Progress is not guaranteed. Be it moral, technological, scientific, or social, there is no reason to assume human civilization marches forever forward in step with time. Understood this way, we can realize that progress is a choice and something we as a species will to happen through the concatenation of our decisions.

Or we can fail to choose, fail to act, and yet, that failure is itself a choice and an action from which consequences follow. There is a reason From Chance to Choice is one of the most essential texts on the bioethics of enhancement – it implies that our continued evolution will hinge upon our decision as to whether or not we want the ability to choose our evolutionary path. We must choose to have a choice.

To be specific, our current generation faces the very real possibility of being asked to decide if human enhancement via technological augmentation and genetic engineering is something we want to pursue. A question already moving beyond the abstract realm of bioethics and making its way into popular culture. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (hereafter DX:HR), prequel to the cyberpunk video game masterpiece Deus Ex, asks the player to take part in answering that question.

DX:HR is that rare video game that offers genuine choice. Some great games, like Mass Effect and Bioshock, allow (or famously disallow) certain choices that, in turn, reflect on the player’s moral compass. DX:HR gives the player the chance to fully explore his or her philosophy and guiding ethic regarding human enhancement and cybernetic augmentation. Choices in DX:HR don’t just ask, are you good or evil, but what do you believe?

Often, what makes a great piece of art is not the message it delivers, but the questions it demands we ask of ourselves. DX:HR, is not a great piece of art, but it aspires to be one. And in some places, it comes damn close by asking us: As humanity moves forward, what do we leave behind?

What follows is not a review but an exegesis of DX:HR and the trials of the main character, Adam Jensen. From behind his switch-blade sunglasses, we see that the future of the human race and of enhancement is not a yes or no question. Instead, we’re forced to face the bleak possibility that there is no right answer and no one to blame.

*Spoilers* from here on out.

The plot of DX:HR can be summarized thusly: Adam Jensen, chief of security for Sarif Industries, a major augmentations manufacturer, is all-but-killed in an attack on one of Sarif’s warehouse. In the attack, Sarif’s chief scientist, Megan Reed, is kidnapped, along with other researchers. Jensen is saved at the cost of his becoming heavily augmented; he is a cybernetic Lazarus. He pursues Dr. Reed’s kidnappers at the behest of the head of Sarif Industries, David Sarif. Jensen quickly uncovers a conspiracy theory with ties to an Illuminati shadow government attempting to use Dr. Reed and her breakthroughs in human augmentation for subliminal social control. As he progresses, Jensen encounters rogue military units, enhancement critics and protestors, and a host of regular people just trying to survive in an augmented world.

Astoundingly, the plot blames no one for this technology’s misuse beyond the Illuminati themselves. The technology gets to remain neutral. Even corporations are given even-handed treatment. More important, when you reach the end of the game, there is no single “end.” There is a selection among endings among which you must choose. In weighing this decision, the-player-as-Jensen is confronted with five avatars who represent the ethics of transhumanism. DX:HR leans heavily on Greek myth, as did the original, so I leverage that here to set these characters in context.

1. Hugh Darrow, inventor of augmentation. Darrow’s right leg is damaged and he must walk with a cane, as his own innovation is rejected by his body, so he cannot be augmented. Darrow views himself like Daedalus watching his creation, augmented humanity, fall like Icarus downward in a flaming spiral after flying to close to the sun. He is the paradox of the innovative status quo. Only the present can create the future, but to let the future flourish, the present must allow itself to become the past.
2. David Sarif, mass producer of augmentations and champion of transhumanism. Sarif recognizes that progress has costs, often calculated in human lives, but argues the utilitarian benefits for future generations far outweigh the harm current generations or certain individuals will suffer. For Sarif, no one person, no set of myopic morals, can stand in the way of where humanity must go. Sarif is Prometheus, a Titan and a thief, stealing augmented fire for humanity.
3. William Taggart, leader of the anti-augmentation movement, Humanity Front. That Taggart shares his last name with an Objectivist hero is curious enough, but his arguments against augmentation come out of a desire for the very thing one might presume transhumanism is trying to achieve: a human future. Taggart is a champion of natural law, a representative of the gods. Humans are limited not out of oppression but protection – to exceed is not evolution, but extinction.
4. Eliza, a self-aware AI construct half-ECHELON, half-spin doctor, that crafts media output into a single subtle message. She tells the public what its opinion is. She is Mercury, Athena, and the Oracle in one – offering information, wisdom, and prophecy. And though her countenance is Apollonian, her option for the world is Dionysian: release the brakes and drop the reigns.
5. Adam Jensen himself. Jensen dreams of himself as Icarus. As the player, one chooses to save those who are merely in the wrong place at the wrong time, or to exercise your newfound power with extreme prejudice. At no point does Jensen betray an opinion about his augmentations that is not in sync with a decision made by the player, including basic dialog response selections.  Jensen forces the player, forces you, to confront your own transhumanist leanings – your own opinions expressed through the choices you make as Jensen will unsettle you.

From these five we develop a rounded picture of enhancement. For Darrow, it is a breakthrough that will leave many deserving people behind. For Sarif, it is a liberating force, a technology that unbridles humanity. For Taggart, it is a gift of dragon’s teeth that glosses over real problems in the name of technophilia. For Jensen, it is for me, but maybe not for thee. For Eliza, it is the technology that brings not the final order of civilization, but must be unleashed into the dark materials of chaos to rebuild the world – perhaps only by destroying the forces controlling it can augmentation and enhancement really liberate humanity.

At the end of the game, Eliza tells Jensen, “This isn’t the end of the world, but you can see it from here.” The player-as-Jensen finds oneself at the proverbial and literal end of the world in a bunker in Antarctica with a choice posed by Eliza: which human future is best? Eliza is in the place to offer this choice because of her ability to control opinion and information. What you decide through Jensen will happen at the touch of a button. Suddenly human progress is not an uncontrollable force hurtling along under the power of its own momentum. Standing at a nexus of history, one can choose to apply pressure to nudge civilization in one of four directions. No direction is backwards, but each its own version of forward. All horrifying.

There are four options:

1. Expose the conspiracy, but cripple progress towards human enhancement;
2. Promote enhancement without reservation, removing the checks of watchdog groups;
3. Hide the conspiracy, but support watchdog groups and slow enhancement progress to a crawl;
4. Annihilate the tools of control and take yourself out of the equation. Choose not to choose.

None of these is the “right answer.” You have already beaten the game when this choice arises. And therein lies the glory of DX:HR. There is no happy ending. The game serves as a warning and a rejoinder: the future is coming, but it is built not by servos and fiber optics, but by the decisions of people. As such, the future will arrive broken and corrupt, beleaguered with the venom and stench of those who seek power at the cost of their fellow humans. Good will persist, yet it will be required, as always, to strive and struggle to be seen and heard. But still humanity moves, ever forward.

Thus, DX:HR can be distilled to this single question: Having ruled out utopia, what is the least worst option for our human future?

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Among gamers, Deus Ex is something of a legendary fusion of disparate gaming styles. Among science fiction buffs, Deus Ex is lauded for managing to take two awesome genres, William Gibson-esque cyberpunk and Robert Anton Wilson-level conspiracy theories, and jam them together into an immanentizing of the eschaton unlike anything you’ve seen since Doktor Sleepless. And among transhumanists, Deus Ex brought up every issue of humanity’s fusion with technology one could imagine. It is a rich video game.

So when Square Enix decided to pick up the reins from Eidos and create a new installment in the series, Deus Ex: Human Revolution (DX:HR), I was quite excited. The first indication DX:HR was not going to be a crummy exploitation of the original’s success (see: Deus Ex 2: Invisible War), was the teaser trailer, shown above. Normally, a teaser trailer is just music and a slow build to a logo or single image that lets you know the game is coming out. Instead, the development team decided to demonstrate that it was taking the philosophy of the game seriously.

What philosophy? you might ask. Why transhumanism, of course. Nick Bostrom, chair of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, centers the birth of transhumanism in the Renaissance and the Age of the Enlightenment in his article “A History of Transhumanist Thought” [pdf]. The visuals of the teaser harken to Renaissance imagery (such as the Da Vinci style drawings) and the teaser ends with a Nietzschean quote “Who we are is but a stepping stone to what we can become.” Later trailers would reference Icarus and Daedalus (who also happened to be the names of AI constructs in the original game), addressing the all-too-common fear that by pursuing technology, we are pursuing our own destruction. This narrative thread has become the central point of conflict in DX:HR. Even its viral ad campaign has been told through two lenses: that of Sarif Industries, maker of prosthetic bodies that change lives, and that of Purity First, a protest group that opposes human augmentation. The question is: upon which part of our shared humanity do we step as we climb to greater heights?

When was the last time a video game asked you an existential question about the nature of our species? The tension between the proponents and opponents of transhumanism in DX:HR is heightened by the ambiguous opinion towards enhancement of the main character, Adam Jensen. Jensen’s own enhancements are a result of the need to save his life after a traumatic attack. Unlike Tony Stark, Jensen does not craft his own mechanized additions, but must instead come to terms with the cybernetic hand he has been dealt. DX:HR is not interested in cybernetics as merely a fun backdrop for a video game, but instead treats enhancement as the serious ethical issue that it is. The world of the game is set in a “Neo-Renaissance” where even the characters’ clothing reminds us that transhumanism is born out of the Age of Enlightenment. As a prequel to the original Deus Ex, DX:HR takes us into a world where augmentation and cyberization are still new to humanity and shows us how painful the transition into a transhuman future might be.

To dive deeper into these issues, I had a chat with Mary DeMarle, the lead writer for Deus Ex: Human Revolution, about how the ethics of enhancement and augmentation were considered when crafting the game’s story and characters.

Q: How did you approach the topic of augmentation? What were your thoughts about cyborgs and human engineering before you began your research?

A: As soon as I knew we wanted to center the game around the concept of human augmentation and where advancements in neuroprosthetics might take Mankind, I knew I needed to do a lot of research. I started with a book entitled, “Radical Evolution” by Joel Garreaux. It was a great introduction not only to the subject of human engineering, but also to the various theories and arguments for and against it. After that, I split my research efforts in two, spending some of my time reading up on the technological advancements, and some of my time reading up on the philosophical debate. I have to admit that, before starting all this research, I had tended to think of cyborgs and human engineering as the stuff of Science Fiction — something I love to read and immerse myself in conceptually, but not something I might actually see in this reality.

