Back to Back to the Future II, Part Two

So that's that's the first time I've ever quoted the same song twice in in consecutive episodes. Hey guys, So we're doing our second part of our Back to the Future Part two extravaganza. Wait say that title again? What is it? Is it part two of our Back to the Future Part to two part episode about I called it back to Back to the Future to part two. Hey guys, So we're doing a second episode about back to the Future because the the the year that they go forward to and Back to the Future Part two

is t which and it turns out that's this year. Yeah, the year that we're recording this. Maybe if you are from the future and listening to past episodes of forward digging and just giggling up your sleeve. It's the past, but right now it's the present. Man, time is hard or not quite the present yet because it occurs in October. Yeah, we're recording this in January, so there's still time for

all of this to come true. So if you have not listened to our first episode about the technology of Back to the Future Part two and where the reality stacks up against the movie, you should go back check out part one and then come to this MP three right now, right, and that will make that intro we had seemed coherent by comparison apparent. Well, last time we talked about stuff that appears in the Back to the Future universe like flying cars, uh, self lacing shoes, adjusting jackets,

three second hydrator, ovens, that a big steamy pizza. Yeah, digital binoculars. Oh what else where do they have? Nest thermostats? Yeah? Yeah, So we talked a lot about that, digital windows, that kind of thing, telescoping self extending baseball bad most important piece of technology in the future according to Joe obviously. Um, but last time we did not talk about the one

thing that everybody had to be waiting for. So we thought we'd do that first in the second part here, which is hoverboards, yeah by Mattel in the in the film, at least the one that Marty McFly flies on is Yeah. To be a few different brands, some marketed towards towards older kids, some are marketed towards thugs. Yeah, you got the thug thug market. It's an a couple of different varieties that can either be powered or nonpowered. I'm not sure. Don't work on water unless you got power. Very canny

impersonation and who I don't know. Yeah, yeah, I I did watch this entire movie almost um, just last night, so I'm an expert right now, right, okay, Well, the hoverboard in Back to the Future Part two is basically a skateboard without wheels that never touches the ground. It's it's again. It's meant to evoke the great skateboard chase sequence from the first film. So you know, that is kind of one of those instances of hey, you remember how much you like this thing when we did in

that other movie. Well, now we're doing it again, so kind of like it's kind of clever actually actually like it itself. I actually like it kind of adorable. I know I sound like I'm being dismissive, but trust me, in this case it works. And movies like Anchorman too, maybe not so much, but in this it works great. Um. And that's a theme that's throughout all the Back to the Future movies exactly, Lauren, the whole idea of history repeating itself. Well, so they imagine this technology. It's a

floating skateboard more or less. Yea, do we actually have anything like that now that it's and I know what you're gonna say, You're gonna say, oh yes, because I saw that video on YouTube and it even had it even had Christopher Lloyd, who is obviously an expert on the future, and Tony Hawk, who's obviously an expert on standing on on pieces of wood that move around. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This product is supposedly made by a company called hover, which is a capital h UV and then a little R. And the video showed lots of celebrities getting on these hoverboards, floating up off of a parking lot and then zooming around. Ye and and Christopher Lloyd being kind of doc brownish about the whole thing, although not not looking like Doc Brown. It was Christopher Lloyd. Wasn't him playing the character? Yeah?

So um, but it was. You know again, it was really well produced video, and it fooled I guess some people. I mean, obviously, the knee jerk reaction for a lot of people was this has got to be fake. And uh, I still see people arguing about it, saying that it was real. Right, And then there was a video that Tony Hawk made later where he essentially apologized for the hover videos. So we just thought it would a funny joke. We never thought anyone was going to take it seriously.

And I'm thinking, like that's I I have a hard time believing that no one on that group was hoping that folks would take it seriously. I mean, when Back to the Future two came out, there was a rumor specifically created and uh and and distributed that the hoverboard technology really did work, and that was just the toy companies that were worried about potential lawsuits that were holding

it back from ever hitting the market. So that was back in when this rumor broke, and it was a rumor that was supported by Zamacha Zamachi and the rest of the film production company. I thought it was hilarious, but obviously that was a rumor. Uh, this was an orchestra at hoax. It was a joke video. It was made by Funny or Die, so that should tell you something.

I'm sure that there were people when Tony Hawk did his video saying, hey, it was all a joke who immediately said, oh, no, it was real, and now the companies are backing off because it's too dangerous cover up. Yeah, exactly, it's the whole conspiracy theory thing, right, like any evidence

to the contrary is manufactured. They were also I think a lot of people who saw the original video but just weren't aware there was ever a disclaimer, right, And if you if you watch the one where Tony Hawk is actually quote unquote apologizing, it has behind the scenes footage of folks wearing harnesses that are attached to cables that are are keeping them suspended, and then they just keyed the cables out, the wires, the cable they keyed them all out later so that they didn't show up

on screen. Um, so it's not a real thing. However, that being said, there is a real hoverboard, but there are a lot of qualifiers who have to add to wait a minute, what a real hoverboard? Yeah, hindo hoverboards, I don't believe you. At a Kickstarter, their goal was

