Earlier today, I watched Elysium at the theaters. It's a film (starring Matt Damon, Jodie Foster and Sharlto Copley) about the social clashes between the rich and the poor with a twist of science fiction technology. The poor are left stranded on the over populated and over crowded Earth, whilst the rich live on the Elysium, an advanced space station and try to get richer.
The technologies we see in the film are: robots, exoskeletons, energy weapons, neural information storage and extraction, space transportation and habitats and a very mysterious healing machines. One way or another, most of these technologies appear in other popular works of science fiction. Out of all of these, the healing machines seem to be the most interesting one to me (most likely because it's something alien to the science fiction technologies I'm familiar with).
The machine looks and functions like an MRI scanner. The injured person lies down on a bed, a rotating arm scans his or her body. During this process, an image of the inside of the body (similar to the images seen on the screens connected to MRI scanners) appears on a computer. Once the injuries or sicknesses are detected, whether they are multiple fractures, cancerous tumors, missing limbs or even the facial damage caused by being close to an exploding hand grenade, the body is healed in a process called re-atomization. What exactly is this re-atomization process?
Based on what we see in the movie, re-atomization seems to be some sort of process where the atoms in the body are reorganized in order to reverse all damage. How does this work exactly? We aren't given any clues in the film apart from the rotating arm (which also re-atomizes the damaged areas it goes over). So we can assume that the rotating arm does the re-atomizing. Yet, regarding the nature of the process itself, we can only leave that to imagination. Whatever it is, I hope scientists and engineers come up with it soon...
Hi, just came across this old post whilst searching re-atomizing processes. Yes I also was in wonderment of the re-atomizer in the movie 'Elysium'. Such a device would be able to cure all forms of ailments in the Human body...or at least 99.9% of them.
ReplyDeleteThe premise being that conversion of the atoms already present into other forms and therefore the removal of cells of a cancerous/tumorous nature. Cells removed could be modified and be used to repair other cellular tissues including bone.
On the assumption that the conversion process is based of soft tissue material only as it would be less technical, else we would have the "Lead into Gold", effect.
Question ultimately is, how far away is the tech from current timeline? Some may argue that it's completely unfeasible to create such a device, but like the old adage of introducing the fete of flying to the Romans, you'd be put to death for heresy lol.
Anyway, the concept of re-atomization has been around for a while in Sci-Fi medium, from the earliest days of the, "Star Trek" series. Re-atomization was the primary function of the 'Transporter', after, of-course atomization. In-fact the step further taken was to be able to temporarily store the mapped data in memory for a brief period. The memory required for such an operation is completely mind boggling tbh.
Either-way, it's tech that I'm sure most would agree would be life changing...literally!