Q: How have those views changed as you’ve worked on this project?

A: I think the biggest change was the realization that cyborgs and human engineering are not only possible, but probable in our lifetime. When you talk to people who are working in the field — people like Will Rosellini, our technical consultant — and you learn about current projects and how close we are to achieving some of the advancements we depict in the game, you can’t help but be amazed. I’ve also had the opportunity to talk with people who have not just overcome disabilities through advancing technologies, but who have gone on to achieve things most “able-bodied” people never will. In the process, I’ve seen the potential and the incredible allure of human augmentation. At the same time, a lot of my research into the dangers of experimentation and unregulated industries has made me understand the other side of the debate. It truly is a rich, complex issue that becomes all the more fascinating the more you dive into it.

Q: Can you please give a brief summary of how augmentations are invented and popularized in the world of the game? What are the motivating factors for those who oppose augmentation?

A: As part of the game’s backstory, we envisioned a series of technological, historical, economic, and cultural events in the decades leading up to 2027 (the year in which the game takes place) which together lead to the advancement and proliferation of mechanical augmentations. In the technological arena, leading researchers discover how to significantly improve the way implanted (artificial) electrodes and the human nervous system interact, leading to a revolution in neuroprosthetics. At the same time, an increase in the number of people needing prosthetic limbs — due to military conflicts and a few devastating natural disasters in parts of the world — creates a unique demand for the tech. In the economic realm, a devastating terrorist attack destabilizes the oil industry, adding to the world’s existing economic woes, and catapulting the world economy into a severe crisis. Governments respond by opening up oil shale reserves for development; by and large the people getting jobs in this and other high risk, physically demanding industries turn out to be those who are mechanically enhanced. Unable to compete for these lucrative jobs, several “able-bodied” people sue for the right to amputate their own healthy limbs. Meanwhile, on the cultural front, several highly popular artists, entertainers, and athletes begin sporting new augments and winning unprecedented accolades. People begin viewing mechanical augmentations as something everyone could (and maybe even should) have, and their popularity takes off.

Not everyone is pleased, however; people opposed to the technology end up, by and large, falling into three camps. Those who feel threatened by it (not everyone can afford mechanical augmentations and if someone doesn’t get one, might he end up losing his job to someone who does?); those who object to it on religious grounds (God made human beings in his image and trying to change or “improve” them is morally wrong); and those who object to it for intellectual reasons (using biotechnology to alter the human body risks fundamentally changing who we are as a species. Therefore, scientists and researchers are tampering with human nature without even realizing the danger they are putting Mankind in and should be closely regulated.)

Q: How would the average person in the street feel about augmentation in the world of the game?

A: It depends on who the person is and where he lives. Some will see it as a wonderful thing; a chance to improve life for one’s self and others by taking control of your own evolution and becoming all that you can be. Others will see it as dangerous and say we shouldn’t be playing God or tampering with Human Nature. Still others will despise it (and those who use it) due to fear, jealousy, and basic ignorance. Others won’t have made up their minds yet, since they can see both the benefit of the technology and the ways in which the debate itself is tearing at the fabric of society.

Q: I’ve been following the viral marketing campaign for DX:HR. First Sarif Industries was introduced (via their website/advertisements) and then their ads were countered by Purity First activists who exposed the dark side of augmentations and defaced the Sarif website. What is at stake in the conflict between those companies designing and building augmentations and those who oppose human augmentation?

A: On one hand you could say that the basis of the conflict is philosophical, so what’s at stake are people’s very strongly held beliefs. One side believes that achieving self-controlled human evolution is Mankind’s destiny and that fear of the unknown should not prevent us from realizing it. The other side believes that Man does not have the wisdom of God and must let nature run its course. But of course, there are a variety of other factors at stake as well. Mechanical augmentations are part of a highly lucrative industry, and some people want to ensure that this remains true without rules or regulations so they can “cash in.” Others fear the unregulated, uncontrolled spread of the technology within the “ignorant masses” and will do anything they can to control who gets to use it and who doesn’t.

Q: Adam Jensen, before his accident, is torn between augmentation and remaining “all natural.” How does that perspective shift over the course of the game?

A: Adam hasn’t decided how he feels about the whole augmentation debate at the start of the game, precisely because we wanted to use his initial indifference and ignorance as a way of exposing the debate to players. He gets tossed into the middle of things when his company is attacked and he’s forced to become augmented. He never has a choice in the matter, and as he struggles to understand who attacked him and why, he gets exposed to the full brunt of prejudice on both sides. Since you are playing Adam, you get to experience this firsthand as well. Thus, how Adam’s perspective changes over the course of the game really depends on how your perspective shifts. You’re the one playing him. You are the one making choices and witnessing the consequences.

Q: What are your personal opinions around augmentation? Do you think prosthetics should only be available to those who’ve lost limbs? If the technology progresses enough, would it make sense to deliberately replace a fully functional natural limb with a cybernetic one?

A: I think augmentation can be both a positive and a negative thing. It’s a tool — and like all tools, it really depends on who’s welding it and why. Individuals should be able to decide what is good for them as individuals (so long as their choice doesn’t harm others) and if the technology progresses enough, it may very well make sense for people to choose to replace a fully functional natural limb with a cybernetic one. I, however, would probably choose not to.

Q: Using your crystal ball to look into the future, how realistic do you think a “Purity First” style conflict is? Do you foresee conflicts between those who choose to alter their bodies and those who oppose cyberization?

A: It’s really hard for me to say. People have an awful tendency to want to force their views on others, and intolerance of what is different can definitely devolve into violence. I think the reasons we’ve ascribed to both sides of the debate in the game — fear, greed, jealousy, religious and/or personal beliefs and ethics — are valid enough to spark conflicts, so I think it definitely could happen if the issue ever grew contentious enough. But I would hope that saner minds would prevail.

The future is impossible to predict. But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress?

As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.

But how will we able to tell when the pieces finally do fall into place? I’ve been trying to answer that question ever since Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution was asked a while back by his readers: What are the exact conditions for counting “transhumanism” as having been attained? In an attempt to answer, I responded with what I saw as the three key indicators:

1. Medical modifications that permanently alter or replace a function of the human body become prolific.
2. Our social understanding of aging loses the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society begins to treat aging as a disease.
3. Rights discourse would shift from who we include among humans (i.e. should homosexual have marriage rights?) to a system flexible enough to easily bring in sentient non-humans.

As I groped through the intellectual dark for these three points, it became clear that the precise technology and how it worked was unimportant. Instead, we need to figure out how technology may change our lives and our ways of living. Unlike the infamous jetpack, which defined the failed futurama of the 20th century, the 21st needs broader progress markers. Here are seven things to look for in the coming centuries that will let us know if transhumanism is here.

When we think of the future, we think of technology. But too often, we think of really pointless technology – flying cars or self-tying sneakers or ray guns. Those things won’t change the way life happens. Not the way the washing machine or the cell phone changed the way life happens. Those are real inventions. It is in that spirit that I considered indicators of transhumanism. What matters is how a technology changes our definition of a “normal” human. Think of it this way: any one of these indicators has been fulfilled when at least a few of the people you interact with on any given day utilize the technology. With that mindset, I propose the following seven changes as indicators that transhumanism has been attained.

1. Prosthetics are Preferred: The arrival of prosthetics and implants for organs and limbs that are as good as or better than the original. A fairly accurate test for the quality of prosthetics would be voluntary amputations. Those who use prosthetics would compete with or surpass non-amputees in physical performances and athletic competitions. Included in this indicator are cochlear, optic implants, bionic limbs and artificial organs that are within species typical functioning and readily available. A key social indicator will be that terminology around being “disabled”and “handicapped” would become anachronous. If you ever find yourself seriously considering having your birth-given hand lopped off and replaced with a cybernetic one, you can tick off this box on your transhuman checklist.

2. Better Brains: There are three ways we could improve our cognition. In order of likelihood of being used in the near future they are: cognitive enhancing drugs, genetic engineering, or neuro-implants/ prosthetic cyberbrains. When the average person wakes up, brews a pot of coffee and pops an over-the-counter stimulant as or more powerful than modafinil, go ahead and count this condition achieved. Genetic engineering and cyberbrains will be improvements in degree and function, but not in purpose. Any one of these becoming commonplace would indicate that we no longer cling to the bias that going beyond the intelligence dished out by the genetic and environmental lottery is “cheating.”

3. Artificial Assistance: Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Augmented Reality (AR) integrated into personal, everyday behaviors. In the same way Google search and Wikipedia changed the way we research and remember, AI and AR could alter the way we think and interact. Daedalus in Deus Ex and Jarvis in Iron Man are great examples of Turing-quality (indistinguishable from human intelligence) AI that interact with the main character as both side kicks and secondary minds. Think of it this way: you walk into a cocktail party. Your cyberbrain’s AI assist analyzes every face in the room and determines those most socially relevant to you. Using AR projected onto your optic implants, the AI highlights each person in your line of sight and, as you approach, provides a dossier of their main interests and personality type. Now apply this level of information access to anything else. Whether it’s grilling a steak or performing a heart transplant, AI assist with AR overlay will radically improve human functioning. When it is expected that most people will have an AI advisor at their side analyzing the situation and providing instructions through their implants, go ahead and count humanity another step closer to being transhuman.

4. Amazing Average Age: The ultimate objective of health care is that people live the longest, healthiest lives possible. Whether that happens due to nanotechnology or genetic engineering or synthetic organs is irrelevant. What matters is that eventually people will age more slowly, be healthier for a larger portion of their lives, and will be living beyond the age of 120. Our social understanding of aging will lose the “virtue of necessity” aspect and society will treat aging as a disease to be mitigated and managed. When the average expected life span exceeds 120, the conditions for transhuman longevity will have arrived.

