Harish Palaniappan's

Thanks to the medium of movies.

Movies are taking us all somewhere.

Marketing Neccessity

They say Neccessity is the mother of invention..

When people thought that it would be nice to fly across land to transport things or people or yourself to a place, they invented airplanes..
When people wanted to some way get rid of doing the boring home laundry work, they invented the washing machine..

But... to feel a neccessity, one has to be motivated and convinced of the advantages of doing things faster or better. For instance, you have to market advantages of travelling in 30 minutes across the english channel to make people feel the advantages, before they can see the advantages working in reality... and then we would have kindled the need for it, the neccessity.

Who does this marketing ?
As of today.. movies, I think. Obviously we can't expect the government to run an AD in public interest on TV channels..selling the idea of flying taxis. Some movie showcases it.. and people say "hmm.. ", then we go about it.. ( yes, sometimes technologists might be praying that such movies run well...so the time the technology or the product comes )

These days, computer graphics and animations add a lot of capacity and power to movie making, giving good scale for imagination for the movie maker.

People are motivated to think big on the future of things.. Watch a movie like star trek, and come out of the hall, sometimes, you get a feel what would it be if there were such machines and beings outside the hall in real life,

and likewise,

most often we understand that its not so likely to see a flying taxi in our lifetime and it is a long time real life technology would catch up.

Be honest, we all thought about cloning this way, but what happened.. we have already heard of successfully cloned species around the world.. and who knows there might be some scientist somewhere who has already secretly cloned himself or his fellow researcher.

Movies feed thought.. and also technology these days. While new technologies and researches kindle writers, and writers kindle movie makers... successfly imagination goes around well, and good movies motivate technologists in return.

We all knew how much thrill we felt seeing dinosaurs finally out of the local museum.. in the movie Jurassic Park.. If the movie thrilled normal people so much, imagine how much it should have sympathised with the researchers searching every speck of sand for a dinosaur bone..

Movies help raise the benchmark in quality of living, advancement in technology.. in regular intervals. When you thought we are at our best, and saw a movie where they are showing flying trains, we are going to obviously think there are more things to do.. rather than sitting like the world has everything today.

That should explain things like, why the French keep breaking their own fastest train speed record. It should be giving them that thrill in breaking it, rather than to make customers happy by transporting them a few minutes early.

Is today's technology far off ..

If my opinion woul mean anything to you... we are not far off.

Technology today is definitely capable of making most of the things that we see in the movies, .. mind you.. including generating species that we saw in MIB2..

The reason why we dont hear of anything so futuristic in research, most of the time, is, there isn't any neccessity so we are not doing it in a rush. But, but.. people are moving towards the goal, though at a slower pace.

We always saw advanced weapon systems in movies... today, we DO have recognized labs or engineers trying to make the fastest fighter airplane that cannot be detected by even radar, we DO have teams that have already had success testing a gun like weapon that doesn't fire bullets but fires invisible rays at the target, and if the target is a human, the rays burn up body moisture to make the human feel enormous heat at the point of fire.

They keep mum over these inventions or research on purpose...and much of it is defence secret. There are systems that are slowly and cautiously being developed...cautiously because we don't want to have villians to acquire these systems or technologies like in movies...and one reason is because we don't have a hero to save us, like in the movies. Even Arnold schwarzenneger would only run for life if a power packed villain appears in real life. Real life is no movie.

If you are wondering whether any neccessity is being created at all, through movies... don't worry, it is. To put it clear, we could say, Things rise up to the surface to be noticed only when the weather is good.

We all know internet.. but know this, Internet was top secret technology invented and used in second world war times and has been so until the late 1990's when one of its features, the power of sharing information, overcame all risks of keeping the technology a secret any further, and so you are here reading this blog. Sharing information has been a serious neccessity since 1990's, which is proven now with the amount of information we have on the web in just 15 years of Internet's popularity.