It’s a pretty cool-sounding year we’ve just embarked on, and sci-fi writers have been salivating for 2020 for decades. We took a survey of the literature (and the TV shows, and the video games, and the movies, and everything else) to put together a timeline of important events that are scheduled to hit in the next twelve months, and it’s a doozy. Join us for a very eventful future as we run down almost all the things that could happen this year. As a note: we’re not including shows like The Boys that started last year but are set in 2020, that would be ridiculous.
Humans Will Land On Mars
There are a number of films set in 2020 where mankind sets foot on the Red Planet for the first time, with varying results. Brian de Palma’s 2000 Mission To Mars saw a team of astronauts land for the first time to discover a giant human face in the red sand, a hidden complex and the revelation that life on Earth was descended from Martians. In 2001’s Stranded, a five-person mission goes awry when they crash, leaving only enough oxygen, food, and water for two. The other three venture forth on a last-ditch attempt to survive. While the Mars mission timeline is set for 2030 in the real world, that doesn’t seem like too far off now.
Arno Stark Fights Machine Man
1984’s Machine Man limited series introduced Arno Stark, the son of Tony’s cousin Morgan. After the first Iron Man dies, Arno inherits Stark International and builds himself a new, powerful suit of armor with big gears on the shoulders. His first appearance sees him battling Machine Man, and over the next few decades Arno would travel back in time from 2020 to face off with present-day Marvel heroes on numerous occasions. I think it’s a safe bet to assume that Marvel’s going to do something with the character this year.
North Korea Takes The Lingshan Islands
The events of the first Crysis kick off in 2020 when the DPRK occupies the fictional Lingshan archipelago with the goal of capturing the ancient alien artifact buried there. When they take a team of archaeologists hostage, the United States sends a commando team wearing nanosuits to get them back. Of course, the aliens wake up and things quickly get messy. Relations with North Korea are already frosty as the decade begins, but as far as we know they’re not planning any military expansion.
Robots Box Instead Of Humans
I actually got an invitation to visit the set of 2011 Hugh Jackman vehicle Real Steel but couldn’t go. Maybe if I had I’d be better prepared to talk about the world of 2020, where Ultimate Fighting has been replaced by metal-on-metal clashes of brawling robots. While we’ve seen a variety of robot competitions on TV, none have been humanoid, because mimicking our bipedal movement system is a challenge. However, it’s certainly possible that this year will be the one where robot boxing becomes the country’s most popular sport.
Underwater Marine Bases Study Sea Life
1972 Hanna-Barbera cartoon Sealab 2020 lasted barely over a dozen episodes and is best known as an Adult Swim footnote, but it’s an interesting look into what the minds of the 70s thought the world of the 20s would be like. Several hundred men, women, and children live in the underwater Sealab, perched atop a volcano. Each week, they had to deal with sharks, whales, malfunctioning nuclear reactors, and other hazards. We don’t think there are any long-term undersea habitats opening this year, but Elon Musk could still surprise us.
Agent Shadow Defeats Pit Bull
1989 NES game Raid 2020 is one of those rare games that got an American release but not a Japanese one. Developed by unlicensed shovelware house Color Dreams, it casts the player as Agent Shadow, venturing through a cyberpunk future to take out a malevolent drug lord. You probably haven’t played it, because it’s bad even for a late 80s NES game. But, if its predictions are to be believed, a fedora-wearing secret agent will ride a jet-ski, shoot hordes of identical thugs, and venture into space to win the War on Drugs once and for all.
Terrahawks Battle Planet Guk
Gerry Anderson was Britain’s cozy sci-fi master, with his shows like Thunderbirds combining rocket-powered action with marionettes for a bizarre but exciting experience. His 1983 series Terrahawks saw the Earth Defense Squadron, led by Doctor Ninestein, battle against wrinkled creatures from Guk led by the villainous Zelda. Thankfully, her many schemes, most of which involved size-changing monsters that she kept in a deep freeze until they were needed. No sign of them so far, but it’s only January.