two dollars. They raised half a million, so they definitely hit their people are excited about hoverboards, you guys, keeping in mind that these are hoverboards that you would only be able to use in very specific circumstances and nothing outside of them. You couldn't run them on water unless you have power. Yeah, you couldn't run them on concrete

or wood or grass or they're using electromagnetic repulsion. So we've talked about electro magnets a lot and how you know, creating magnetic fields is a really powerful thing for lots of things. So it's using essentially the same principles as a maglev train. Uh. And it works on metallic but non ferrous surfaces, so things like copper and aluminum, which

are are non faires. If it were on iron, then what would happen is once you started the electro magnets, they're becoming a magnetic field would be associated with the iron as well, which would be an aligned with the device, and you would end up having a hoverboard that's locked to the surface that's on as opposed to one that's floating above it. Uh. Non fairest materials is what it allows it to have this kind of um repulsion aspect

and be able to to float above it. Uh. I read some reports of various folks, like people from Engadget who got to try this out or wired. They said it was very, uh, disorienting and scary because you're you're on something where you're like, I don't want to fall off. But again, because you're limited to those surfaces, it's not something that you could just purchase and then you know, ride home unless the streets are paid with copper where

you live, so you you know. I could see this being used for something like an attraction at a park where they've set up a specific area with like an aluminum sheet floor where you can, you know, after signing a waiver, go on one of these. But I don't think it's going to be something that is going to be uh you know, Mattel is not gonna be marketing this to little girls, not within the next nine months. Yeah.

I mean, I hate to be a downer, but I feel like this almost doesn't count because of the special circumstances that are required, like in this case, you might as well just take a snowboard into a vertical wind tunnel. Okay, so indoor skydiving title, Yeah, I mean, you know, yeah, it's not. It's it's similar in spirit to what we saw in the movie, but obviously the limitations mean that it's nothing like the experience that you saw in the film.

I mean, you couldn't ride this over any surface besides water unless you have power. Uh, it wouldn't do any It wouldn't do any good. The power, by the way, as I recall, it's like a trio of thrusters that are on the back of of griffs hoverboard. It's got like a little almost like little jet engines on the very back of it, and that's what the power is. That's what allows it to have forward propulsion, even over water. But anyway, yeah, doesn't doesn't quite fit, which is a

real big bummer. I mean, the hoverboard was one of those iconic pieces of technology shown off in the film that people really um got attached to. They thought it was super cool. You know, personally, I don't feel all that robbed of magic. I think actual skateboarding is difficult enough. Yeah, I can't imagine not injuring myself on a hubboard. Yeah, I don't need to be an extra few inches off the ground when I fall terribly skateboard, I can't time I get on it. I can't do a skateboard, I

can't can't do wakeboards. Anything that requires balance on top of the board, forget it. Um Um, I might as well just go ahead and throw myself at the ground. So uh yeah, that but that's that's one we definitely needed to cover, and we got that one out all the way. But there's still a lot of other technologies that appear in that film. You know, I don't think last time we ever got around to communication technology. No,

we didn't really. We mentioned some things where you could consume content, but we didn't talk about ones where you could actually communicate with people. Ah yeah, And and video calls play a pretty big role in the plot line, such as it is if you want to be snarky about it, um because yeah, yeah, so so they have these huge screen TVs that can I guess either function or double as as video call centers. Yeah, there don't appear to be any cameras attached, but that's okay. Yeah,

maybe that's worked into the bezel. Sure, all right, I okay, i'd say we have this. I don't think anybody really likes it all that much. Some people do, but I think it's I think it's in very specific use cases, Like I don't think there are that many people who use this as their regular means of communication with other people. Yeah. Yeah, it's certainly not. If you want to call up your

coworker who happens to be flee Um. Yeah, and because because that dude is totally flee Um and just chat with him about something illegal, You're you're not necessarily going to go straight to a voice to to to a video call. I mean you might. You might skype with a significant other who's who's on a trip far away, far away from you, writer, or with family members, or you might you might even face time. If you're perhaps of a younger generation than anyone sitting in the podcast

room right now, you might. You might use FaceTime or something like that for your daily business and and within work, you might use it for something like calling into a meeting or in the podcast world, we do it all the time, or podcasts where you know you have a guest host, especially if it's a video podcast. Then you might have multiple people calling in a video conferencing, So it's not that it's unusual in the year two thousand and fifteen, although I don't Again, I don't think of

that as the primary means of community. Heck, I don't even think of calls as being the primary means of communication these days. Now it's all text and and things of that nature. I don't know that many people who actually enjoy talking on the phone anymore. I enjoy talking on the phone. I wouldn't want people to see me while I'm on the phone. Again, it's a very specific use case scenarios that I want anyone to be able

to look at my hideous visage. I don't think of myself as particularly misanthropic, but I very rarely use my phone as a phone. Well, phones are interesting if you have friends, you want to talk to those. I've heard about friends, thank you, I've been working on. Although interesting thing also about the phone system in the movie is that UM it will along the bottom of the screen, like like where a newscast might have a little a

little bit of rolling information. UM it will give you the callers identification, their their job, their age, their address, UM their favorite drinks and hobbies, uh, their family members, names and ages, the sports that they play, their political affiliations,

their food dislikes. So this is like, this is like when you watch a movie where you see a high powered executive and they're about to make a phone call on their assistant is giving them the skinny on whoever they're going to talk to, like Okay, he's got two daughters there, blah blah blah. So that that you can have that that that manufactured personal interaction that actually makes sense. It sort of combines calls with like the about page

of a social media program. H right, totally yeah, yeah, that's like like Facebook is a little bit of what it reminded me of. The interesting thing here is that I can easily imagine a video calling up that incorporates this sort of stuff by scraping information from some other source.