5. Responsible Reproduction: Having children will be framed almost exclusively in the light of responsibility. Human reproduction is, at the moment, not generally worthy of the term “procreation.” Procreation implies planned creation and conscientious rearing of a new human life. As it stands, anyone with the necessary biological equipment can accidentally spawn a whelp and, save for extreme physical neglect, is free to all but abandon it to develop in an arbitrary and developmentally damaging fashion. Children – human beings as a whole – deserve better. Responsible reproduction will involve, first and foremost, better birth control for men and women. Abortions will be reserved for the rare accidental pregnancy and/or those that threaten the life of the mother. Those who do choose to reproduce will do so via assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) ensuring pregnancy is quite deliberate. Furthermore, genetic modification, health screening, and, eventually synthetic wombs will enable the child with the best possibility of a good life to be born. Parental licensing may be part of the process; a liberalization of adoption and surrogate pregnancy laws certainly will be. When global births stabilize at replacement rates, ARTs are the preferred method of conception, and responsible child rearing is more highly valued than biological parenthood, we will be procreating as transhumans.

6. My Body, My Choice: Legalization and regulation will be based on somatic rights. Substances that are ingested – cogno enhancers, recreational drugs, steroids, nanotech – become both one’s right and responsibility. Actions such as abortion, assisted suicide, voluntary amputation, gender reassignment, surrogate pregnancy, body modification, legal unions among adults of any number, and consenting sexual practices would be protected under law. One’s genetic make-up, neurological composition, prosthetic augmentation, and other cybernetic modifications will be limited only by technology and one’s own discretion. Transhumanism cannot happen without a legal structure that allows individuals to control their own bodies. When bodily freedom is as protected and sanctified as free speech, transhumanism will be free to develop.

7. Persons, not People: Rights discourse will shift to personhood instead of common humanity. I have argued we’re already beginning to see a social shift towards this mentality. Using a scaled system based on traits like sentience, empathy, self-awareness, tool use, problem solving, social behaviors, language use, and abstract reasoning, animals (including humans) will be granted rights based on varying degrees of personhood. Personhood based rights will protect against Gattaca scenarios while ensuring the rights of new forms of intelligence, be they alien, artificial, or animal, are protected. When African grey parrots, gorillas, and dolphins have the same rights as a human toddler, a transhuman friendly rights system will be in place.

Individually, each of these conditions are necessary but not sufficient for transhumanism to have been attained. Only as a whole are they sufficient for transhumanism to have been achieved. I make no claims as to how or when any or all of these conditions will be attained. If forced to guess, I would say all seven conditions will be attained over the course of the next two centuries, with conditions (3) and (4) being the furthest from attainment.

Transhumanism is a long way from being attained. However, with these seven conditions in mind, we can at least determine if we are moving towards or away from a transhuman future.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog, Pop Bioethics, and on facebook and twitter.

Image of psychedelic human eye by Kate Whitley via dullhunk on Flickr Creative Commons.

The reason? Branagh leans heavily on the magi-tech rule of Arthur C. Clarke, which Natalie Portman’s character quotes in the film, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” So what is the difference between really-really advanced technology and actual magic? Sean Carroll, who did some science advising for the film, clears the idea up a bit:

Kevin Feige, president of production at Marvel Studios, is a huge proponent of having the world of these films ultimately “make sense.” It’s not ourworld, obviously, but there needs to be a set of “natural laws” that keeps things in order — not just for Iron Man and Thor, but all the way up to Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme who will get his own movie before too long.

In short, the Marvel universe is internally consistent, which makes me all the more excited for the Avengers film. Clarke’s rule of magical tech helps create some of that consistency. I both love and loathe Clarke for that statement. Love because it strikes at the heart of what technology is: a way for humans to do things previously believed not just implausible, but impossible. Loathe because it creates an infinite caveat for lazy authors and screenwriters. It seems like anytime some preposterous technology is injected into a narrative either as a McGuffin or a deus ex machina, that damn quotation from Clarke gets trotted out as the defense. So does Thor live up to Carroll’s hopes or abuse Clarke’s rule?

To answer the question, we need to investigate Clarke’s rule a bit further. There is a corollary to Clarke’s rule: “Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.” By that measure, just how advanced are Asgardians? More than sufficiently. I knew Branagh wanted to explicitly avoid making Thor an actual magical god of thunder. And, because of that, I had so many damn questions about pretty much everything in the film. Why is Thor the only one who can lift Mjölnir? What is Odinsleep? Are Frost Giants aliens? How is Odin able to “take” Thor’s powers?

Needless to say, I was frustrated. And then I remembered the spirit of the rule. If I’m able to tell the difference, then it isn’t advanced enough technology. But that doesn’t mean we’ll always perceive the Asgardian’s abilities as magical.

The best example of a good use of the tech-as-magic scenario is the Stargate series. In the Stargate Universe, the Gou’ald are an advanced alien species that use their highly advanced technology to overwhelm and subject less-advanced alien races. To the late 20th century humans who discover the stargate and utilize it, the equipment of the Gou’ald is advanced, but not magical. Yet to the Egyptians who were originally exposed to the Gou’ald, the tech was magical. As a result, the Gou’ald were worshiped as gods by the Egyptians and merely treated as advanced aliens by late 20th century Americans. That difference is critical to understanding why Thor isn’t just using Clarke’s law as a caveat. The parallel with Stargate (super-advanced race mistaken for gods leading to a mythologizing of their existence) allows us to understand just where the Asgardians sit in the Marvel universe.

In essence, the technological gap between early 21st century human technology and the Asgardians is at least as large as the gap between the Egyptians and the Gou’ald. We’ve got a long way to go.

Thor, thankfully, does not as a film attempt to justify the science behind Asgard. Only two remotely scientific elements are relevant to the plot. The first is that Bifrost, the rainbow bridge (pictured), is a controlled “Einstein-Rosen Bridge” aka wormhole. A huge piece of machinery enables the cosmic transportation device to work. Asgardians get into the transporter, it spools up and then beams them to another realm. Second, Thor’s hammer Mjölnir (which Kat Denning’s mispronunciation thereof is comedy gold) was “forged in the heart of a dying sun.” How that happened and why it makes the hammer so magical is never explained. Those are the only two references in the film that, from what I could tell, even pretended to acknowledge science. No effort is made to disguise the rest of the overtly magical and mythical elements of the Asgard. And that’s a good thing.

Thor does not pull a George Lucas and attempt to over-science the magical elements. Thor is not superhuman because he has some Norse equivalent of midichlorians. He is superhuman because he is magical. Sure, that magic is allegedly based in technology, but technology so incredibly advanced, we can’t distinguish it from magic. That lack of distinguishability is the indicator of just how advanced the Asgardians actually are. It’s also what let’s us enjoy the movie for what it is. Don’t try to understand how the Bifrost’s gate works or why a wormhole needs a sword to activate it – just enjoy watching a hunky bearded man heroically smashes things with his magical hammer and while wooing a gorgeous theoretical physicist. It’s magical!

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Promotional Images for Thor via Paramount

And the fun doesn’t stop with organic entities. Androids, cyborgs, and robots make gender all the stranger. Why is Data fully functional? Isn’t it curious that, of all the characters in Ghost in the Shell the two most heavily cyberized characters, Motoko and Batou, are hyper-feminine and hyper-masculine respectively? And, my favorite: as a robot Bender has no gender, so if Bender bends his gender, what gender does Bender bend?

Sci-fi sex is fun to talk about, of course, but how can all of that help us understand the actual future of humanity? Simply put: we imagine what we hope to see. So the question is: what is it we imagine and hope for? An utter free-for-all of alien-cyborg-A.I. bacchanalia? I don’t think so. Instead, sci-fi is teaching the diversity of our own human sexuality back to us.

Science fiction allows for universes in which we can more easily accept alien forms of gender expression and sexual desire. For example, Ruby Rhod from The Fifth Element is perfectly and outrageously androgynous. In a normal action flick, I suspect Rhod would be a controversial and possibly distracting figure. In science fiction, however, Rhod is just another character caught up in the chaos. Sci-fi lets us explore sexuality free of the cultural and social baggage it carries in the here and now.

A big part of removing this baggage is breaking assumptions by destabilizing what we presume are the foundations of gender and sexuality. For example,  recently the merry old internet produced hipster Mass Effect. One image caught my eye: “I only play as FemShep.” I myself am an avowed Mass Effect fanboy and a vocal defender of playing as a female version of Commander Shepard. Jennifer Hale is just a better voice actor. But I didn’t know that when I started Mass Effect for the first time. I simply thought a female Shepard would be more interesting. Why?

FemShep is a more interesting character because she plays like a he. In his analysis of “FemShep’s Popularity in Mass Effect” James Bishop makes the case clear:

People play as the female version precisely because Commander Shepard is male in all other ways. The lines, the character animations and various other tidbits are male-oriented in a way that makes FemShep more than your stereotypical RPG female protagonist. For one, she wears practical armor. Well, mostly, but it is science fiction after all; we can accept floating visors and the like.

There it is again: sci-fi lets us accept floating visors, so it lets us accept a “male-oriented” female protagonist. The fictional universe provides a buffer for ideas about sex and gender that would normally make us uncomfortable. In fact, FemShep is so engaging because expectations and assumptions of sex and gender are constantly confronted by the character’s actual actions and abilities.

A key measure of social progress is how accepting we are of different permutations of sexuality. Sexuality can get extremely complex. For those who think it’s only male or female, gay or straight, think again. Consider the following possible variables:

Male or Female (biological sex)

Homo or Hetero (sexual preference)

Cis or Trans (gender presentation)

Asexual or Hypersexual (libido level)

Mono or Poly (relationship structure)

Each of these variables is not an either/or situation, but sits on a spectrum. So, if asked to self-identify, the question is not “are you asexual or hypersexual” but, “on a scale of one to ten, one being no sex drive, ten being perpetual, overwhelming sex drive, how would you rate your libido?” And a number in one variable might have no bearing on another. A binary is just not enough – there is a reason the rainbow is representative of the queer community.

Furthermore, some of the categories don’t necessarily refer to one thing. For example, the “homo” or “hetero” category uses the terms in their original root-form: are you attracted to a person similar or different than you? In human context, similar or  different could refer to biological sex, gender presentation, race, religion, age, ability, education, or any number of things. Get into sci-fi, and similar and different may refer to species, organic/inorganic, body shape or any number of infinite variables. We may be attracted to some aspects of a person that are the same as us (e.g. biological sex, education and religion) and prefer some aspects be different (e.g. race and gender presentation). In short, we all have some homosexual and some heterosexual tendencies.

