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TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 7:01 pm
by Imbrooge
Alright so TRON, to summarise in this franchise Encom created a device that transports people to and fro from a programmed world. Here is the thing though, MCP didn’t import Flynn’s mind or anything it digitized him! So Encom essentially made a matter-energy converter.

Then in Legacy it is made clear that the digitizing laser works in reverse to, with the ride coding a program can be brought from the Grid into the real world. Alongside the fact that Flynn aged based on real world time and the fact that he ages at all pretty much means you can take anything from the real world change the variables as you see fit and then bring it back exactly as it became from meddling with it’s code, even humans.

And lastly the one in Legacy was made by Flynn inside a dingy basement under an arcade that can apparently run without causing a power surge so it obviously doesn’t require a lot of power for what it can do.

I’d like to discuss all the possibilities with this, and how drastically different things would be. Basically the impact on society and all the practical applications this technology would be used for.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sat Apr 16, 2011 11:07 pm
by Arioch
The ability to convert matter to energy (or information) and back again is essentially the ultimate superscience technology; it's the technology you expect from a nascent-God-species like the Krell in Forbidden Planet, rather than modern-day (or even 24th Century) humans. It basically means you can transport anything to any place, instantly fabricate any item you desire, or change the properties of any object (or person) at will. All aspects of life would be fundamentally changed by this technology: not just transportation and industry, but warfare, medicine, entertainment, lifespan and life cycle... everything.

The problem with the digitizer in TRON is the same as with the transporter in Star Trek; it was introduced merely as a plot device, and the broader implications of this God-technology are totally ignored (some of the implications were occasionally explored in the later Star Trek series, but rarely to any depth). Not to mention that such devices require several orders of magnitude higher technology than anything else you see in Star Trek, and of course is even more out of place in the present-day TRON setting.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 3:45 am
by sunphoenix
Yeah... lol! "Matter to energy (or information) and back again" equals - YOU WIN Stop playing!
Essentially there is NOTHING you cannot do!

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 5:17 am
by manticore7
heh, monsters from the Id. All their advance technology and the Krell still couldn't shake their rock banging, thunder fearing, cave alien roots.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 6:53 am
by bunnyboy
- Matrix Warfare.
- Phoneline tranportation replaces trains, jets and ships, cutting creat part of pollution and greenhouse gases.
- And of course, automan

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 11:45 am
by sunphoenix
Automan...lol! I Remember that show! Interesting concept... but didn't catch on. Would have liked to see where they went with it! :)

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 3:49 pm
by Mjolnir
bunnyboy wrote:- Matrix Warfare.
- Phoneline tranportation replaces trains, jets and ships, cutting creat part of pollution and greenhouse gases.
- And of course, automan
You're not taking it far enough. Why pollute at all? The Tron: Legacy device can conjure up objects out of nothing or zap them away with an arcade basement 's power supply, it could easily be adapted into both a clean energy source and a waste disposal...just don't do any data acquisition when reading objects in. Murder becomes a prank, getting killed means you miss an appointment or show up late for work. Don't need doors any more, just use pairs of Tron-zappers, which automatically back you up as you leave your home and spawn a replacement if you don't check in.

Warfare? Just make a weaponized variation of the waste-disposal type that can "rez" new copies of itself. Try to disappear your enemy's version of such devices faster than they can zap new ones into existence, while they do the same to you...just hope nobody thinks to build one that can target a planet. Or just say "screw you" and go build your own planet elsewhere. Why not? It's trivial to do...start with a Sputnik-sized probe that rezzes a few larger copies of itself, which do the same to themselves for a few generations until you've got a planetary core formed from a mass of Tron devices crushed under their own gravity, then have the surviving surface ones start making rock, dirt, oceans, atmosphere, life, cities, and copies of your entire national population.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sun Apr 17, 2011 9:57 pm
by Imbrooge
@Arioch:

I didn't think it would be the penultimate superscience, I knew it would be a big deal but not that big of a deal. And the big plans Encom had with this tech was essentially bandwidth exploitation, and Flynn's plan was Second Life 2.0. They've struck gold and don't even realise it. Atleast Flynn realises how big a deal it is about the implications of those ISOs

@Sunphoenix:

There is a limit, in the TRON verse absolutely everything else is still 1980's - 1990's. So the physical limits of the hardware is still there, the electronics is about as vulnerable as ever to the enviroment and sabotage, and lastly physics still aplies to anything you bring for the digital to the real. So whatever you make you still have to design it intelligently.

