The Tomorrow War (2021) · Film

Species-specific biological toxin is becoming real

Emerging
0
years from fiction to now
The Tomorrow War poster

About the source work

The Tomorrow War (2021)

In December 2022, biology teacher and former Green Beret Dan Forester fails to land a job at the United States Army Research Laboratory. While he watches the televised 2022 FIFA World Cup final, soldiers from the year 2051 arrive on the playing field through a time portal to warn that future humanity is near extinction due to alien invaders: the White Spikes. In response, the world's military forces are sent to the future, but less than 20% survive, prompting a global draft. Dan, conscripted for a seven-day tour, is fitted with an electronic vambrace that tracks him and will automatically return him to his own time following his seven days. Dan's wife, Emmy, encourages Dan to seek out his estranged engineer father, James Forester, to remove the vambrace so the family can go on the run. Dan meets with James; angry over his father having abandoned the family, he instead leaves with the vambrace intact. During orientation, one recruit, Charlie, notices the draftees are mostly older adults: Dan deduces that they were all people known to have died before 2051. Dan and the other draftees are deployed to Miami Beach, Florida in the future but are dropped at the wrong coordinates, high above the city, and most fall to their deaths. Romeo Command orders the remaining recruits to rescue staff at a nearby laboratory. The lab staff are dead, but the team recovers their research data before the area is bombed. Dan and the survivors make it to a military camp in Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, where Dan discovers that Romeo Command is headed by his now-adult daughter, Colonel Muri Forester. After a strained reunion, the two embark on a successful mission to capture a female White Spike, which are rarer than the males. Muri later reveals that Dan became disillusioned after losing the research job, which caused her parents' divorce and estrangement from his daughter, just as James did when Dan was a child. Dan also learns he died in a car crash when Muri was 16. Dan and Muri, along with the captured female, are transported to the Jumplink site on a fortified ocean oil platform. They work on a toxin that targets the female, but the arrival of an enormous White Spike swarm quickly overwhelms the base. Muri is severely injured and tells Dan to take the toxin to the past and mass produce it, believing that humanity will not survive in this timeline. Before Muri dies, the two reconcile, and Dan is successfully returned to the past with the toxin. He attempts to deliver it to the military so it can be returned to the future, but the Jumplink has been destroyed by the aliens. After Dan tells Emmy about the future, they suspect that the White Spikes may have arrived much earlier than 2048. This is supported by finding volcanic ash traces from the Changbai Mountains and the 946 AD Millennium Eruption using a claw that Dan brought back. They conclude that the aliens were already on Earth, trapped under the polar ice cap. When global warming melted the ice in the future, it released them. The military are unable to support Dan without proof, so he asks James to use his para-military connections to transport an eight-man team to Severnaya Zemlya, in northern Russia, to search for evidence. There, they find an alien spaceship that crashed into an ice sheet centuries ago. Once inside, they realize that the White Spikes are actually bio-weapons created by another alien species. The alien crew was killed in the crash, but the White Spikes have survived in suspended animation. The team inject the toxin into the dormant creatures, instantly killing them, but the remaining ones awaken. Team members Dorian and Hart sacrifice themselves by manually detonating the alien ship and eliminating the remaining males. A female escapes, but Dan and James track it down and kill it, preventing the future war from occurring. Returning home, Dan introduces a young Muri to James.

Tracked against

From Fiction to Reality

Where this concept is right now on the path from imagined to mass market.

Not Yet Emerged
No real-world commercial signals detected yet - still purely fictional.
Emerging
Early signals exist (patents, research, developer interest) but no real product yet.
Early Market
Real products exist and are on the market, but adoption is still niche.
Mainstream
Now a normal part of everyday technology, with broad institutional adoption.
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What the Data Shows Right Now

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Frequently Asked Questions

Specific to Species-specific biological toxin.

"Species-specific biological toxin" is currently at the Emerging stage. It was first imagined in The Tomorrow War (2021), 5 years ago.

This concept is linked to 2 tracked trend(s). Patent filings score 100/100 on our velocity scale (100 means filings roughly doubled year-over-year), backed by 7 tracked academic paper(s) and reaching 2 industry sector(s) so far.

Yes - we've verified 1 real-world product or company example(s) building this concept today (see below).

20 idea(s) in the IdeaCrawl catalog align with this concept's underlying trend(s).