The point is that sci-fi lets us see those variables of attraction and sexuality in action. Even better, sci-fi video games let us experience those variables for ourselves. In the case of my FemShep (pictured, right), I ended up romantic with Liara in ME1 and with Thane in ME2. To say I was attracted to a reptilian male alien assassin is bizarre, I admit. But that’s what makes sci-fi so wonderful. By playing Mass Effect as FemShep, I was able to understand and empathize with a form of sexual attraction I would never personally have.

And that understanding is what science fiction is telling us about the future of sexuality. All of the variables and spectrums and complexities and similarities and differences can be distilled down to one simple equation: consenting persons love one another for different reasons and in different ways. It also puts our own concepts of “different” into perspective. If you’re ok with a human loving a robot, why wouldn’t you be ok with a human loving another human? Sci-fi teaches us that the type of persons involved is irrelevant, so long as they are capable of consent and willingly enter into the relationship.

So the next time you find yourself laughing at Fry’s perpetual struggles to woo Leela or feel confused by whatever your romantic inclinations will be in Mass Effect 3, just remember: that’s science fiction expanding your sexual horizons.

Follow Kyle on his personal blog and on facebook and twitter.

Image of hipster femshep via fuckyeahhipstereffect

But you may still have your doubts. Allow me to put things in perspective. Imagine it’s 1995: almost no one but Gordon Gekko and Zack Morris have cellphones, pagers are the norm; dial-up modems screech and scream to connect you an internet without Google, Facebook, or YouTube; Dolly has not yet been cloned; the first Playstation is the cutting edge in gaming technology; the Human Genome Project is creeping along; Mir is still in space; MTV still plays music; Forrest Gump wins an academy award and Pixar releases their first feature film, Toy Story. Now take that mindset and pretend you’re reading the first page of a new sci-fi novel:

The year is 2010. America has been at war for the first decade of the 21st century and is recovering from the largest recession since the Great Depression. Air travel security uses full-body X-rays to detect weapons and bombs. The president, who is African-American, uses a wireless phone, which he keeps in his pocket, to communicate with his aides and cabinet members from anywhere in the world. This smart phone, called a “Blackberry,” allows him to access the world wide web at high speed, take pictures, and send emails.

It’s just after Christmas. The average family’s wish-list includes smart phones like the president’s “Blackberry” as well as other items like touch-screen tablet computers, robotic vacuums, and 3-D televisions. Video games can be controlled with nothing but gestures, voice commands and body movement. In the news, a rogue Australian cyberterrorist is wanted by world’s largest governments and corporations for leaking secret information over the world wide web; spaceflight has been privatized by two major companies, Virgin Galactic and SpaceX; and Time Magazine’s person of the year (and subject of an Oscar-worthy feature film) created a network, “Facebook,” which allows everyone (500 million people) to share their lives online.

Does that sound like the future? Granted, there’s a bit of literary flourish in some of my descriptions, but nothing I said is untrue. Yet we do not see these things incredible innovations, but just boring parts of everyday life. Louis C. K. famously lampooned this attitude with his “Everything is amazing and nobody is happy” interview with Conan O’Brian. Why can’t we see the futuristic marvels in front of our noses and in our pockets for what they really are?

Jean Baudrillard, an impenetrable post-modern French philosopher who lived long enough to see his predictions in Simulacra and Simulation come true, described our current situation as hyper-reality. The present is overloaded with information and everything becomes meta-ironic-underground-mainstream-old-retro-cool faster than we can process. As all the sources of meaning get their wires crossed, the past is mined for the Next Big Thing because we know what worked once before, where as no one has any idea what the future actually holds. Patton Oswald describes the phenomenon as “Etewaf: Everything That Ever Was–Available Forever.” The past can become new because we didn’t have enough time to understand it’s value the first go around.

And therein lies the the terror of the 21st century. The era in which “the future” means anything is behind us. It no longer works as a concept because that for which “the future” used to stand – a world of wonder, scientific innovation, and marvel – is here, now, all around us. Others have noted that the Singularity is “In Our Past Light-Cone” and that our current visions of the future are actually outdated in relation to current technology. But this creates something of a problem: if it’s already the future, then what comes after the future? This question is the wrong one. It’s like asking what comes after history? More history, of course. The more interesting question is this: now that the future is here, how do we survive it?

Our Baudrillardian hyper-reality is one in which world-altering inventions must be instantly integrated into our lives or we begin to fall behind, to fall out of reality. If you met someone who didn’t use a cellphone or computer and had no idea what the internet was, would you say that person shared your reality? Really? In addition to the risk of being outrun by reality, the strangeness, the alienation of our daily experience of the future comes from the fact that our future is partial. Yes, we have smartphones and internet-everything, but we don’t have genetic engineering or neural-implants or human clones or surgical nano-bots or teleportation. Different areas of science enter the future at different rates. We don’t notice the current wave of innovation we’re riding, only the fields lagging behind. The future is here, but it’s incomplete.

If the past decade has taught us anything, it’s that though technological progress is guaranteed, its direction is impossible to discern, pace Ray Kurzweil. A breakthrough in one technology can cause explosive progress in relation to other technologies. Because cellphones and the internet went through such exponential growth, even with huge advances it looked like genetics, biotech, neuroscience, and nanotech just plodded along. It’s no longer a question of when the future will get here but which future is next? A future of space flight and interplanetary colonization? A future of androids, cyborgs, and AI? A future of genetically enhanced and near-immortal transhumans? A future of nanotech based post-scarcity production? My argument is that while any one of these futures is a real possibility, only one will come into being at a time. If pressed to guess, the breakthroughs in genomics and genetic engineering point to the next couple decades being dominated by biotech. Just as you’ve managed to shake off the awe and wonderment of your smartphone, in a decade or so you’ll be bored with gene therapies, $50 genomic sequencing, designer babies, and clones. Or maybe I’m completely wrong and it’ll be nano-tech replicators and graphene-based space elevators that you grumble about not getting your orbiting cubical fast enough.

We’re making our way through the future, one decade, one technology, at a time. Try to stay excited.

Image “We’ll All Be Happy Then” via the ever amazing paleofuture.com

D. Boucher at The Economic Word generated the above chart with Google’s endlessly entertaining Ngram viewer. The Ngram viewer lets you search for the number of occurrences of a specific word in every book Google has indexed thus far. As you can see, “future” peaked in 2000, leading Boucher to wonder if we’re beyond the future. Yet, Boucher hedges:

Strangely, however, I look at the technological improvements over the past ten years and I see revolutionary ideas one on top of the other (for instance, the iPhone, iPad, Kindle, Google stuff, Social Networks…). My first reaction is to blindly hypothesize that our current technological prowess may distract us from the future. If it is the case, could it be that technology is a detriment to forward-looking thinkers?

I thought it might be fun to Ngram the Science Not Fiction topics of choice and see if we live up to our reputation as rogue scientists from the future. I figured if we’re all from the future, then our topics should either a) match the trend or b) buck the trend. I’m not sure which is right, but the results were quite interesting. Charts after the jump!

I searched the topics from 1900-2008 with a smoothing of 4.

To start, Kevin Grazier with Space and Physics:

Jeremy Jacquot with Biology and Biotech:

Malcolm MacIver with AI and Robotics:

Erik Wolff with Engineering, Energy, and Electronics:
It seems my compatriots are all from the future, indeed! Peaks in the ’80s and ’90s right down the line, as predicted by the initial “future” graph. The hypothesis holds. The future must be behind us.

And now, yours truly with Transhumanism and Human Enhancement:

My goodness, an anomaly! Look at that exponential growth–whoa, so intense, but what does it mean? I honestly have no idea. Now, both transhumanism and human enhancement are much smaller percentages of the total word count (.000001% as opposed to say, AI’s peak of .001%), but they are the only words still on the rise. Do scientific words with futuristic connotations hit a saturation point? Or are we no longer thinking of the Next Big Thing as being futuristic? I hope to have something resembling an answer before the New Year.

Will we use metal in the future? What else would we build things out of? Might we use organic technology (machines and buildings made of or from biological organisms) instead?”
In The Graduate, that iconic film from 1967, bewildered 20-something Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) gets some career advice from a businessman who leans close and intones “I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening? Plastics.” Benjamin didn’t follow that advice, but the rest of the world did, and in spades. By 1979, global production of plastic had exceeded that of steel and is still growing, reaching over 200 million tons this year. There’s no doubt that plastic will continue to play a major role in how we make things, but it won’t replace everything.

In some ways, plastic is the material of the future, the latest step in humanity’s long upward trek through the ages of stone, bronze, iron, and steel. The word “plastic” comes from Greek roots meaning “capable of being molded.” Compared to metals and other materials, plastic is infinitely versatile. With its ability to shape-shift and to take on different mechanical and optical properties, it shows up in a huge spectrum of applications from packaging and plumbing to toys, medical supplies, and computers. And unlike iron and steel, plastic doesn’t rust.

But plastic also has problems that will prevent it from replacing metals any time soon. Its very durability can be an issue. Discarded plastic objects can survive for centuries in garbage landfills without degrading, and plastic artifacts have been found polluting the oceans far distant from any land. Also, what doesn’t seem to be widely appreciated, the raw material to make plastic comes from a resource we need to conserve, petroleum.

On top of this, metals do some things better than plastic—just try cutting up an apple with a plastic knife. Copper and other metals are needed to conduct electricity through power grids; all plastic can do is insulate the current-carrying wires. However, plastic is making inroads relative to some materials such as wood, which is being replaced by plastic “lumber” in certain applications.

Plastic also offers a possible way to actually construct things using biotechnology. Unlike metals, which are classified as inorganic, plastics are organic; they’re made of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, the same constituents as living things, which links plastic to biological products. For instance, under the right conditions, certain microorganisms can synthesize compounds called polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs). These display properties like those of artificial plastics, with the benefits that they’re not petroleum-based and are biodegradable. Researchers are investigating ways to mass-produce these bioplastics, for instance by bioengineering plants to create them.

