When Jules Verne wrote From the Earth to the Moon in 1865, people thought the idea was batshit nuts. A little more than 100 years later, NASA sent what was essentially a tin can with the processing power of a TI-83 full of humans to the moon and proved all those old dead French people wrong.

The fantastic ideas of science fiction endure today, and they are also to be found in anime. From being an integral part of the concept and premise of the series to blatantly filling plotholes, to simply being a random eyecatch, things that stretch the feasibility of modern understanding of science are common in anime. Partly because it’s anime, and you can draw whatever the hell you want.

Right, Gurren Lagann?

But despite how utterly ridiculous some of these things sound, you would be surprised at how closely related to truth some of these fantastic ideas can be. So without further ado…

East of Eden

Layar developers have been working on Augmented Reality technology for about a year now (this specific app has been available, though with not too much coverage, since last summer). Apparently, really smart computers take your GPS position and orientation and then draw from a database visual information to triangulate and identify objects. It sounds like a total pain and large expenditure of processing power and databases. But I am sure if Google takes this shit over, it will be out and about by 2012.

In Japan there is already technology to use your phone like a credit card, so that aspect of Higashi no Eden isn’t even far-fetched. I remember when I was little all this crazy scanning technology was totally cool. Now I place my wallet with my bus pass into the scanner when I get on the bus and my boring old life continues…

Perfect Memorization

In the 2008 anime Toaru Majutsu no Index, the titular character, Index, has the curious ability to memorize everything. Her purpose is to act as a living external hard drive and store secret grimoires in her mind.

Hyperthymesia is a very rare condition (by rare, I mean there have been 4 cases) where someone literally remembers everything that ever happened to them by date. You can imagine how much that would suck. That time you peed your pants in 9th grade? The time they caught you in the girls’ locker room trying on bras? The time you blurted out “that’s what she said” on reflex at your grandmother funeral? Never forget.

Touma’s right hand has not been tested on this condition.

Synesthesia

The titular character in CANAAN has synesthesia that enhances her senses to augment her abilities to near superhuman levels. Nikolai Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov is an 19th century Russian composer who actually has synesthesia. Canaan can sense people’s feelings and intentions and mere presence by simply feeling it. Rimsky-Korsakov can associate musical notes with colors.

…

Nevermind.

Space Elevators

In Gundam 00, the nations of the world solve the energy crisis and become independent from oil by building to a massive solar array in space supported by space elevators.

You can KINDA see the space elevators if you look really hard...

Though building a structure that extends beyond the atmosphere seems totally impossible, remember that the Earth’s rotation generates a centripetal force that keeps the structure upright. Take a look at this following diagram, which shows the basic concept of how a space elevator would stand up. Keep in mind there are two factors in play. The acceleration due to gravity accelerates us down into the planet while the acceleration due to Earth’s rotation accelerates us up away from the planet.

If you crunch the numbers and do some more physics, it comes out that the tension exerted on the tethers is huge. If we build a space elevator out of materials available today, it will rip apart and fly off into space, which is a pretty sucky way for an elevator to work. However, they are working on carbon nanotube technology that would be strong enough to support an elevator of this type. To date, the longest nanotube array ever created is about 2 centimeters long. Only a few thousand more miles to go!

Aqua – The Terraformation of Mars

Here is what Mars looks like in Aria.

Here is what Mars looks like now.

In fact, Aria is so far fetched from a scientific point of view, I’m surprised it’s even labeled as such. The gravity is regulated by… mass balls, and climate control just happens.

The reason you would even want to make Mars like Earth is rather scary: Earth may not be habitable in a few billion years, as the Sun becomes a red giant and swallows up the inner planets. Or you could just get it for the real estate, whatever. Actually terraforming Mars, while theoretically possible, is so difficult it’s hard to even imagine. The first thing you have to do is import some water.

Buddum -pshhh!

Which doesn’t sound like a huge deal, right? Earth has around 1,400,000,000,000,000,000 tons of water on it. From what we see in Africa and stuff, we don’t seem to have much to spare, either. But scientists have proposed taking water from Ceres, the largest asteroid in the asteroid belt, which happens to have enough water for all of Mars. Moving celestial objects? Time to call in the Gunbuster.

Then you need to supply Mars with massive amounts of greenhouse gases. That’s no big deal, just send China to Mars for around 10 years.

After that we need to figure out how we’re going to deal with the fact that Mars doesn’t have a strong magnetic field like Earth does. Hydrogen and other important stuff that’s important to having an atmosphere and liquid water simply just float away into space. Also, inhabitants on Mars will be susceptible to harmful cosmic rays. Sorry, Akari, you might have a positive outlook on life, but you got diagnosed with 16 different kinds of cancer again this month.

After investing billions more over possibly hundreds of years and solving other problems such as Mars not having a moon to stabilize its rotation and thus theoretically tumbling every few thousands years, hopefully we will eventually have the stunning results.

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