Either you create a profile in the app itself, which just makes it easy because then it just refers to itself, or it scrapes publicly available information off of social media profiles or even Google searches that kind of thing, and it would populate fields so that you would have this information.

We've seen kind of mock ups of apps like this for augmented reality where you know you've seen like the smart glasses where a person is looking in a room and people's names and they're like little Twitter handles and stuff are popping up over their heads. Gives you a little bit of information and obviously that brings up questions about privacy. It brings up you know, what's appropriate. What

do we want to make public? Is it is it acceptable if we have chosen to make this information public that people have easy access to it, or is the fact that that access becomes so easy mean that we no longer care that we publicly shared it. We want there to be a limitation. These questions were still answering.

Places like Europe are answering it through litigation where they they there's the story in two thousand and fourteen where Google was taken to task and said that there needs to be this right to be forgotten where people who want to have certain things in their past kind of expunged from Google so that something they did, you know, some stupid thing they did maybe fifteen years ago, or something that they got involved in in their past that no longer has any relevance in their their current lives

gets taken out of search results because they don't want themselves associated with that. Obviously, that raises a lot of questions and a lot of problems. And UM, all this being said, you know, we haven't seen a specific application as far as I know. That mirrors what we saw in Back to the Future too, but it's it's totally within the realm of possibility. I don't I don't see anything about it that makes it, you know, even even

difficult to pull off. A way in which they we talked a few times in the previous episode about ways in which this movie did not quite go far enough in its imagining of the future. And um, the way that this phone system operates within a household is one of those ways, because it's a it's a housewide phone system that can be accessed from like individual visors, but everyone has a single phone number within the family unit.

It's one phone for the household. So they imagined that that people that, like the kids, could each have a visor that they could check and see who's calling and take the calls supposedly on this little headset of theirs. Um, but it's it's just one household line. They couldn't get all the way to individual cell phones, right, yeah, which is interesting. I mean I can totally see why they went with that. Yeah. Of course, in the late eighties, I had my own phone number, but I didn't have

my own phone line. The number also went through the same phone line as the only one. It's just that it had a different ring to it, so that if that ring was going off, my parents knew, oh that's one of Jonathan's friends. I'm not even gonna bother picking it up. Um, and uh, that was the only thing. But otherwise it was you know, if I picked up the phone, I was, I had the family line was active, so uh, you know, I can see that they were just building on what was already common at the time.

They didn't anticipate a world where we would all have devices that have their own dedicated communication channels. Now, surely the movie understood that Facts wasn't gonna last forever, right, No, no, what, there's a facts machine in every single room in the house. And when you given the closet, and when you get that and when you get fired, it prints to all of them. Well, I think that that boss was just

not a nice person, but but yeah, it was. Yeah, the fact that there was a fact was really pretty amusing because again, the facts is one of those pieces of technology that has largely been supplanted by digital tech, you know, stuff digital displays and and PDFs, that sort of thing. We still see facts is. I mean, there are different companies and specifically government organizations that require you to facts in documents as opposed to scanning an email.

I have facts to shocking number of documents in the past year or so, like a shocking number, and by that I mean like more than three. But that's stuff. Yeah, considering that we're living in an era where you could literally take a picture of it with my phone and text to somewhere. They're also depending upon the depending upon

the document you're talking about. If you already have it in digital format, there are a ton of programs that already automatically convert that into PDF format, and then you could send it as a PDF where you don't have to worry about people making changes to it. And yeah, it's just weird to have a world where that facts is considered still a viable and necessary piece of technology.

According to nineteen nine, that was incredibly incredibly important, yea, so important that you needed to have like the aready have them in your Yes? Yeah, I guess if I ever ran low on toilet paper, you know, pretty handy. Well, I found it was massively wasteful as printing multiple copies the same message, not even different messages to different rooms. You're going to crush a man in his dreams, you

need to really go all out. Yeah. Well, speaking of crushing, are there any good crushing or you know, really any kind of robots in the home of Back to the Future Part two? Well, there there was. It wasn't It wasn't pictured directly, but there was definitely. Um these these like trash bag sized blocks of trash kind of hanging

out around a local dumpster. So I thought that that was interesting because it implies that within every home there's probably some kind of like large scale trash compactor, right that you're using to create these bundles of trash. Why on earth would you need that unless you're generating ridicu hellosus amounts of trash. Because they were generating ridiculous amounts of trash, that's true. Yeah, the fax machine prints out a duplicate of every single message in every room of

