Judge Dredd! The Man! The Tech! The Reality!

The future America is an irradiated wasteland. On its east coast, running from Boston to Charlotte, lies Mega-City One — a vast, violent metropolis where criminals run rampant. The only force of order lies with the urban police force called Judges who have the powers of  judge, jury, and executioner for every crime — littering, jaywalking, or murder! Known and feared throughout the city, Dredd is the ultimate Judge, challenged with ridding the city of its latest scourge, a dangerous drug called Slo-Mo, and the crime boss Ma-Ma who is using it to take over the city.

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If this sounds appealing as your vision of the future, visit the White House’s petition site where there is a petition to streamline the current U.S. Judicial system, “ …a petition to dissolve the current legal system and replace it with a single Hall of Justice, run by Judges; motorcycle-riding law officers who act as police, judge, jury, and executioner.” When the petition passes the 25,000 mark, it will be granted an official response. So far, the number hovers around 3,000. We promise to let you know what the White House’s response will be, provided another 22,000 people sign up by December 13, 2012.

To prepare for the Dredd 3D movie Blu-ray release on January 13, 2013, as well as IDW’s American-produced ongoing comic, let’s look at some of the technology of Judge Dredd’s world and how close some of it is to present day reality.

One of the busiest, most fascinating, and most futuristic characters in Dredd’s world is Mega-City One itself.

New York, some time in the 22nd Century. Probably not Donut-o’clock.
Image: Carlos Ezquerra, 2000AD, 1977

The reality of the sprawling, coastline spanning Mega-City One with mile-high starscrapers is a long while off. In 1976, when Judge Dredd first debuted in 2000AD, the massive city was constructed from the writings of JG Ballard’s High Rise and HG Wells’s When The Sleeper Awakes, and films like Logan’s Run and Death Race 2000.

Other influences were the stylings of UK architects Archigram, but mostly from American and European concepts of the Mega City. These were developed partly out of a reaction to the mid-1950s post-war rapid urban sprawl, in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles particularly, partly out of the ideas of  Frank Lloyd Wright’s ideas of Usonian Living, and partly out of a rejection of the Brutalist architectural ideals in vogue during the 1950s that left so many cities looking like giant cinder-blocks had been dumped haphazardly. The original, early 70s Mega City was a vertical city, self-contained, with a minimal footprint on the planet.

One of Paulo Soleri’s Hyperbuildings.
Image Source: Paulo Soleri & Cosanti Foundation

Others have experimented with eco-friendly mega-living in Arizona, near Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter retreat Taliesin West, building Paulo Soleri’s Arcosanti, Tsukuba Science City in Japan, and Masdar City in the UAE. One Russian architectural firm, Ab Elise, has suggested the opposite of vertical living. The firm has suggested building down, into the ground, turning a disused Siberian open-cast diamond mine into a city of the future dubbed Eco-city 2020.

The city will be covered with a protective glass dome to guard its residents from Siberia’s inclement weather, while the solar cells on its walls will harvest the sun’s energy to provide power for the whole city. Eco-city 2020 will be divided in three levels containing vertical farms, residential areas and recreational spaces with a large core featured at the centre.

Ab Elise’s vision for a crowded Siberia.
Image Source: Ab Elise

Over the last 36 years, the idea of the crowded, cramped Mega City has become firmly enmeshed in society’s consciousness, and a real reality. Conurbations like Mumbai, Tokyo, New York, and Mexico City have crowding with more than 20 million inhabitants into their areas, with Shanghai, Karachi, Lagos, and Dhaka set to follow suit by 2025.

Even BMW’s marketing team have touched on it, touting the i3 Electric Concept Coupe as The Megacity Vehicle despite the i-Series Concept cars owing their looks more to Tron than Dredd.

BMW i-3 Coupe Concept.

With Mega City One as the backdrop, the voice of authority for Judge Dredd is his gun, The Lawgiver.

Because Judge Dredd was inspired by — among others — Dirty Harry, and Harry Callahan being best known for toting a .44 Magnum,  “…the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off…,” it’s only fair that the Lawgiver comes next on the list.

The Lawgiver is a serious piece of murder-ware capable of firing six or seven different kinds of bullet, automatic targeting and focus, and can only be fired by an authorized user based on that person’s handprint or DNA. The idea stems directly from a line in the 1973 movie, Westworld.

The guns issued to the guests also have temperature sensors that prevent them from shooting each other or anything else living but allow them to ‘kill’ the room-temperature androids.

While this sounds like a lot for one tool to be capable of, the disparate parts are coming together.

One Belgian arms manufacturer has recently devised a Black Box for guns, keeping track of rounds fired and capable of being part of a larger automatic network, allowing soldiers to know when to predict a need to reload, when to re-equip, or perform maintenance. There’s even the possibility of disabling a gun remotely.

With the rise of affordable biometric readers, fingerprints and handprints are fast becoming readily available and on a small enough scale for a handgun. The readers may lie in the world of concepts for now, but they’re not too far off. Even the latest Bond movie, Skyfall, as well as in License To Kill featured gadget. (Note: Bond movies aren’t necessarily indicative of technology being presently available. We’re awaiting our invisible Aston Martin for review. Aston Martin has so far refused to answer our phone calls.) In the mid-70s, came the arrival of the Magna-Trigger system, which only allows for the firing of the gun when a special magnetic ring is worn. Since 1999, Mossberg Shotguns have a Smart Shotgun that only fires in the proximity of a special RFID chip.