Blogs / Science Not Fiction

Really! Most of us are familiar with the idea of cryogenically freezing recently dead people, right? Companies freeze the corpse shortly after death to very low temperatures, in the hopes of preserving the person until such time as scientists can reverse whatever it was that killed them. At the minimum we know that Ted Williams is chilling out somewhere in California at 77 Kelvin, waiting for science to come up with a way to give him a new body (Walt Disney, by the way, was cremated). But thanks to last night’s episode of The Eleventh Hour, I’ve now learned that some people choose to only have their heads frozen and not the rest of them. It sounds like that scene from Young Frankenstein, right?

A little research reveals that it’s basic economics: Head-only freezing can cost as little as $80,000, far better than the $150,000 whole-body freezing costs, based on the pricing at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, a real life cold-storage non-profit. The theory behind cryonics is simple: The brain is the storage unit of everything that defines us: personality, memories, habits, etc. If the brain can be frozen without damage, then the person contained by the brain can live indefinitely until science is ready for them.

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Last night’s episode of Eleventh Hour was pretty straightforward: some smallpox germs escape from the private storage spot of a virologist whose doing some research on the side. Call him a mad scientist, if you like, but he felt really bad about his crime at the end, so he commits suicide by drinking a vial of his own super germs. Ick.

Anyway, one of the keys to the drama of the episode was the question of just how fast smallpox would spread from person to person, and whether Jacob Hood, our intrepid scientist, and Rachel young, his compadre and handler, could stop the disease from spreading. It’s not easy, because smallpox can be transmitted over the air, just by breathing within six feet of a victim. Contagion is even more likely if you touch the victim or for  some reason exchange fluids. Alas, Young tries to capture a possible suspect by chasing him into the street where he promptly gets hit by a car. Young goes to check on him and gets blood all over herself. Straight to the containment area for her!

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I can hardly imagine the challenges of having a low-functioning, developmentally delayed child. Last night’s episode of the Eleventh Hour tackles the difficult choices a parent with such a developmentally delayed child faces, and the hope and despair these parents experience.

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This year’s New York Musical Theater festival included I Come For Love, a musical comedy inspired by classic science-fiction B-movies. Claiming to be the real story of what happened at Roswell in 1947, the tongue-in-cheek plot revolves around a female alien (dubbed “Nine-Oh”) who has landed in her UFO in a bid to find out just what is this Earth thing called love.

An enjoyable romp, I Come For Love juxtaposis the “dissection’s too good for ‘em” sensibility of the classic 1950’s B-movies with the “save the innocent alien” ethos that came along in later decades. Nine-Oh and a hard-bitten reporter called (what else?) Scoop end up falling in love and must overcome diverse obstacles, viz, the U.S. Army and a mob of local townsfolk.

Which leads me to two questions: a) why are shows like I Come For Love so rare, i.e., why is there so little science fiction on the stage? and b) could humans and aliens ever interbreed?

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Amanda Tapping is tall, which was a surprise to me, even though I’ve been watching her performance as Samantha Carter on the Stargate franchise for years. I suspect the kind of framing that has enabled Tom Cruise to gaze down at his various female leads. I got the chance to discover the truth about Tapping’s height last night at a preview screening for her new show, Sanctuary, which airs tonight at 9/8c on the Sci Fi channel.

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Fringe, J.J. Abrams’ (of Lost and Alias fame) latest show, last night featured the unintended fall out from an attempt to grow humans in tanks. Since the goal of the original attempt was to produce fully grown soldiers, bypassing the normal wait time of 9 months plus 18 years, some liberties were taken with growth hormones in order to accelerate aging. Thus fall out, such as a baby that goes from conception to death of old age within a few hours.

Growing human beings outside the confines of a real uterus–ectogenesis–has been a staple of science-fiction since at least Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World: it was a critical element in The Matrix, and even featured in a recent Doctor Who episode. It’s also been a staple of real science for some time: in 1996, Japanese researchers were able to keep goat fetuses alive and developing for 3 weeks in their artificial womb. In 2002, researchers at Cornell were able to keep human embryos alive and developing for several days, after which the experiments were terminated to stay within embryonic research ethics rules.

This real research is driven by the desire to help childless people, or dangerously premature babies, and not, say, a hankering for a super-soldier production line. But if the day comes when we can produce a child with just a smear of genetic material and a machine, then we will have to do some deep thinking. On the one hand, this kind of technology could allow us to colonize distant star systems (instead of trying to keep humans alive for hundreds of years of interstellar travel, send a robot and some DNA), while on the other it could lead to the creation of an entirely new underclass of humanity, a la the “tanks” of Space: Above and Beyond.

It’s been a long time in the making, but Spore has finally been released today for Windows and Macs. The brainchild of Will Wright, (best known as the creator of The Sims) this video game allows the player to go from controlling a protoplasmic blob in a tide pool to commanding a galactic empire. DISCOVER interviewed Will Wright about the Big Thoughts behind Spore in 2006, but what’s it like as a game?

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The curse of a mummy’s tomb lay over Eureka in last night’s episode. (Spoilers below!)

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