In General:

I don't know about Warfare, but a career in coding is gonna be basically the number one profession to rule them all, with hacking a close second. What other professions that would still exist would boil down to anything that can't be done by the digitizing laser and the machines that you would be building. So extremely little.

EDIT: And actually coding things to work right in the real world is not going to be easy, especially if it doesn't exist yet. But you can experiment by altering properties to make materials you couldn't otherwise make.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 1:30 am
by Mjolnir
Tron really just doesn't hold up to any significant level of inspection. The "laser" can convert a physical object into data and later reconstruct the original object with apparently no loss. Just storing the data involved ought to be far beyond anything we can currently imagine constructing, and that's just storage, without the whole virtual existence side of things. It's so far beyond anything that currently exists, so disjointed from what we can actually do, that attempting to predict its effects is pretty much futile. We can only guess at what it can do from the movies, and there's no particular limitations shown.

Anything that you can construct a computer model for can be zapped into existence out of nothing...this thing sidesteps thermodynamic conservation laws somehow, or it'd never be able to scan and reproduce a human while running from a wall outlet. Retrofit current vehicles with a pair of these devices in place of the gas tank and exhaust systems...they'll go forever with no exhaust and no refills. Build rockets that rez combusting fuel straight into the combustion chamber...no more issues with building large, lightweight fuel tanks, and you've just achieved relativistic interstellar travel. You've also achieved a weapon capable of relativistic kinetic bombardment of your target, given enough acceleration time. Or it might be simpler to just rez a nuke about to blow up, or a pile of antimatter, or a black hole. I'd be heading for deep space as soon as possible, largely to get a lot of distance between me and whatever everyone else on this rock might cook up. No need to head for any particular star, I could make my own. I wouldn't have to pick any one direction either, I could send copies of myself in all directions.

There's never any explanation given for how programs can have anything that would translate to physical forms in the real world. If the system makes any sense at all, the skills of greatest value would be MechE and EE, plus a strong grasp of physics, chemistry, metallurgy, and biology. It's not clear how coding skill would be much help, once the CAD tools to create the data needed for rezzing objects are produced. The whole field of manufacturing technologies would become instantly obsolete, of course...no need to spend billions developing the processes and equipment to etch nanometer-sized features into semiconductor when you can just conjure the finished product up out of nothing. Though this is mostly relevant if you figure out some way to keep someone from blowing up the world.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 7:40 am
by manticore7
@Imbrooge

Your avatar is Awesome :D,

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 11:22 am
by Riess
I for one would have loved to see CLU's carrier materialize in Flynn's. And promptly crash becaue gravity doesn't work that way, but that's beside the point.
But really, efficient (more than 100% efficient by the looks of it), controllable matter/energy conversion? A virtual reality that can spontaneously create intelligences whose avatars are translatable to viable human life forms? That's godtech right there.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 5:16 pm
by Arioch
Yes, I thought the prospect of a program army invading the real world was questionable at best, but the story had pretty much gone off the rails by that point. The whole thing with the ISO's was gibbering nonsense.

It's okay. The visuals were great and I could watch Olivia Wilde all day (even if her character has no reason for being there).

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Mon Apr 18, 2011 6:27 pm
by Trantor
Arioch wrote:...and I could watch Olivia Wilde all day
Our prey patterns seem to match. 8-)

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2011 1:31 pm
by bunnyboy
I just watched the legacy movie yesterday and I think it is nothing of virtual.