the house. You're probably creating like three pounds of paper waste every hour probably Yeah. Um, there were also roving around the city, these robotic trash cans, these kind of like our two D two looking things. Yeah, that would kind of just willy nilly sort of sort of rove around waiting to accept your refuse and we've you know, there's a great example of this as a concept. It was actually used in a in a commercial. It wasn't meant to be like an actual product. It was more

of a gimmick for a TV commercial. A robotic trash can that used a robotic chassis with wheels at three wheels that could spin kind of like casters on a on a on a chair. They could spin into any direction, so it could the robot could quickly maneuver in any given direction at a moment's notice. Uh, moved really really fast. On top of that chassis was mounted a trash can like a regular little waste paper beIN so that it had just enough clearance from the floor so it wouldn't

scrape around and the wheels could turn freely. And then it was had a processor in it that was connected wirelessly to a connect sensor, a Microsoft Connect sensor, and the way it worked was that if you tossed a piece of paper, the connect sensor would detect, it would project out the pathway of that piece of paper, send a command to the robot to intercept that piece of paper. The robot would move into place and then catch it

as it hit before it could hit the ground. And it was used in this commercial just as a little gimmick where someone is typing on a typewriter, which already was you know, was already anachronistic, but typing on a typewriter, and then, like the classic, pull the sheet out, crumple it up, through it behind you, and this happens three or four times, and then the person typing on the typewriter it gets a stick of gum or something whatever the commercial was actually selling. And then the next time

this doesn't make the person better at writing. Apparently all it does is make make the world magical around them, because then the next piece of paper, they again pull it up, they crumple it up, toss it behind them, and the trash can moves and catches the piece of paper. I just thought it was funny. I'm like, well, if I were making a commercial where someone was chewing gum while while failing over and over to write whatever they were trying to write. I'd have them succeed in writing,

not failing again. But now the trash can catches their garbage, makes fire more convenience. I guess a lot of the role of gum in human life. Yeah, but at any rate, Uh, there's a great video and I'll make sure to share it on social when we when we put this podcast up. That shows the both the commercial and the behind the scenes of how it was done. Although it's it's not in English, but it is. It does show you, like the the actual design process where I mean they machined

parts to make this robotic trash can a possibility. To me, it really just cool about being able to use a connect to do path prediction. Yeah, I thought that was really interesting. So um yeah. Other other robots that they feature in the movie include um in the eighties cafe that they go to, that's that's kind of partially a throwback to the nineteen eighties and partially the way that

nostalgia cafes work. Nothing like what the eighties was like at all, kind of like if you go to a nineteen fifties diner, it's not really like the nineteen fifties, it's like option way less sexism and racism. Yeah, it's pretty great. Well, I think a lot of if you go to a nineteen fifties diner, it's taking you back to what people in the seventies thought in the nineteen fifties were like, it's like happy days, not like the real nineties shirt sure, sure, and and all of the

technology that they use in those fifties cafes are updated technologies. Similarly, in this eighties cafe, they have these robotic m video servers like wait waiters and waitresses. Um, you can be served by Michael Jackson or by Battling Ronald Reagan and Ayatola.

Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, because because they're they're they're you know, asking you what you want and talking about the day's specials, and you know, one of them is like you should have the bean dip, and the others like, no, get the chicken tenders, and then they like fight a lot, so which I'm not, but uh, it's it's one of those things where where the all the depictions of the various personalities are put through what

I like to think of as the max headroom filter. Yeah. Yeah, that was very much what they were, like this kind of shoddy digital representation of a person that would occasionally, um, the playback of their dialogue would kind of skip like a record, basically entirely unlike digital representations of things skip right. That would mean that you would have to program in either the or there'll be some terrible buffering problem. But either way you're just wouldn't make you repeat, it would

just make you pause. Yeah, it's it's it's a weird thing a rate um. Yeah. So so that's that's pretty cool. Yeah, one piece of technology we kind of kind of jumped over, but it's still one that I wanted to mention really quickly. Is that Lauren You mentioned that mentioned that in the house people could get calls on glasses. We do have video glasses. I mean they're not great, but at least none of the ones I've tried have been really great. But that's that's one of those pieces of technology that,

again you can get. It's not it's like a lot of the ones word mentioning. It's not something that everybody has their hands on, but there are examples out there to varying degrees of success. Some of them are more video screens, some of them are essentially a replacement for something like a mobile device. Most of them connect to a mobile device, so really it's an extension of a smartphone. But it's one of those things where we do actually have them, but it's not in the same implementation as

in the film. But anyway, all right, so we've done robots, we've done communication, we've talked about the importance of fax machines. Let's let's move on to health, because we've talked about a lot of these these other areas, we haven't really focused on the health side. Now. Granted again I don't

remember much about health and Back to the Future part two. Okay, Early on in the film, UM, Christopher Lloyd's character explains to Marty that that he has been to a rejuvenation clinic and that Marty should not be alarmed because he will look very different when he peels off this mask that he is wearing, and he looks exactly the same, which is kind of the idea, suddenly looks younger. Allow me to explain to you the jokes in this movie