If you want to speculate even further, way past the idea of growing plastic rather than making it in factories, think about the science-fictionish possibility of bioengineering plants to produce plastic exactly in a desired shape from a drinking cup to a house. Current biotechnology is far short of this possibility, but science fiction has a way of pointing to the future. If bioplastics are the materials breakthrough of the 21st century, houses grown from seeds may be the breakthrough of the 22nd.

DISCOVER: What kind of realistic technology could we use to get to nearby stars? Which stars would be feasibly reachable by such technologies?

Kevin Grazier: It’s a saying plastered on T-shirts and bumper stickers—the kind sold at both science-fiction conventions and physics departments nationwide:

186,000 miles per second:
It’s not just a good idea, it’s the law.

The speed of light, of all electromagnetic energy, in a vacuum is the ultimate speed limit in the universe. Nothing that has mass or carries information can travel faster.

This universal speed limit is a direct fallout from Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Special relativity implies that the speed of light in a vacuum is a universal constant, but values that we tend to think of as constant in our daily experience—mass, length, and the rate of the passage of time—are not. Depending upon the relative velocity of two observers, these values will “adjust” so that both observers see the speed of light as a constant. Two observers travelling at high speeds relative to each other will find themselves in strong disagreement about measurements like the length of each other’s spacecraft and the rate of the passage of time.

Another consequence of special relativity is that, as an object travels increasingly faster, it behaves as if it has increasingly more mass. Therefore the amount of thrust it takes for an incremental change in velocity (known in the space program as a delta-V) is vastly greater at high speeds than at low. This effect is also highly nonlinear: It takes almost an order of magnitude more thrust to accelerate from .9c (nine-tenths of the speed of light) to .99c than it does to accelerate from .5c to .7c. An object travelling at the speed of light would act as if it had an infinite amount of mass and it would, therefore, require an infinite amount of energy (read: an infinite amount of thrust/fuel) to attain it.

This is, of course, a shame for civilizations (like ours) who want to explore planetary systems around other stars first hand. The distances involved are, well, astronomical. Just within the Solar System, it typically takes NASA probes 6 months to a year to reach Mars; it took Cassini 6 years, 9 months to reach Saturn. The (currently) fastest object created by humankind, the Voyager 1 spacecraft, will take 40,000 years, give or take a few thousand years, before it makes its closest encounter with its first star: AC+79 3888—currently located in the constellation Ursa Minor. At that speed few Time Lords, and even fewer humans, would survive the journey to even “nearby” star systems.

Current chemical rockets, and even the more efficient ion drives, cannot propel humanity to the stars at a reasonable speed, but there are concepts for interstellar spacecraft drives that are promising, that could be constructed in a practical sense, and you may be surprised how long the designs have been around. Stanisław Ulam, a Polish mathematician who participated in the Manhattan Project, proposed nuclear pulse propulsion back in 1947.

The idea is simple: explode a series of nuclear bombs behind a spacecraft. The explosions are directed against a thick steel “pusher plate”. The pusher plate is, in turn, connected to the spacecraft by a huge shock absorber to lessen the high G forces from the impulsive accelerations. In the straightforward terminology of Jimmy Johnson, the engineer on the Phaeton:

Basically, we gonna blow us up a bunch of big ass bombs off the ass-end of this here ship. Big ass bombs gonna vaporize some big ass alloy plates, and the translation of all that big ass energy’ll make us go real fast. Real fast. Yippe kai-ay, m…

The practical attempt to design and develop nuclear-pulse propulsion was performed by General Atomics in San Diego in the 1950s and 1960s. Ultimately the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty between the Unites States and Soviet Union made the testing for such a drive illegal, nevertheless over 50 years ago the design seemed practical and could be implemented within the bounds of existing technology. For more information, NASA and Star Trek designer Mike Okuda provided still more details on Project Orion, the U.S. government’s investigation into a nuclear-pulse spacecraft.

An Orion-style drive powered by thermonuclear explosions could theoretically reach speeds of .08c to .10c. That could get a spacecraft to the nearest stars within a human lifetime, but not within Phaeton’s 10-year mission. Virtuality is set in the mid-21st century, and it’s reasonable to assume some technological advances in the intervening time. Phaeton does not use thermonuclear explosions for propulsion, the charges dropped out the back are matter/antimatter charges (yes the thrust for Phaeton is, in essence, provided by photon torpedoes). The obvious assumption is that by the mid-21st Century, science has solved problems regarding the generation and containment of antimatter. One estimate has shown that Orion-style drive propelled by matter/antimatter explosions could attain speeds of .5c to .8c.

If Phaeton’s Orion Drive (named after the real-life nuclear concept) could propel it to 80 percent the speed of light, it could get to Sol’s nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri (4.4 light-years away) in just 5 years, 6 months. That’s certainly a vast improvement, and shortens the round-trip mission time to several nearby stars to less than a human lifetime.

Only, it gets better.

Special relativity, which bit us in the asteroid when it comes to top-end velocity, does our crew a favor as our spacecraft attains speeds that are a high fraction of the speed of light. Recall that for objects travelling at relativistic speeds, values like mass, time, and length appear to “adjust” to keep the speed of light a constant. At high speeds, distances that we measure at “rest”, or at low speeds compared to c, appear to be shortened. This effect is called Lorentz contraction or Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction.

Moving at a snappy .5c, the distance to Alpha Centauri is only 3.8 light-years (down from 4.4), and the apparent travel time is a bit over 7 years, 6 months. At 80 percent light speed, the distance is 2.6 light-years, and the travel time is 3 years, 3 months—less elapsed time for the crew than it would take for light to make the same journey.

Travelling at a speed of 0.7c is the “break even” point, where the combination of spacecraft velocity and Lorentz Contraction means you are travelling at “functional light speed” (the distance to Alpha Centauri in that frame would be 3.1 light-years and the travel time 4 years, 5 months). Of course time passes at different rates based upon their relative speeds as well, a phenomena called relativistic time dilation, so if Phaeton were travelling at a speed of .7c, for every year that passes for the crew, a year and five months would pass for The Edge of Never viewers back on Earth. Billie Kashmiri alludes to this in her confessional near the end.

With the phenomena of Lorentz Contraction as an aid, many more star systems become potential targets of a 10-year mission. There are sound scientific arguments why astronomers believe that any star that could potentially have a planet with life, in particular intelligent life, must be similar to our Sol: from mid-F range on the Herzsprung-Russell Diagram to mid-K. There are several stars in that size/temperature range in Sol’s neighborhood. Below is a screen capture of a spreadsheet that the producers of Virtuality used to select the target star for Phaeton’s mission (text color corresponds to the star’s color):

On the spreadsheet are the stars’ distances at rest, and at various fractions of light speed—with the corresponding travel time.

Click image to embiggen.

Epsilon Eridani, the nearby star that the Phaeton is sent to explore, has one, perhaps two planets orbiting it, as well as at least three asteroid/planetesimal belts. If we assume that Phaeton’s Orion Drive can get her up to .8c, or 80 percent the speed of light, then because of Lorentz contraction the journey (normally 10.5 light-years) is only 6.3 light-years, and it takes just under 7 years, 11 months. So if the Orion Drive can reasonably get a spacecraft up to .8c, then Phaeton’s mission is actually closer to 16 years. If, however, the Orion Drive was capable of propelling Phaeton to .9c, or 90 percent the speed of light, then the distance to Epsilon Eridani is only 4.6 light-years, and the one-way flight time is 5.1 years.

So in order for Phaeton to get to Epsilon Eridani and back within the stated 10-year mission duration, we clearly see that the ship’s Orion Drive would have to propel her to over 90 percent the speed of light (.9c). For all the elements of Phaeton’s mission that might be practically attainable by the mid-21st Century, this is where a little science fiction enters the picture.

Thank you to Steve Cooperman, Doug Creel, and John Weiss for their helpful input and comments.

Question: How big an asteroid would be needed to completely destroy a planet?
That’s easy. It would have to be really, really big or moving very, very fast (or both for a real whopper of an impact), but there are some subtleties that are worth explaining.

First off, let’s admit that we’re really concerned with how big an asteroid would destroy planet Earth, especially life on Earth. I’m a bit more worried about my home planet than Mars, Jupiter, or even Pluto and even more worried about all the life we see around us (not to mention ourselves!). Earth is far more important from the human perspective, so let’s tackle that question.

Frighteningly, many large objects have hit Earth. Real whoppers. That’s a bit scary to think about. The good news is that the Earth is still here, so apparently large impacts of the planet-destruction kind rarely happen. We do know that smaller impacts have happened, such as the meteorite that hit the high Arizona desert just east of Flagstaff, at the site known as Meteor Crater. If we could count the impacts, we could gauge how frequently and when the impacts took place.

However, it is hard for us to find evidence of all the impact craters on Earth today. This is mainly due to erosion, which washes away the evidence by slowly filling in the craters, but looking at the Moon, where erosion is for all intents and purposes non-existent, we see that our nearest companion has been pummeled a lot, though mainly in the distant past. It, too, is still here and in one piece. The far side of the Moon, which always points away from the Earth, has a lot more craters than the side facing the Earth, which makes sense because the far side is more likely to be hit—it’s a bit harder for asteroids to sneak by the Earth and hit the shielded side of the Moon (though some have) than to hit the exposed side.

In fact, the Moon itself holds the key to what was probably the largest impact that the Earth has experienced (and hopefully will ever experience). Before I explain what we know about this biggest of all collisions, it is important to understand what we currently know about the formation of the solar system.

Stars form when dense and cold gas and dust that is prevalent in galaxies like the Milky Way slowly collapses under the influence of gravity. Astronomers see these forming stars just about everywhere we look—from regions practically next door, like the Orion Nebula, to the most distant galaxies we can see with the Hubble Space Telescope. As the star forms, a disk of leftover material takes shape through the combined effects of angular momentum and the force of gravity. These disks become fairly violent places as small particles of material slowly accumulate to form specks of dust, then pebbles, boulders, and ultimately planets. Astronomers have seen such disks in various stages of evolution with powerful telescopes.