The characters have "earth-is-flat" type knowledge, which aren't accurate and should be criticised with evidences.

What we know

there aren't any copies from any program or mind
- discovery 1: Clu is only imitation of Flyn, he don't have his experiences or feelings
- discovery 2: even if Clu had almost every resources of known grid, he can't make "army of clones"
is there even possible to make any copies?

beings there needs refreshment, but even if Flyn is aged, Clu is still young as ever
- option 1: being of tiring is only shortage of energy and age is only appearance
why Flyn have changed his appearance? if he can take any appearance why didn't he used that ability?
- option 2: you can't escape time and aging on grid
do programs get older? do Querra stay young forever as human?

only Quorra has ever come to world of humans
- option 1: she is energy transferred to matter.
where the energy comes from? as we know, thermodynamic laws are unbreakable
- option 2: she is matter transferred to matter.
if the matter was gained from Flyn body, where it was storaged?
- option 3: she is natural living being from another place/dimension
in theory the univese has 11 dimensions. could some of these correlate with information in our networks?
- option 5: she is energy being, eg. tactile holograph
what produces her and keep her in shape?
- option 6: she is haunt, only inside of Sam's mind
was everything only dream or did he really meet her and is she still person of her own

I think that even if you could transfer lot of stuff from grid to earth, you can't pop everything you wan't into existence.
It is good thing that Clu didn't get his plan to work. It would be big surpside to neighbours if suddenly a big crushed warship will materialize from underground and broke their drain.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2011 5:08 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

I have yet to see the new TRON (though it is on my list), but I seem to recall that in the original they didn't actually do any matter conversion. They broke down Flynn and suspended his atoms while he was in the virtual world and then put them back together again, albeit in a slightly different order. That may be slightly less world breaking if you still need to get the correct mixture of atomic components... but still pretty world breaking.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2011 6:23 pm
by Mjolnir
icekatze wrote:I have yet to see the new TRON (though it is on my list), but I seem to recall that in the original they didn't actually do any matter conversion. They broke down Flynn and suspended his atoms while he was in the virtual world and then put them back together again, albeit in a slightly different order. That may be slightly less world breaking if you still need to get the correct mixture of atomic components... but still pretty world breaking.
I don't recall the original even trying to go into anything like that degree of detail. It was a "laser" that scanned objects and people into the computer, that's all.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Thu Apr 21, 2011 11:22 pm
by Imbrooge
There is also a bizarre inconsistancy with the main antagonist in the first film, specifically that it was an independant entity inside the digital world even though it's mainly comprised of seperate interlinked computer towers with their own seperate programming. How does that work?

@manticore7:

I know, I was going to use the Umiak: Not a Spy one but couldn't find it.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2011 4:09 pm
by icekatze
hi hi

Direct quote from TRON 1.0
While the laser is dismantling the molecular structure of the object, the computer maps out a holographic model of it. The molecules themselves are suspended in the laser beam. Then the computer reads the model back out, the molecules go back into place.
Technobabble if ever there was some, but it does indicate that they're not producing matter from energy.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Fri Apr 22, 2011 5:29 pm
by Arioch
Except that they never explain what happens to the matter after it's digitized, or where the matter comes from when they re-materialize; unless we're to believe that the beam was on the whole time. In the new film, they actually bring a program into the real world, so it would seem that they're creating matter that was not there before.

I'm quite sure that they didn't give the physics aspect of this more than a moment's thought; neither of the movies is very serious in its technical approach. I mean, in the first film they have a monster laser pointed directly at the back of the operator's chair.

Re: TRON Tech and How It Would Effect Civilization

Posted: Sat Apr 23, 2011 7:08 am
by Karst45
Well if i would guess an explanation i could say that the matter they used was stored somewhere when digitalize and that this program actually used stored matter (of people who died in the "game") to create it physical aspect.


But even there that would imply a pretty powerful technology. reorganizing matter/atoms and actually giving life to inanimate matter... Like some said; it god mode on.