which you have probably seen, um. But but so, this rejuvenation clinic, he says, can remove wrinkles, repair your hair, change out your blood, what's the transfusion between friends and and thus add another like forty years to your life and also maybe replace your colon. I'm not I don't know. He didn't really specify. No, here's the thing. The fact that he doesn't look significantly different to Marty suggests to me that this this could be intentionally or otherwise a

very clever, satirical way of saying. There are a lot of services out there that are making these huge promises. The idea of preserving your youth is an enormous industry and has been for centuries, but now we've gotten into the high tech portion where everything from injecting what would be considered a deadly toxin into your body so that you could preserve a renkal free existence is now accepted in society. Um. Yeah, it's not really that unusual to

have this kind of of statement from a character. So if we take it from that perspective that there is an industry that still exists in that's catering to people who are fearing the aging process, but is not, you know,

demonstrably incredibly effective. This this prediction is absolutely true to today because because there's nothing stopping a company making these grandiose claims as long as they never get you know, called out on it then So I think this is one of those things that is fairly accurate because we don't actually see the techniques that are being described as

working in that way. It's not like we are. We don't encounter any characters who are forty years older than you think they should, like that have lived forty years longer than you think they should have been able to live. We never encounter a character who's like a hundred and twenty in Back to the Future too, So it's very possible that what Doc is saying is just complete hogwash

that he himself has bought into. It's a possibility. Now, granted that's kind of taking a meta view, so it's not exactly Yeah, it makes sense to me, and I do think I mean, especially since, um, since Biff, who is of grandfatherly age, of the kind of age that someone would have, well, I guess he's he's what we can use our skills and counting. He he would be uh sometimes like like eighteen plus thirty plus thirty Yeah, um, so seventy eight and he looks, you know, despite the

range of age makeup that they employ. Um, I guess maybe about that age, I'd say is a pretty generous lifespan for Biff based upon his lifestyle. That's true, So you may you may be able to infer some life extension technologies. Yes, the injury is still out on this one. But at anyway, we don't have like amazing rejuvenation techniques that can actually add forty years to your life. Yes. Another thing that we do not have is um sleep inducing alpha generator. Definitely not the way they are in

the movie. Uh. This is this device that conveniently gets a character out of the story for as long as the plot requires. Yeah, Doc uses this to uh to put Marty's girlfriend Jennifer Um into a state of sleep for her a period of a few hours um and in which he says that she'll wake up kind of groggy and and based on the fact that this is induced alpha waves in her brain, will assume that everything about this this future that they've been talking about will

seem to her a dream. Right, So that in other words, that he doesn't have this this ikey uh loose end to tie up. You know, he doesn't have to kill her and dump her body into prehistoric America. Why did he take her in the first place, because she was there with Marty when he came back at the end of Back to the Future one, and they couldn't just leave her there because, to possibly go babble, she had seen the time machine. Right. He comes back at the end of Back to the Future Part one, at the

very end of Less Sweet than I Remember. Well, it's when he comes out and he sees Marty and he sees Jennifer and he says that you guys got to come back and says, what back? No, we got to go to the future. What's the matter, Doc? Do we turn out to be get ready to believe? No? This holes or something? And then Doc says, uh, says no, no, you guys are fine. It's kids, Marty. Something's got to be done about your kids. And then they get in the car and they fly, so she's with them at

the end of back. So they had the problem. We've got this character. It's a continuity problem, but we don't know how to write for women, so we we can't have her in the movie. Let's knock around as soon as we possibly can. Yeah, So they hold up this device which essentially shines a couple of lights into her eyes, knocks her out. It reminds of the Men in Black device, honestly, which I guess. I guess the Men in Black device reminds me of this. Yeah technically, yeah, so very similar

in that sense. And it's supposed to induce alpha waves, like you were saying, and at the time, alpha waves were really being associated with, uh like your early early phases of sleep, so light sleep, not when you've gone into R. E. M. Sleep. However, since then, uh, more study has been made into alpha waves. And while we still you know, sleep is still largely mysterious to us, it's one of those things that we don't really understand.

We've talked about that in previous episodes too, But it looks more like alpha waves might indicate a time where you're kind of in a relaxed state, but you are awake, so kind of like meditation when you've when you're doing actual uh progressive relaxation exercises, that kind of stuff. Your eyes are closed, you're breathing slowly, you're you're actively trying to relax you you're going to have some alpha wave

brain activity, but you're not asleep. You know, you're not sleepy necessarily, and also can happen during R E. M sleep, But that's different too, and there's not a whole lot of agreement over exactly what role what it means. You know, as far as our em sleep is gone, it goes. So even if we had one that would induce alpha waves, it wouldn't knock somebody out like that. We do have various devices that are supposed to help you relax, like either by playing soft music or or other relaxing sounds,

or or they're even ones that use light. There's light therapy ones that are meant to help with relaxation. I think I think both Joe and I are just going like or get you tipsy like a bottle of wine. Some of us don't drink alcohol. Wouldn't it have been funny if what had happened in the movie is like Doc Brown whips out of devices like this will put Jennifer to sleep and it starts playing like saxophone music.