The Super Force Fights Crime
After astronaut Zachary Stone returns from a mission to Mars to find his father dead and brother framed, he dons a high-tech suit of armor and fights crime and corruption in the futuristic city of Metroplex in the year 2020. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, it’s dimly-remembered syndicated 1990 TV show Super Force, which aired for two years. Ken Olandt played Stone, who rode a gadget-laden motorcycle through the Crime Zone as he battles crime lords, bounty hunters, monster trucks, and Traci Lords as an alien. If the real 2020 is half as insane as this show, it’s gonna be a wild ride.
The President Battles Zinyak
The idea of a gang leader becoming President seemed ridiculous when Saints Row IV was released in 2013, but things obviously changed a lot since then. In the fourth installment of the series, your protagonist has taken the Oval Office and is governing benevolently until the alien Zin land and totally wreck your sweet setup. First, the President escapes from a virtual reality simulation and then hacks the Matrix to give himself superpowers and conquer back. Sorry, we don’t see Trump pulling this one off.
A Time Looping Soldier Helps Us Win An Alien War
It’s kind of wild that director Doug Liman decided to set his 2014 sci-fi war movie Edge Of Tomorrow just six years after it opened, but a lot can happen in six years. In 2015, an alien species called Mimics land in Europe via asteroid and swiftly conquer the continent. They’re aided by a secret biological weapon – the ability to rewind time following their death and try again with new tactics. When Major William Cage accidentally absorbs that power through contact with Mimic blood, it sets off Groundhog Day with more gore as he fights over and over to kill the Omega mimic. Who knows, maybe this already has happened and we just rewound it?
Joanna Dark Crushes dataDyne
In Perfect Dark Zero‘s dystopian future, most of the Earth is owned by a handful of giant corporations – check – and they’re competing for control of technology called Neurodrive that will allow them to implant information directly into someone’s brain. We have that already, it’s called Twitter. Bounty hunter Joanna Dark gets sucked into the conflict when her father is killed and at the climax of the game she kills dataDyne CEO Zhang Li, who has given himself superhuman powers with the aid of an ancient alien device. Smart money’s on Elon Musk to do that one.
Humans Take Earth Back From Dragons
2002’s Ring of Fire postulated an alternate future in which workers digging out the London subway accidentally wake up a civilization of slumbering dragons, who proceed to just totally wreck everything and subjugate mankind. The last few enclaves of human survivors plot to overthrow their reptile overlords by killing the only remaining male, making them unable to breed. 2020 sees their plan succeed and soft, fleshy bipeds rule the world once more.
Russia, China And The U.S. Go To War
Let’s hope the events of Battlefield 4, which chronicle skirmishes in the War of 2020, don’t come to pass this year. In EA’s fictional universe, tensions between the States and Russia continued to escalate over the past decade, which is somewhat different to what we’ve seen in reality. China then acts as a spanner in the works, with a planned military coup backed by the Russians looking to consolidate power in Eastern Europe and Asia. Hopefully our trade war won’t escalate to an actual shooting war this year, but you never know. A lot can happen before the next election.
We Fight Dinosaurs On Venus
1965 cheapie Voyage To The Prehistoric Planet sees Mankind venture even farther out in the solar system, all the way to Venus. After the moon was colonized earlier in the decade, we set our eyes on other potentially habitable worlds. Unfortunately, after the first mission lands they discover man-sized thunder lizards, mighty beasts and sexy space girls. Dubbed from a Russian sci-fi movie from a few years earlier, Roger Corman created a truly ridiculous, inane take on what the carbon dioxide-suffused atmosphere of Venus would be like.
A Time Vortex Threatens The World
Obscure (and not very good) 1996 PS1 / Saturn / PC game Time Commando sees the military build a combat simulator that draws from all of human history, only to see a virus corrupt the program and open an actual funnel that could suck in the entire planet. As technician Stanley Opar, you have to enter the vortex, traveling from era to era to battle enemies and try to shut the program down. While we don’t see Fortnite becoming self-aware in 2020, the potential does exist, especially with how many computer cycles we’re pumping into it.
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