Current models of planet formation gauge the time to go from a disk of gas and dust to a fully formed planetary system at about a million years, depending on the mass of gas and dust available and some other factors. Astronomers are not entirely sure how the process proceeds, but they have developed telescopes designed to peer through the material surrounding these forming stars to try and pin down the details. A prime example is the Spitzer Space Telescope, which observes in the infrared portion of the spectrum. Radio telescopes like the Very Large Array or the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (now under construction in Northern Chile) can also be used to effectively study the star- and planet-formation process, because the long-radio wavelengths they receive can escape the dense molecular clouds, unlike visible light.

It is now generally accepted that the Moon formed when a large, Mars-sized object crashed into the Earth very soon after the Earth itself formed. This collision dug deep into the Earth’s crust and threw off material from as deep as the Earth’s mantle into orbit where it was pulled together by its own gravity to form the Moon. This explains why rocks brought back from the Moon are composed of fairly lightweight minerals and rocks, containing little to no iron or nickel (metals found at the core of the Earth rather than the mantle). It also explains why the orbital plane of the Moon doesn’t line up with the orbital plane of the Earth itself (the impactor came from a different orbital plane). From dating the ages of rocks, geologists know the Earth is 4.65 billion years old, while the Moon is a bit younger, about 4.6 billion years old, evidently created in a subsequent massive collision.

So, in some sense, Earth wasn’t “destroyed” by an impact of an object the size of Mars that hit the Earth a somewhat glancing blow, but a more direct impact of an even more massive object could easily have had enough energy to seriously disrupt the Earth. Even so, in this case some kind of residual object would have formed, perhaps even two, and if life had taken hold after the planet and its companion cooled down, we might live in a true double planet system. Imagine looking up each night and seeing a blue companion planet in place of the Moon, with its own continents, weather, and oceans. That would be quite a sight.

What about life-ending impacts?
By studying the fossil record, geologists have identified sudden mass extinctions of species. They count the type and number of species in different layers of rock and can see when the number of species changes significantly. Two of the most significant extinction events are called the K-Pg boundary (a.k.a. the Cretaceous-Paleogene event) and the Permian-Triassic event.

The Permian-Triassic event took place about 251 million years ago. Although it is not entirely clear that major impacts caused this extinction, it is clear that the Earth’s life suffered an extreme setback. This extinction event led to the loss of 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species. Ponder this for a minute: This means that nearly all marine life was completely wiped out. More than two-thirds of all terrestrial animal species disappeared. Even many insect species—among the best survivors on the planet—were wiped out as well. This event is commonly referred to as the “Great Dying”—suffice to say it would not have been pleasant time to be alive. Although multiple impacts by large asteroids is a likely explanation for the Permian-Triassic event, there are other possibilities and research continues.

The K-Pg event took place 65.5 million years ago and is fairly clearly caused by the impact of a large asteroid. A thin layer of sediment with a high concentration of iridium was laid down around the world in a very short period of time. Iridium is very rare in the Earth’s crust, because it sank along with iron to the Earth’s core, but it’s often found in asteroids. There is also evidence of significant geologic activity around the time of this extinction event, which led to the loss of about 75% of all extant species, but most geologists believe it was caused by a giant impact near today’s Yucatan peninsula, forming the so-called Chicxulub crater. It is still not clear if the impact and its debris cloud (and tsunamis) were the sole cause of the extinctions or if secondary causes (chemical changes in the atmosphere or oceans) had a role to play. Again, research continues.

What can we take away from these extinction events? Life is both pretty tough and pretty disposable. Although life as a whole goes on, your species may not get a golden ticket. Impacts happen that can destroy most life on Earth. The good news is that life managed to survive and ultimately re-conquer the ocean and land, just not in the same forms that existed before. It is one of the amazing things about life on our planet that evolution guides both the long-term survival of life generally and the development (and extinction) of individual species. Life goes on, but any individual species may not.

Astronomers have begun multiple projects to scan the solar system and identify potential asteroids that might impact the Earth. Hopefully by identifying possible life-threatening objects, we could come together worldwide to somehow save ourselves (and all the other life on the planet). Right now, destroying or nudging an asteroid on a collision course would be a tremendous challenge, but it seems that impacts are few and far between, so we probably have enough time to develop the technology necessary for planetary protection.

My heroes are in a first-contact situation, meeting an alien face-to-face for the first time. How could my heroes and the alien learn to communicate with each other?
Both knowingly and unwittingly, humans have been broadcasting their presence to the Universe since the 1920s—when coherent transmissions in the radio portion of the electromagnetic spectrum became widespread. Our radio and television broadcasts do not stop at the edge of Earth’s atmosphere; rather they propagate into space at the speed of light. While these signals attenuate with distance, they are detectable nevertheless: NASA still regularly communicates with the twin Voyager spacecraft despite the fact that they are over 100 times further from the Sun than Earth and that each of which transmit data to Earth with less power than a common household light bulb. This means that an alien civilization as far away as 58 light-years could potentially be trying to make sense of “Lucy, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do!” (There are 105 G-type stars—ones like our own lovable Sol—within this I Love Lucy-sphere.)

Thirty-five years ago humans make the first and only significant attempt to say “Hello” to extraterrestrial civilizations. On November 16, 1974 the newly remodeled Arecibo radio telescope beamed a message into space. The signal was beamed into space only once, and it was aimed in the direction of the globular cluster M13, a collection of hundreds of thousands of stars 25,000 light-years away in the constellation Hercules. Because of proper motion, M13 will no longer be in position to receive that message 25,000 years from now, but another star system might.

The Arecibo message was beamed into space less because it was a legitimate attempt to make contact with an extraterrestrial civilization, and more as a test of new capabilities of the telescope. The message was 1679 bits of binary information. Presumably any alien species capable of telecommunication would figure out that 1679 is the product of 73 and 23, both of which are prime numbers, hinting at the intended interpretation of the broadcast: that it is actually is a matrix with 73 rows and 23 columns. One assumption behind the message is that any alien race receiving it will orient the matrix vertically instead of horizontally (23 by 73), which produces gibberish—or at least that they’ll examine both representations before giving up on it.

Contained in the Arecibo transmission are representations of the numbers one through ten in binary; the atomic numbers of the elements that form organic compounds which, in turn, form human beings; formulae of a few basic organic compounds; and graphical representations of a human, the Solar System, and the Arecibo antenna. All of the depictions were crude, at best. Even the binary digits one through ten were represented in such a way as to be non-obvious even to human beings familiar with binary. If an alien race actually receives that transmission, it will be easy to determine that it is of intelligent origin (omitting the obligatory gag about Earth not having intelligent life), but challenging to determine the actual intent of the message. The Arecibo message was unique: Although our radio and TV broadcasts “leak” into space, nobody is actively broadcasting signals with the idea of contacting extraterrestrial civilizations. Today we simply listen.

What if somebody responded?
What if one day aliens received a signal that we had transmitted into space, intentionally or otherwise? What if they decided to invite themselves over for a visit? What if they decided not to land on the front lawn of the White House, instead landing on the front lawn of your house? Assuming that the aliens did not know your language, how would you attempt communication? Should you attempt communication?

In movies and on television first contact scenarios often seem so… easy. That’s usually, at least in part, because the heroes in science fiction stories have access to some device that functions as a universal translator—that translates between most known (and previously unknown) languages. Even if the translator is of biological origin like a fish (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) or a colony of bacteria (Farscape), it’s still a device—a plot device that we generally accept in sci-fi like FTL travel or artificial gravity. It makes sense from a storytelling standpoint.

In an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard must learn to communicate with the captain of an alien vessel who speaks entirely in cultural references. While this can be compelling for a lone episode, in series like Star Trek or Stargate it would be dramatically unfulfilling if we had to wait, week after week, while our heroes attempt to communicate with yet another new alien race.

It’s an obvious understatement to say that language is complex—what is startling is how difficult it is to convey even the most basic of concepts to somebody with no known reference points. Everything that you say is fraught with assumptions. Imagine that you walk up to a random stranger on a street corner and say, “Hello. How are you?” What assumption could lie behind such an innocuous greeting? Perhaps it’s more obvious if we rephrase the question. If you walked up to the very same person and said, “Guten Tag. Wie geht’s?” You have made the obvious assumption that the person speaks German which may or may not be a good one. The assumption that other humans with whom we’d like to communicate have shared experiences is a good one. With an alien race, it is not an assumption you can make.

It gets worse. Most language has cultural colloquialisms that make accurate translation even more difficult. Even though a universal translator might function well on a word-by-word basis, it’s still doubtful that meaningful dialogue between humans and alien races would rapidly ensue when we consider even the most common cultural influences upon language. For example if somebody who spoke German as a native language spoke into a universal translator and said, “Er is sehr blau” in reference to your mutual friend, you may think that your friend is feeling depressed—the literal translation is “He is very blue.” You wouldn’t figure out, other than perhaps by visual observation, that your mutual friend is drunk, which was the actual implication of the statement in German. “Blue” means depressed in English, inebriated in German, and in neither case would the connotation of that sentence be, “He is reflecting short-wavelength visible light.”

When the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft were launched in 1972 and 1973, they carried human greetings to any alien civilization who may find the craft one day. Each craft carries a plaque that has diagrams of, among other things, a human male and female, the Solar System, and the spacecraft’s origin. The man has his hand raised in what is supposed to be a friendly gesture, but even this has a cultural bias. It could equally be interpreted as hostile: “You want a piece of this? Come to my planet and I’m going to slap you senseless.” In fact, one argument against affixing the plaques to the Pioneer spacecraft was that it sends the very clear message, “Here are the directions to the restaurant, and here’s what’s on the menu.”

Which brings us back to the spacecraft sitting in your front yard, and the alien beings who have exited the craft and who are now standing before you. If Earth’s history can be used as a template, first-contact scenarios between cultures possessing drastically different levels of technology often end badly for those in the low-tech population. It would, however, probably be reasonable to assume that if the aliens wanted you for dinner, you’d already be in their oven. Or on their plate. Or in their equivalent of a stomach. If they wanted you as slave labor, given the proximity, it’s probably too late for you on that score as well. Nevertheless, the first goal in any such encounter should be, first and foremost, your survival. It might be a good assumption that the aliens are on a heightened state of alert—that they are wary of what you may do simply out of a fear response. Waving “Hello” like the man on the Pioneer plaque is perhaps not a wise move. Slowly turning your hands so that your open palms face the aliens might be a better choice. Presumably if the aliens can get all the way to Earth from their home, they are intelligent enough to look beyond any cultural insult this gesture may cause, and recognize that what you mean is that you are not carrying a weapon. Making all motions and gestures slow and deliberate would not be a bad idea.

