A Better Shield

Building off of the horrors of Character Shield, one recurrently common and intriguing theme in scifi are energy shields. Since the 1920's science fiction authors have been using all sorts of different shields to protect alien spacecraft, starships, trap prisoners, or just deflect stuff. Theres a lot of different names but they're all very similar in concept; glowey shield surrounds something and stuff cant go through it.


Much less spectacular than hollywoods creativity gives testimony to, natural energy shields exist in the world today. In fact our planet has one of the strongest in our solar system. A long time ago (long before there was life) the earth was just a ball of rock until a huge iron asteroid hit it. The force of the impact made a lot of heat and energy, forming our moon from pieces of the earth that were dislodged. This resulted in our planet getting an iron center and a magnetic field that goes pole to pole. In fact the poles are the + and - sides of the Earth "magnet". You can see this force field by picking up a compass. The tiny magnetized needle (made of iron) is small enough (and balanced enough) to get pulled and pushed on by the Earths energy shield and gets pulled in a direction to point north.


The biggest difficulty with making a large energy shield like we see in movies and games is mainly energy capacity. Our modern technology doesn't have the strength to make to make a shield that big or the power to hold it for any time at all. Maybe in future years someone will find a way to refine the natural shielding process and make it more realistic, but until then were stuck with hiding behind armor plating or concrete during alien invasions.