That would have been a much better joke. I still think the whole killing her and dumping group Rhistoric America would have really gotten around this all right. I think that if we get a time machine, we need to go back in time and talk to Robert Zeneca's. Yeahs Zeccas, Now this was granted. I mean, the whole purpose of her being unconscious is for a gag that happens later in the film where she wakes up and sees her

future self. Yeah. Well they have to get her into the house so that she can witness the goings on of her of her fututure family. Yeah. So it's it's you know, it's they did make use of her, but it was clear that it was going to be harder to have this be a two character stories, so they had to get rid of her somehow without killing her off.

So that's that's how they did it. Well, do we have any like, you know, exo skeletons and power suits and robotic limbs in the future rising lack of exo skeletons. I was really kind of hoping for some of those. Uh but but no, but there are some bionic implants. Uh. Doc mentions kind of off handedly that that Griff Biff's grandson um, because that's how names go, right. That's another convention of the future is that your grandchildren will have your same first name, but with the g R consonant

you don't see Biffs direct kids at any point. Do you know, just your grandchild will be groan than well, I will grow. That's a great name. That's like a troll name. So you just need to move to Norway and you got it all planned out. Sorry, Okay, Yeah, bionic limbs all right? So so so so Doc kind of kind of jokes that there's a short circuit in Griff's bionic implants um, which which implies that he's got it implies to me that he's got some kind of

brain implant going on. Um, but when you meet him, he when when he moves around there sometimes um these terrific pneumatic robots sounds that accompany it, kind of implying that, like, like especially when he's when he's like stretching his limbs out or standing up tall or something like that, implying that he does in fact have bionic limbs of some kind, although and driven by the same pneumatic stuff that is fed through little tubes all over the city. I guess

that's funny. It makes me wonder if Griff is not in fact Biff's biological grandchild, but a hybrid, uh cyborg clone of Biff. Yeah, that would explain why we never saw Biff's son. Yeah, cyborg Biff. Alright, So it's a terminator on the inside, that's what the pneumatic noises are coming from, and then on the outside it's living tissue grown from Biff's DNA. I don't mean to to dampen you know, the party or anything, or or to really

bring things down. Well, we have cyborgs right now. The whole purpose was to really talk about the technology as it relates to today, not to invent new ways to incorporate back to the future mythology into other existing science fiction. Okay, so getting to that, we do have cyborg you know, bionic limb type stuff, but it's all obviously very much in in the early stages, early prototypes. Some limbs are a little more further along than others, but things like

the robotic arms. We've started to see some really cool developments, I mean amazing stuff, uh, that have come out of things like Dean Cayman's group. The Deca Arm, also known as the Luke Arm, is a great example the original versions of that. We're controlled using actual sensors that were built into shoes, so you would use your toes to control the arm. But now they have versions of it that connect to you know. They they you can contract muscles in whatever is left of the limb that you've lost,

and that will send the commands to the robots. So there's still a learned there's a learning curve. You know. Obviously you need to learn how to to contract the muscles you need to send the command you want your arm to do. But as you learn it and you practice it, it becomes more and more natural to you, so that you're no longer really thinking of it, you know,

in in a conscious way. And uh, if you read any of the reports from the folks who have tested this out, like the actual amputees who have used this technology, I mean, it's incredibly inspirational stuff. It's really really moving to hear people talk about Like there was a guy who said, I picked up a water bottle with my left hand. The last you know, he's like in his late forties, is the last time I did that, I

was twenty three. You know, as you know, you hear something like that and you're like, wow, all of the fields, but yeah, and listening to them talk about some of the kind of like average things that they can do, like like like fasten their own pants. It's to feed themselves,

right right, it's it's it's really awesome. Um it is you know, prohibitively expensive and um technical enough that it's or complex enough a system that it's it's really only for those kind of cases where you're trying to restore function to someone who has lost it, and not in this case, for beefing up a belief. Yeah you don't, you don't have like the it's not used as enhancement. It's used as it's used to to regain independence. So yeah, it's one of those things where the reality and the

fiction are obviously very very different. And again, I mean I don't blame the film for this, because you know, they're trying to project a really you know, like they were blue skying the whole future thing. What do they care it's nine. When they're making the movie, they just want They wanted to be fun and interesting and say like, all right, it's thirty years out. What could happen in thirty years? And when when you have a question like that, if you ask me like, in five what's the what's

the baseline level of technology going to be? Like I'd be making some pretty crazy predictions too, pretty when when when I used to be on tech stuff, we used to make some pretty crazy predictions for just the very next year. That's true, That's true. Another thing that they mentioned in the movie is suspended animation kennels. So apparently suspended animation is not only so widespread and successful that humans can use it, but they can you can put your dog in it, right, I mean to yeah, yeah,

you're going out town. You don't wanna, you know, take care of the pooch. It's you know, to them, it's like you never left. Yeah. Oh well, although I can see the appeal of that, I guess, yeah, yeah, so you're not traumatizing your dog. I mean the appeal I see is that. I mean, obviously, this is assuming that the actual process of putting your dog in suspended animation is not at ull traumatic h for anybody the dog

in question, Einstein seemed to find. So, assuming that that's the case, the thing that appeals to me the most, and this is totally like uh super squishy Jonathan feelings, is that you have the most time with your dog. You're not cheated out of a single moment of your time your dog, because you know, you're not losing that week that dog is. Yeah, you could even do it at night or when you go to work and then you come back home and then like so your dog

could live to be like forty. I miss my dog. Guys, Oh, I don't blame you, but but yeah, we've had an entire episode about how unlikely it is that suspended animation is ever gonna work right, well, at least for certain types of animals. Yeah, right, mammals maybe not so much.