If the aliens did, in fact, wish to achieve any meaningful dialogue, the goal in any interplanetary communications, then, would be to find a common ground with a minimum of assumptions and colloquialisms. Whether or not this is an attainable goal is another question. If the situation were reversed, and it was human beings who had just landed at an alien being’s home, presumably we would have done our homework first—doing either remote or in situ observations to smooth over a first-contact scenario. They may have also have experience, having done this once or twice before. So the best communication strategy might simply be to let the culture with the highest level of technology take the lead while the low-tech participants concentrate on staying alive. In the end, it’s probably best to let the alien initiate communication, even if it is simply, “Take me to your leader.”

What is the most likely form an alien would take?
Life’s architecture is difficult to predict because it depends on many factors involving the interaction of the environment and life through evolution and natural selection. We can, however, make some generalizations based on the vast number of morphological forms that life takes on earth.

Life on earth ranges from microscopic spheres and rods to macroscopic creatures exhibiting wide variations in their morphologies (e.g., spiders to humans). Nevertheless, nearly all life (everything except sponges) exhibits symmetry—either bilateral or radial symmetry. In bilateral symmetry (also called plane symmetry), only one plane, called the sagittal plane, will divide an organism into roughly mirror image halves. An organism with radial symmetry has no left or right sides, only a top and a bottom (dorsal and ventral surface). An alien life form, therefore, would most likely be symmetrical. The type of symmetry would be influenced on the environment in which it lived. From our basic knowledge of survival of macroscopic organisms whether they be aquatic or terrestrial it seems that bilateral symmetry dominates.

The possession of other specific attributes (e.g., ability to hear, see, smell, move, etc.) depends on the environment and competition for resources for survival. For example, when we think of “seeing,” we think of “eyes” first. But if we think of the function (sensing specific wavelengths of light) rather than the specific physical attribute, it opens a plethora of ways in which we can imagine “seeing,” ranging from the photosensors for phototaxis in bacteria to the compound eyes of some insects. The uses to which life puts its sensory perception mechanism of light ranges from finding food to escaping from predators. It would seem logical that an alien would have some type of light sensory perception mechanism if it lived on the surface of a planet. What the physical make-up and appearance of that light sensory perception mechanism would be is difficult to define. The perception of light is not just limited to the type of perception just described, that is, “seeing”, but also to perception by photopigments (e.g., chlorophylls) used for capturing light energy to produce cellular energy for use by the organism (i.e., photosynthesis).

Following this line of logic, the form that an alien would take is the form that makes it survive and reproduce best in its environment. If I had to make a guess it would be that it would have symmetry (probably bilateral symmetry), capable of light perception, and probably motile (increases chances of finding nutrients and escaping predators). To say anything more specific would require knowing the planetary environment in which it lived.

What about the form of an intelligent alien, specifically? Would it even need to have a solid form?
First, what is intelligence? As defined by H. J. Jerison, intelligence is the behavioral consequence of the total neural-information processing capacity in representative adults of a species, adjusted for the capacity to control routine bodily functions. This can be related to encephalization. Encephalization is defined as the amount of brain mass exceeding that related to an animal’s total body mass. Quantifying encephalization has been argued to be directly related to that animal’s level of intelligence. Brain-to-body mass ratio (also known as the encephalization quotient, or EQ) is a rough estimate of the possible intelligence of an organism, and is defined as the ratio of the actual brain mass to the expected brain mass of a typical organism that size. On average, the larger an organism is, the more brain mass is required for basic survival tasks, such as breathing and thermoregulation. Therefore, the larger the brain relative to the body, the more brain mass should be available for more complex cognitive tasks. It has been shown that dolphins, which have the highest brain-to-body mass ratio of all cetaceans, are able to communicate with each other and are thought to be intelligent to some degree. Humans have a higher brain-to-body mass ratio than dolphins.

To this day there is no broadly definition of “life”. The Darwinian, or genetic, definition of life is the most accepted today. It holds that life is self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing evolution by natural selection. Applying this definition to life suggests that it would be a solid form.

Would/will we recognize an alien transmission right away? Is there a chance we could miss such a transmission, or they ours?

We will recognize the sorts of electromagnetic signals for which we have built good matched filters: nanosecond optical laser pulses, narrowband radio continuous wave or pulsed signals. If signals are of some other type (e.g., a modulation scheme with higher dimensionality, or something other than electromagnetic waves) then we will not detect them, except by serendipity as we build new instruments to study our universe in different ways, or by using increasing computational power to look for more complex types of electromagnetic signals.

If signals are transmitted via a technology that we haven’t yet invented, we will miss them until we manage to invent the appropriate technology (remember that we are a very young technology (~100 years) in a very old galaxy (~10 billion years). I suspect we have a lot more to learn.

We could also miss signals in time. If technological civilizations and their signals are short lived, we might be searching for exactly the right thing, but long after the signals have come and gone. Likewise, if we do not manage to continue as a technological civilization for a very long time, then any transmission project that we might decide to embark on would have little likelihood of being detected by anyone else.

I continually tell groups containing grad students and post-docs (who touch more data than the rest of us) to resist the temptation to edit out anomalies until they have first satisfied themselves that it isn’t a real effect, perhaps the artifact of someone else’s astroengineering or signaling project—but in truth, it’s very hard to train someone to be a Jocelyn Bell [who discovered pulsars as a post-doc].

There’s no way to estimate what we might be missing.

Will we understand alien communication, and vice versa?

People argue that mathematics is essential for a technology that can create and operate some sort of transmitter. Therefore a language based on mathematics should be mutually understandable, and in 1960 Hans Feudenthal created such a language he called Lincos (for “lingua cosmica”). Another suggestion is a language based on the period table of elements that are (we think) the same throughout the universe; this idea has been pursued by Carl L. Devito. If the signal is electromagnetic, the wavelength of the transmitted signal serves as a common unit of measurement between sender and receiver; you might describe yourself as being N wavelengths tall. Of course it is hard for us to think in any way except the way we do—it might be that another intelligent species with the capability of manipulating its environment to create a transmitter that we can detect could still perceive their environment in such a different way that it might be impossible to find a common ground for describing the same thing. But all of this is a problem that I’d like to have, and I don’t doubt that there would be many other individuals around the globe just as eager to help unravel any information from a detected signal. An old Southern cookbook starts a recipe by saying, “To cook a possum, you must first catch a possum.”

That’s my personal approach to SETI—it’s the detection of a signal that we must work on first. Even if there were no information encoded within a detected signal, or even if we can never decode it, the detection of a signal answers the old important question “Are we alone?” Even a cosmic dial tone tells us something else implicitly: It tells us that there’s a high probability that we can have a long technological future, because technologies must, on average, be long lived. Otherwise we would never overlap in time with another technological civilization, and the detection would not have occurred.

Philip Morrison used to put this most poetically—he called SETI “the archaeology of the future.” Because of the finite speed of light, a detected electromagnetic signal will give us information about their past, but it will tell us about our future.

Our first expert-answered Codex question goes to J Storrs Hall, an independent scientist and author who’s also president of the Foresight Institute, a nanotech-oriented think tank. Thanks especially to Jennifer Ouellette, a science writer and the director of SEEx, for connecting us with Hall. Without further ado, here’s the question of the day, asked by an (imagined) big-time Hollywood director/producer who thinks getting the science right might help nail down that elusive Oscar:

“How could nanotechnology transform the world? Most importantly, how could I stop a plague of nanorobots from eating my spaceship/research facility/planet?”

Nanotechnology is going to transform the physical world in much the same way that computers and the Internet have transformed the informational world. In the long run, that means that physical things like cars and houses will see the rates of improvement that we are used to with computers. New capabilities, such as super-light, super-tough materials, will appear.

Existing capabilities that are expensive, such as photovoltaic solar cells, will become cheap enough for everyone to use. In some cases, these both will happen—it might, for example, be possible to surface the roads with photovoltaics that are tough enough to drive on but gather enough energy to power your car as it goes.

The latter half of the 20th Century was one of the most exciting times in the history of science, because it brought the solution to one of the great mysteries: the nature of life. We discovered that the almost magical properties of living things—the abilities to grow, heal, and reproduce—were because they were full of molecular machinery. (The fourth property of life, burning fuel to power useful motion, was captured in the Industrial Revolution.) Nanotechnology research and development is slowly unraveling the principles and techniques by which we will ultimately engineer new molecular machines that will be able to make high-tech products as cheaply and cleanly as biology makes potatoes.

Plagues of nanorobots, under the name of “gray goo,” were first considered in detail by the Nanotechnology Study Group at MIT in the 1980s. Their concern was that these would be mechanical bacteria. Of course, the whole Earth is covered with biological bacteria, just as small, with machinery just as molecular, as anything nanotechnology could ever make. So why was anyone worrying about a few more mechanical ones?

The main worry was that the mechanical version might be more efficient and thus more dangerous. A car can go 10 times as fast as a horse. Perhaps a mechanical bacterium could be faster, tougher, or more efficient than a biological one.

On further analysis, it turned out that the situation wasn’t that simple. Horses eat hay and grain and leaves and other naturally occurring energy sources, while cars need highly refined and expensive fuel. One reason cars are more efficient is that their “digestion” is outsourced to refineries.

Similarly, cars outsource their healing to repair shops and their reproduction to factories. They need roads and other infrastructure to be built for them. Any sensibly designed nanorobot would work the same way, for the same reason: It’s much more efficient. But that leaves the nanorobot, like the car, completely unable to go foraging in the wild and form a “plague.”

