When I was but a wee nerd, when Star Wars was driving people to buy VCRs the way The Matrix would make them buy DVD players years later, a friend introduced me to the wonders of anime by playing a bootleg VHS tape in which two robots, piloted by people, battled for supremacy in outer space. (Describing an anime film like that is like trying to identify a specific Tom Cruise film by explaining that he plays the cocky young guy, but I digress).
What made this movie stand out for me was how the robot was controlled. The pilot stood in a cokpit in the robots torso. He was attached to the robot by a series of straps that connected directly to the robot through the walls and ceiling. When he moved, the robot moved. Since he was some kind of martial arts super star, his robot was about as fine a defender of the universe as one could hope for, as long as the hero could overcome his psychological issues and fully self-actualize (If you recall the name of this anime, please oh please, comment and let me know what it is).
So, obviously, we still haven’t gotten around to inventing battle bots that can fight our wars for us, but if we did, we’d have a much better system for controlling the robot than silly straps. (more…)
The last episode of Sanctuary revolved around the test of aerosolized biological weapon targeted at abnormals, the extraordinary creatures that are the show’s raison d’etre. Science Not Fiction commented recently on some of difficulties involved in creating effective bioweapons, and the choice of an aerosol-based delivery mechanism by Sanctuary’s writers is spot on. The particular biological agent in question is a designer prion, and a nasty little buggers they are indeed.
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These things always start small: First someone programs a computer to read minds, and next thing you know it’ll be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and we’ll all be erasing unpleasant memories.
And how long a step can it be from there to the trippy I’m-in-your-mind sequences from The Cell, or even, dare I say it, The Matrix itself? And the mind-reading computer that starts it all? We’re getting there.
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Normally on Sanctuary, the action focuses on so-called abnormals, sentient creatures who either belong an entirely different species to homo sapiens, or who are human beings that are born with genetic mutations. Last Friday night’s episode was a little different: a shadowy group was kidnapping down and outs, injecting them with a drug that caused normal humans to transform into abnormals. In other words, cause their adult bodies to undergo the same kind of developmental changes that would happen to a natural abnormal in the womb (or, in this show’s case, possibly in the egg or chrysalis). Although not focused on developing an army of pliable thugs, the basic idea—changing the genetic cards that an organism was dealt at conception–is the goal of real researchers working on gene therapy, which is popping up all over the place in science fiction these days: for more on the actual science check out Science Not Fiction’s earlier post when Stargate Atlantis took a different tack on the same topic.
The military’s most farseeing agency, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, required the services of Eleventh Hour’s Jacob Hood in last night’s episode to figure who violently killed some test-chimps and a veterinarian in the agency’s super soldier program. It seems a mad scientist had found some way to increase the size of a human amygdala, which led the soldier to have extreme, and unthinking, fight-or-flight reactions. Whenever someone approached this super soldier in a threatening way, he reacted with extreme prejudice. Naturally, the mad scientist wasn’t supposed to be testing on people, which is why by the end of the show he was off to prison.
But DARPA is pretty serious about improving the, ahem, human component of soldiering. After decades of focusing on machines (like unmanned flying drones, GPS, and Internet), DARPA decided toward the end of the 1990s to focus on improving the actual biology of the soldiers. Contrary to the show, the goal is not extremely obedient killers. The modern military is focused on small teams functioning independently, far from base and reinforcements of any kind. To succeed in this kind of environment, they want to actually increase the ability of soldiers to think creatively, to stay awake longer, and to be physically active longer without becoming tired.
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On Friday night’s episode of Stargate Atlantis, the Atlantis expedition discover a small pod. The pod contains biological material that can be used to replicate a sentient life-form from scratch, should the pod find a planet with the right chemical makeup to provide the raw ingredients. It also contains a cultural and technical database to educate the “Children of the Pod,” and an advanced Artificial Intelligence responsible for guiding the pod to a suitable destination and “birthing” the first generation life-forms. In the real world, with its apparently iron-clad restriction on faster than light travel, this kind of approach is actually one of the leading contenders for how human beings might colonize the galaxy.
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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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Network shows aren’t exactly known for their subtlety, but the Eleventh Hour last night managed to navigate the complicated issues surrounding genetically modified organisms (GMO’s), taking potshots at biotech firms, big agribusiness, and folks who fetishize food labeled “natural” in equal measure.
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Last night CBS premiered it’s new science-fiction detective show, Eleventh Hour, which revolves around a scientist investigating misuses of science, accompanied by his FBI minder. The first episode focused on human cloning and the show deserves big kudos for wringing out a fresh take from what has become a very hackneyed topic in science fiction. The writer and producers managed this feat by actually sticking close to today’s science: most stories that incorporate reproductive cloning introduce a successfully created clone (whether a child or an adult) and go from there. The messy details of actually creating a clone are glossed over, or not mentioned at all. Not so on Eleventh Hour.
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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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To paraphrase the Hold Steady, we like to stay positive. At Science Not Fiction, staying positive means that we don’t debunk (or nerdgas.) If the sonic screwdriver solves the problem, then by all means whip it out.
That being said, this show Fringe is seriously stretching us to the limit.
Fringe Gets Fast Aging and Frozen Optics Wrong [Popular Mechanics]
Fringe “violates basic tenets of biology, chemistry and physics without any explanation.” [Polite Dissent]
Now that we’ve gotten that off our chest, here are few other links to help lighten the mood:
You say Obama? I say Adama for President. [LA Times]
H.P Lovecraft as the Whitman’s Sampler copy writer [McSweeney's]
Future Farms to Have Giant Livestock [Modern Mechanix]
The theme of HBO’s new series, TrueBlood, is based on a Japanese scientist’s invention of synthetic blood. The breakthrough allows vampires to “come out of the coffin” and progress from freakish villains to fellow citizens. (Just stop into a local TrueBlood bank for a snack, and humans are off the menu.)
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