There's some like reptiles and things where it's much easier to see how you could achieve some kind of suspended animation, especially with the kinds of reptiles and fish and certain animals that you can just freeze and not kill them. And we also talked about how the breakthroughs we've seen in quote unquote suspended animation are really more about giving the best chance for for victims of terrible injury or disease or whatever to recover during a surgical procedure that

may last a few hours. So you're not talking about something where someone's indefinitely being put into suspended animation. It's more about let's try and create an environment where they we are increasing their their chances of survival as much as possible. So it's not, you know, it's it's a very different outcome than what we're seeing in in science fiction. All I'm saying is I can imagine pretty easily a suspended animation kennel for your pet juvenile salamander. Yeah. I think, yeah,

I could see that being a thing. I don't know how much you a few years out though, that's certainly not it's they overreached. You could be. You could just be a guy on the street corner with a big freezer. That's yeah, just have a sign, don't do that. Don't really suspended animation kennel for salimated. It be nice to salamanders. Yes,

they're wonderful creatures. Yes. One one last bit of health equipment that we see in this film are so Marty's father, George, George, thank you, George McFly, who who is now of grandfatherly kind of age, has thrown out his back and so he is in this hovering, suspended upside down ankle holding brace. Right. It's like it's like if you've ever seen those things of people who would get in these these these kind of stretchers that would get inverted and the idea was

that I was supposed to treat back pain. It was supposed to be an actual therapy for this. Um it's that same idea, except now it's hovering around so that you actually have mobility as opposed to your stuck upside down in a certain section of a building. Yeah, it's sort of it's sort of like yeah, yeah, yeah, or it's like that spell in Harry Potter that that James

uses on snape when their kids. Okay, yeah, my wife could even tell you what it is nursery across nursery in fact, well the the so yeah, yeah, I can tell you the reason for that technology in the in the context of the film, because it's funny. Well, also that they could not get the actor for George McFly for part two. So what better way to disguise the fact that you don't have the same actor than inverting them upside down and never getting a really good look

at them. So that was Yeah, Crispin Glover didn't want to come back. Well, he wanted to come back, but only if he got like a crazy amount of money in all with with uh yeah kind of but yeah, so yeah, so that didn't happen. They said no, there's no way we can do that, and so he walked and they got a different actor. But yeah, if you've got that, that's why if you back to the future to all the scenes that have George in them, there's like a screen door that you're looking through or back

from the scene. Yeah, exactly, so that way you don't have it's not as obvious as a different actor. Um. Not that they had problems with Jennifer that way, but anyway, that's that's a difference. Nobody cared about Marty's girl, not I mean, she's female. That's why we got rid of her in the beginning of the I do I do feel really bad that I've been just calling her Marty's girlfriend this entire time. She has a she she is a person, she's self actualized kind of the way the

movie treats her. You can't be blamed for calling her Marty's girlfriend, because that's pretty much all she serves in the all right enough editorializing about Yeah, we do have one last category here, and that is a citywide infrastructure. Um, and we we've already covered the inflation rate. Yeah. The idea that if if we get to a point where you need a fifty dollar bill in order to go buy a pepsi, not saying that pepsi itself is fifty dollars, but that a fifty dollar bill would be necessary to

cover the cost. Then obviously inflation would have to go out of control for us to get to that point in the next nine months. Yeah, they don't have to. They don't have to be a catastrophic event, which were crust. Yeah, let's I'll knock on wood. Um, I'm not sure. I'm sure that there's wood somewhere undering underneath the sneer of our table. Um other infrastructure. They have a weather service that controls rain and clouds and sunshine like to the

precise second. Yeah, yeah, at the controls it, yeah yeah, or or perhaps predicts it. But it looks like a control situation because as far as I know, southern California doesn't have um or doesn't typically have very brief, very sudden, very intense periods of rainfall. Yeah. And and what we see at the beginning of the film is um there they they just arrived, they've just landed. Uh, there's it's

pouring rain, absolutely pouring rain. And um and and Doc has a little a little watch one of his two watches, because he's wearing two watches in the movie, which I think is really adorable. Um, he looks at the screen and and says, just wait another like five seconds, and and as if by magic, the clouds part, the rain stops, the sun comes out. So there's apparently some kind of weather service. I I took it to mean as controlling. That's interesting. It could be either way, or it could

just be that they're actually predicting the weather. To the second, that seems well, the prediction, the prediction part. Neither of these are realistic obviously, certainly not for today. I mean like maybe in another well, even then I would say, to the second seems wrong. The prediction part is at least the less impossible, less egregious impossible, just egregiously impossible, because, as we've discussed on this very podcast before, weather patterns

