Happy Birthday Roy Batty!

If you haven't already heard, Roy Batty, Nexus-6 replicant, was born today. Born, constructed, decanted-- whatever the hell you call it when a replicant is created.

Mr. Batty is a highly intelligent replicant, skilled at combat with both a Physical and Mental Level of A. A combat model, Batty will most likely spend his short four year life span in off world military service. 

So, congratulations, Roy! It won't be long before you'll be witnessing those attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, while you watch C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. Hope your birthday's a good one. Here's hoping it won't be lost like "tears in the rain!"

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There's no denying that Blade Runner is one of the better sci-fi films of the past 30 years, but man, has any other major sci-fi film ever been so off in its predictions about the future?

The movie was made in 1982, but takes place in the far-off year of 2019. I don't know what the hell the producers were thinking, but even thirty seven years was far too short a time for all the advances in the movie to come to pass. According to the film, in just three short years we'll have: • Replicants:  Artificially created organic beings that are almost indistinguishable from real humans. To make matters even worse, Roy Batty is a Nexus-6 model, which implies there've been 5 previous versions in the series. Looks like you've got your work cut out for you, science! • Animoids: By 2019 many of the world's animal species will be extinct or ownership will be outlawed, so we'll have organic or robotic replicas, which, like replicants, are indistinguishable from the real thing. • Flying cars: The dream of every rush hour commuter is sadly still decades away, if it ever happens at all. The bigger question is SHOULD it ever happen? We can't even keep from crashing our cars into each other here on the ground; imagine the collateral damage that would occur from a mid-air auto crash. • Offworld Colonies: This is the biggest blunder in the entire film. In the movie there are numerous ads urging the populace to start their lives over on the offworld colonies. We couldn't even get to the moon today if we had to, much less set up a self-sufficient colony on a planet in another solar system. I doubt this could happen in the next hundred years, much less three. And those are just off the top of my head. I'm sure if I sat down and watched the film again there'd be even more impossibilities. Would it have killed them to have set the movie in 2119?