well (or full telepathic utility, since they can be used in space). Whether or not this counts as state of the art communications technology, or is better than average, is unclear.
*At lightspeed, a message from Earth to the sun would take 8.3 minutes. Communication between Legionnaires in different solar systems has been shown to occur with no lag at all.
Then again, the Flight Rings aren't *often* shown functioning at this level, and, more recently, the Legionnaires around Titan didn't seem to be chatting with the Legionnaires on Earth in real-time, so perhaps this is 'chronicler's error,' or perhaps there is some sort of 'booster band' that can be used in emergencies to communicate FTL that isn't in regular use due to cost or difficulty or for legal / environmental reasons.
For all we know, they route communications through Bgtzl. The laws of the comic-book physical universe are wildly different, in some respects. The Justice League had teleportation technology 1000 years ago, after all.
Registered: Aug 2006
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Eryk Davis Ester
Created from the Cosmic Legends of the Universe!
posted
I've always thought that one of the most fundamental non-Legion specific Legion era technologies were the weather control systems, which date back to the Adventure era. You've got to figure if you live in an era where Titan can be terraformed to be habitable, controlling Earth's climate ought to be pretty basic.
From: Liberty City | Registered: Jul 2003
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quote:Originally posted by Silver Age Lad: I think the technology is limited by the imaginations of the wrters and artists. Technology took a great leap forward in Legion Annual #1 when Giffen/Levitz finally jumped beyond the 20th century.
Even a few months before that, Broderick was playing with some holographics as well, as I recall.
From: Vancouver, BC, Canada | Registered: Dec 2003
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posted
Tony Bedard's R.E.B.E.L.S. has captured a lot of the tech that was formerly confined to the 30th/31st century. No time travel yet, but with two Brainiacs running around that universe, even that might develop.
The Legion could certainly benefit from some exciting new tech stuff. I continue to be perplexed and fascinated by the mid-millenium's "great technology disappearance" that writers have used for decades to explain why the future is still recognizable to us.
Silver Age Lad
Part-time member living in another century
posted
quote:Originally posted by Malvolio:
I also recall that quite often people were depicted reading what looked very similar to an I-Pad, only with the McCauley Industries logo on it.
This is why the Legion writers will never be able to truely project 31st century technology. A device that seemed consistent with the 30th century just 30 years ago has been developed in the 21st.
If by some amazing gift, the Legion writers could envisage the technology of 1000 years hence, we would not be able to relate to it.
How would a person from 1010 have been able to cope with the ooncepts of computers and the internet, planes, lasers, submarines, television etc. The technology in 3010 will surely be as alien to us as ours is to our friend from 1010.
-------------------- "Our devotion to each other was unexplainable" "You were kids" "No Batman, we were Legion"
From: Ancient Kingdom of Northumbria, UK | Registered: Aug 2007
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future king
Excuse me but can you please direct me to the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles?
posted
All very good points S-A Lad. When you put it that way it really brings out the science fiction aspects of a futuristic story. Funny how most of the tech has come to pass some 30 odd years later.... Makes you wonder if some scientist out there who's focused on invention of conception is working on, say ... a viable form of matter teleportation right now, something straight out of Star Trek (and even the Legion). That would top the "invention" of the IPad I think! It would take a remarkable and gifted writer to conceive of technology that hadn't been touched on yet and then take that and plug it into a futuristic setting like the Legion's era. Just to make it truly futuristic to us reading it today, if not those reading it 30 years from now.
From: ontario | Registered: Feb 2007
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posted
There is a lot of futuristic tech that we still don't have yet.
We don't have interstellar transport, much less intergalactic transport.
We don't have teleportation.
We don't have control over the weather.
And we only have a prototype for a flying car.
So there's still a lot of room to imagine.
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From: Freeville, NY | Registered: Nov 2003
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Set
There's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met.
posted
Much of the, IMO, most interesting science fiction of the last few decades has dealt less with how gadgets will transform the future and more with how and changing definitions of what it means to be 'human,' will change things.
The only reason we don't have human clones *today* is because we don't want them. We are well on our way to mapping out the brain, and, 35 seconds after that, to recording it onto a computer, at which point, does the recording become a person, a copy of a person or just data?
Wildfire, pretty much since day one, has been discorporate energy. He breaks most definitions of 'life,' and yet he's apparently got rights and citizenship, even 'though the Legion universe hasn't been shown to have a whole bunch of sentient energy people running around as citizens, which, in a meta sense, would suggest that the UP already has a standard of 'it's sentient until we rule otherwise' in corner cases like 'energy-echo of someone who got blown up.' It seems quite unlikely that the UP had a law on the books, just in case someone got disintegrated, and lingered on as anti-energy, so it seems that the UPs default stance when dealing with new potential sentiences like Wildfire is 'still a person, in absence of proof otherwise.' (Granted, that's the old UP, back when earth people got along fine with aliens, and not the new retconned xenophobic earth.)
Registered: Aug 2006
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