Year Million

Want to have your mind expanded? Or completely blown? "Year Million" takes a look at how the future might play out, given the current status of technologies and real concerns about quality of life.

Sci-fi writers make their money thinking about the future and hypothesizing about how future existence might look if technologies and trends were carried to their logical conclusions. This show looks to "a far future" and asks viewers to consider some surprising and startling possibilities.

In the first two episodes of this mini-series, we consider the dramatic changes that advances in robotics will bring. Our culture can expect significant changes in the next twenty years; but what might occur in hundreds of years? Will robots replace many humans? Will they threaten the existence of humans? Will they merge with humans?

Also considered are the consequences of medical research that promises longer life spans. Nanotechnology may eventually promise near immortality. Genetic advances may promise designer children. The combining of human and machine may blur our definitions of humanity, especially if the contents of the human brain can be digitized.

Will people be able to download the contents of their brains into robotic bodies? Will people be able to visit or actually live in digitized (virtual) worlds? Will cryogenics allow people to be reanimated in the future, when medical advances allow more choices or a cure for disease?

Will off-world travel and colonization be the salvation of mankind?

With any new technology comes new ethical questions. Will technology advance faster than the ethical systems designed to deal with them? Will we be able to retain what makes us human? Do we know exactly what those things are?

"Year Million" is both exciting and scary. A fantastic voice over facilitates the journey through a myriad of musings and questions.

Really interesting story, i learned quite a bit of possibilities of the future. Lady in the red glasses (comedian of some sort i guess) incredibly annoying. Other than that pretty good show!

Such an interesting topic for a show for tech lovers

Caveat: I only managed to get through one episode of this, maybe it gets better, but I doubt it.

This feels like someone ripped off one of the ripoffs of the, admittedly quite good, near future horror/sci-fi anthology "Black Mirror". Except instead of having some decent social commentary being the payoff, or at the very least a twilight zone type twist at the end, the show pretends the reward is that it has "educated" us with it's fear/wondermongering about it's completely improbable sci-fi future. I gave this show a chance because I thought NatGeo had decent programming, sadly I was mistaken. Fortunately there are already a few reviews that deal with some of the major flaws, but I still have a few selected gripes about this show to force upo-, I mean, to share with the reader.

Despite the claim the show's opening makes, that "this is not science fiction" this show manages to be nothing if not a jumble of common science fiction tropes. If the show was still critical and thought provoking that wouldn't be so bad by itself, but instead of actually rigorously looking at the possibility of these things happening, the show handwaves all the hard science to have random people -no-name comedians among others- talk about things clearly outside of their area of expertise in some lame attempt to justify the show's grandiose claims. Often the show meanders off tangent to make some halfhearted pondering of human nature or some other such nonsense, seemingly dedicating more time to talking about the past than justifying why the future is going to play out in this manner. The show's claims hurdle past ludicrous and head straight into wacko territory faster than a speeding hyperloop car. In the first episode only a few minutes in they just casually state how the singularity will obviously happen and robots will rise up and become the dominant species and yada dada yada, throughout it all the only impression I could get was that the writers are either insane, or that they plagiarized the plot of the episode from some crappy airport paperback sci-fi. Really barely anything they state actually seems to be constrained by logic, it's a schizophrenic mess of tangentially related subjects somehow leading to each other. One example of this is how in the first episode it's stated that a cellphone is somehow an AI, and AI has gotten better lately, therefore humanoid robots taking over is an inevitability... Yeah I'm as puzzled as you by the logic on that one. The show is riddled with that kind of thing, any decent points made are lost in a sea of bullcrud.

Another thing that ticks me off about this whole thing is that the show said that the the future will be "practically unrecognizable". Yet the show looks like the most uninspired sci-fi shlock some art student came up with for their graduation project. Everything is neon, gaudy, and glow-y when there's no reason for it, everyone looks like they fell out of some 90s cyberpunk parody with all the tech they have jammed into and on their their body, and cars look like they were on the way to some Asian street race they are so riced out with neon. There is nothing at all convincing about any of it, none of it makes any sense. Like we are supposedly a few hundred years into the future and practically nothing changes but superficial crud which we could realistically create using only technology available to us today? Honestly if I was actually into design as more than a passing fancy I think I might have had an aneurysm from how appallingly little thought went into depicting this future.

All I can say is that in my opinion this show is a pile of dog droppings which only insults and misinforms it's viewers. This kind of crud belongs on the new history channel with ancient aliens and occult Hitler show, not from a publication that is at least seemingly respectable such as NatGeo.

I thought the film Year Million was absolutely one of the best documentaries I've seen in awhile. The Dyson Sphere theory is great. Scientists have already identified a G-type star far from our reach that fluctuates in and out of light at different rates of speed. For me, that's proof enough that there is life out there. Once we harness the power of our nearest star, we will move onto distant ones because ultimately power is what it takes to keep things in motion.... if I lived in the future my main focus would be space exploration I would travel to the furthest reaches of the galaxy searching for life. It would be the greatest adventure mankind has ever taken...