are incredibly difficult to predict. They have an enormous amount of energy and them, uh, they're extremely chaotic events. When you look at a weather report that says there's a seventy chance of rain, essentially what that means, and I'm oversimplifying, is that on all the other days that had weather conditions similar to the day in question, it rained. Of those days. That's why chance of rain means that in those same conditions, seventy percent of the time it rained,

of the time it did not rain. So it's it's literally just giving you a percentage of chance that it's going to rain that day. My favorite of the times when it says that it is currently raining outside and you look out the window and it's not. Yeah, yeah, that that sometimes can happen to Uh. That's so that's the getting to a point where we can predict it precisely is mind blowing, because again, it's just such a

complex issue. I mean we whenever you talk to any climatologist about this sort of stuff, uh, and or or a meteorologist, which would be more appropriate. Climatology is of course looking at very long patterns, but if you talk to a meteorologist about this kind of stuff, you realize, wow, there are a lot of factors that go into this, and a lot of them are very difficult to predict, and some of them are impossible for us to know. At the moment. There are a lot of butterflies flapping

their wings out there. Yeah, yeah, so obviously you know those those monsoons are gonna just keep on coming. So if it's a prediction thing, it's a little less unbelievable. Uh. And that at least then you're talking about just knowing when a weather pattern is going to be moving through to the point where you can even have it in

your schedule. But um, if it's about weather control, and I took it to mean the same thing to me, I thought it was, oh, this is when we've scheduled our rainstorm so that we can actually get you know, water into the into the area and then it's over. Um, that is well beyond our capabilities. Guys, guys. Yeah, sorry, I just had an insight that I think perhaps makes this whole weather conversation we've just had irrelevant. I can't

wait to hear it. I think what happened is that Doc Brown had already been through this part of the future more than once. That's what I mean. He watches these events transpire, he sees what happens, and then he comes back to get Marty and Jennifer, goes back to

the future and does them again. So he's already been there at that moment, and he would already know when it stops right, So it's not that because he says specifically that the that the Weather Service is operating like down to the tick, he could be lying, Well, he is an unreliable narrator. Can basically, I mean, because most of these are jokes that are spoken by Christopher Lloyd's character.

So really, most of these insights that we have about this potential future could be the fact that he's a deeply unreliable and psychotic narrator turned Doc Brown into Obi one kenobi Okay, Okay, Well, I didn't know that he had specified that about the Weather Service, And even if he hadn't, then you have to go. You have to assume that he wrote down the exact moment when the rain stopped, like the rain's over, let's see what time it is. I should make note of that. I bet

I can use this to impress Martins. Yeah, because the building of the time machine isn't nearly impressive enough, I need to tell him when the rain's gonna stop. Yeah, he's he's really like the Wizard of Oz, I think. Um. But well, and also there is in that in that newspaper we referred to, Uh, there is a tiny little bit of weather. Now, this just shows how people have scrutinized every single frame of this film, freezing it and

looking at all the details. But uh, the October two fifteen issue of USA Today has the mornings scheduled weather for the Hill Valley, California area. Um so you get like the actual time, and in fact, someone has written it all down where it says mostly clear twelve am to one thirty six am, partly cloudy one seven am to six thirty six AM, heavy rain six thirty seven am to seven twenty three am. So um so it may very well be that this is prediction not manipulation,

but either way it is, it is unrealistic, especially in so. Uh, this one's a miss, but this was fun. Did you guys wanna have any other concluding thoughts before we wrap up on this Back to the Back to the Back to the Future Part two, Part two. I think the companion to this episode should be that we get our friends from stuff you missed in history class to do an episode on Back to the Future three and how accurate that is to what eighteen what years supposed to be?

It would be? I think it was eighteen eighty five, because I think it was a hundred years Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, that's my suggestion. Okay, all right, well we'll float it by them and see. I think a five person podcast would be a blast. No no, no, no, they could do it on their own, okay, and then we would just linked to it and we can just

look in through the windows shout snarky things occasionally. We'll have to do that soon, because I don't think I don't know if we'll have a window in the new one, and we'll be moving before too. We can just cut a hole in the wall. I'm sure that that will maintain the acoustics property. That's true. We don't want to

have too great deviation from our current experience. Listeners, if you haven't heard this before, we will soon be moving and we will have a brand new podcast studio, which in the past, if you've heard sirens in the background of this podcast, no more. You will not have to hear any more sirens, assuming no one in the office is carrying a siren around. Because we that our new studios will not share an external wall, so they'll all be internal rooms. We have two audio studios and two

video studios. We're very excited about trying them out soon. And uh yeah, So there's gonna be some changes, but you guys probably won't be aware of them, except for the fact that you'll be thinking, well, I haven't heard a siren in a long time, but that will come up in a it'll take a few more episodes, I

think before we get to that point. So, guys, if you have any suggestions for some of those future episodes we can tackle either while we're here or when we're in our new digs, send us a message let's know. Or if you got any questions or comments about the episodes of the past, you know, send them our away. We love to hear from you, and you can write us our email addresses f W thinking at how Stuff Works dot com, or drop us a line on Google Plus,

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