Imagine trying to build a car that ran on hay which it harvested itself, graded its own roads, made its own parts with which it repaired itself, and built new cars. Plagues of nanorobots are about as likely as plagues of hay-eating cars. And in the unlikely eventuality someone ever actually did build them, such nanorobots wouldn’t be much more efficient than bacteria, and could be controlled easily by efficient, faster, more powerful, fuel-using, non-reproducing nanomachines.  — J Storrs Hall

In the most recent issue of Nature, there are two papers…that detail the characteristics of sodium and lithium under extreme pressure. Specifically, these two metals adopt semiconductor-like (even superconductor-like) characteristics if you subject them to giga-pressure (literally, 80-200 gigapascals). The sodium actually becomes optically transparent during this squeeze. Reading this reminded me of a Star Trek [movie] that involved a not-so-scientific explanation of “transparent aluminum” …Is the idea of using transparent metal for windows pure science fiction?

The paper you’re talking about, the one on high pressure sodium, sure did make a lot of noise in the science world, and for good reason. Drs. Yanming Ma and Artem Oganov at SUNY Stonybrook showed that  lithium and sodium do goofy things under pressure — like turn transparent. Normally under really high pressure, elements turn into metals, c.f. hydrogen. The science makes intuitive sense because the atoms are getting smooshed together as the pressure increases. The electrons are freed to become conductors, and the element takes a metal-like structure. But in sodium, it turns out, the electrons line up into columns, one on top of the other. This creates gaps between the atoms, and instead of becoming a conductor, it becomes an insulator, and, conicidentally,  becomes transparent.

All of which is cool, but it doesn’t really answer Michael D’s question, because the sodium is under 200 gigapasacals of pressure, the sort of pressure you find if you were journeying from Jupiter’s surface toward its core, not hanging out on the bridge of the Enterprise.

And yet! That formula Scotty gave for transparent aluminum in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home very nearly exists in the form of aluminum oxynitride  (known as ALONtm). Harder than diamond, ALONtm is far more shock resistant than even bullet resistant glass. In Air Force tests it has resisted multiple rounds from a .50 caliber sniper rifle. That hardness also prevents wear and tear, since neither sand nor rocks nor shrapnel in the night will scratch the stuff.

In practical use, the ALONtm would be the outer layer for windscreens of cockpit covers. It would be backed by a thin layer of glass and a layer of transparent polymer to prevent shattering. All together the ALONtm windscreen would be thinner and lighter than a traditional bullet-resistant windscreen.What’s unclear from my research is whether it would be strong enough to hold back enough water to make the aquarium for all those humpbacks whales on a captured Klingon spaceship, but it’s a start.

The main downside? It’s wicked expensive. Traditional bullet resistant glass goes for $3 per inch-squared, but ALONtm costs between $10-$15, or it did back in 2005.  I can’t seem to find any more current applications for it, but this is the military, it could be classified.

Anyway Michael D., I hope that answers your question.

I want to have a teleporter in my story. How would one work?

The good news is that a working teleportation device already exists. The bad news is that it won’t work for you if you happen to be bigger than a rubidium atom—but scientists are toiling away to fix that. As physicist Michio Kaku noted last year in DISCOVER, we could be teleporting things as big as a virus within a few decades, which means we would be ready teleport a person around the 23rd century, just in time for the predicted construction date of Captain Kirk’s Enterprise.

The key to teleportation is to realize that we don’t want to use it as some kind of “matter transporter.” The kind of everyday matter that makes up you, me, and the planet, is made up of protons, neutrons and electrons. Quantum physics tells us that every proton is identical to every other proton, every neutron is identical to every other neutron, and the same holds for electrons too. What’s important are not the particular particles that make up our bodies, but the way those particles are arranged into atoms, molecules, and cells. Duplicate the arrangement, and you duplicate the person.

The situation is analogous to what happens when a scene is captured by a TV camera and transmitted to a screen somewhere else. We’re not interested in somehow transporting the actual photons that entered the camera’s lens to the eyes of the viewer. Instead, the camera records the pattern the incoming light makes. Information that describes this pattern is transmitted to viewer’s screen, where a brand new set of photons are produced with the desired color and intensity. These convey the image of the scene to the eye. What’s important is preserving and transmitting the pattern of information, not the original photons.

The key to transmitting the information pattern of solid matter, as opposed to an two-dimensional image made of photons, is a spooky phenomenon known as quantum entanglement. It turns out that particles can be in a number of different states, and big part of the weirdness of quantum mechanics is that these states are undefined until they are somehow measured. Imagine tossing a coin and catching it. In the quantum world, not until you peek at the coin does it decide to be heads up or tails up! Entanglement means taking two particles and treating them together in such a way that their states become mingled. The states of the particles are still undefined until measured, but now making a measurement of one particle’s state will instantly determine the state of both particles, not just one. This holds true, even if you took one of the entangled particles and moved it to the other side of the solar system before performing the measurement.

Incidentally, Einstein loathed this idea, and it was one of the things that turned him away from quantum mechanics and towards a more-or-less dead end approach to physics in his later years. But thanks to a piece of quantum theory known as “Bell’s inequalities” along with entanglement experiments conducted in Paris in the 1980’s, Einstein was proved to be wrong.

Entanglement makes teleportation possible like this: first create an entangled pair of particles, say two atoms. We’ll call one atom “the pitcher,” and the other “the catcher” (This is not standard physics terminology). Now move the catcher to wherever you want to teleport to. This must be done very carefully to avoid destroying the entanglement. Now let’s take an atom that we want to teleport. This atom has a particular internal arrangement of electrons, neutron and protons that somehow makes it special to us—we’ll call it the Scotty atom. We put the Scotty atom into a chamber containing the pitcher atom. The states of the Scotty and pitcher atoms are combined and then measured. This combination process scrambles the state of the Scotty and pitcher atoms, putting them into random states.

So far, it looks like all you’ve done is put a perfectly good Scotty particle into a quantum shredder—the arrangement that made it special has been destroyed. But now you take the measurements of those scrambled random states and transmit them (in theory this could be done by radio, or any other method you can think of) to wherever the catcher atom is located. A regular, run-of-the-mill, atom is pushed into a chamber with the catcher atom. We’ll call this new, boring, atom the Tabula Rasa atom. The information about the random states that we measured after the Scotty and pitcher atoms were combined is also fed into the chamber. Presto—the Tabula Rasa atom takes on all the attributes of the Scotty atom. To all intents and purposes it is the Scotty atom.

Scientists are working on scaling up the process so that it works on larger and larger scales, hoping to move up from atoms to molecules, molecules to cells, and maybe one day, entire people. But the basic process is the same as for a single atom.

Note that in some ways the process is similar to what happens on Star Trek—teleporting someone requires disintegrating their body. There’s no way to teleport someone and leave their original body intact—the person can’t exist at the pitcher and catcher ends at the same time. Teleportation cannot be used to make copies of a person. In quantum mechanics this restriction is known as the “no cloning theorem.” In some ways however, teleportation is quite different to Star Trek—it requires quite a bit of preparation and equipment at both ends of the process—you can’t just appear on the surface of a planet you’ve never visited before.

But you could imagine this being used as a way to travel to distant solar systems—a robot probe with a supply of entangled particles could be sent out on the decades, or centuries long, journey required to travel between stars. Once it arrived at it destination, explorers would step into a teleportation chamber on Earth containing the entangled pairs of the particles sent with the probe. Their bodies would be destroyed, but information about them would be transmitted by radio at the speed of light to the probe. The probe would receive the information, and reconstitute the explorers. Of course, if anything happened to break the chain of transmission, or to disturb the entangled particles before the right time, the explorers would be killed. But if everything worked, to them it would feel like going from Earth to an alien world in the blink of an eye.

We’re here to help. In the comments below, fire away with your science questions about any sci fi book, TV show, movie, radio play, comic, or whatever that you can think of, and we’ll set about answering as many as we can in upcoming posts as part of our Codex Futurius project.

Bear in mind, we yearn to answer science questions. We’re relatively useless for fielding pop entertainment rumors or speculating on why Starbuck keeps having weird visions. But the science of Sci Fi? Bring it on.

I want Superheroes in my story, all with amazing powers. I also want a good explanation for their origin: could genetic mutation or manipulation create a superhuman?

The short answer is yes, within limits. Billions of years of evolution have produced a vast number of abilities in different animals that are beyond the gift of any normal human. Dogs have noses stuffed with olfactory receptors that make them 100 to 1,000 times as sensitive as humans to scents. Fish that swim in the Antarctic Ocean have natural anti-freeze molecules in their cells that allow them to thrive in water that is so cold it would kill a human within minutes. Many insects can see ultraviolet frequencies of light that are invisible to us, giving them a very different view of nature.

Because all life on Earth uses the same genetic code, in theory anything that you can find in nature is up for grabs. For example, the blood cells of crocodiles contain a type of hemoglobin that is so efficient at oxygenating a crocodile’s body that the crocodile can lurk underwater for an hour without coming up for air. Researchers have been able to tweak the DNA responsible for producing human hemoglobin to incorporate some of the genetic instructions found in crocodiles, thereby creating more efficient human hemoglobin. This superhuman hemoglobin is currently only produced by bacteria in vats and is intended for medical applications, but in principle it could be engineered into human being, giving them Aquaman-like powers.

There are certain physiological limits to what you can borrow, (for example, angel-sized wings on a human being would still be too underpowered to allow him or her to fly. If you really want a character to have working wings, a more radical rearrangement of the superhero’s body plan would be required) but nonetheless scientists have been taking useful traits from one organism and engineering them other organisms for decades now—a famous example is a gene found in the crystal jellyfish that produces a protein that fluoresces, giving off green light. This gene has been used to create “glow-in-the-dark” rabbits, fish, cats, mice and more. You’re not limited to transferring genes between animals either—you can mix and match between bacteria, animals and plants.

This technology is known as transgenics, and it was first demonstrated in 1973. It—along with other advances in genetic engineering—so freaked scientists out at the time that they agreed to a voluntary moratorium on any related experiments until an international conference—the Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA—was held in 1975 to establish the rules under which research would be conducted. These rules included a list of prohibited experiments that were deemed to be too dangerous as they might result in horrible scenarios, such as the release of deadly new diseases into the wild.

The big technical problem with transgenics is getting the desired new genetic material into an organism’s cells. With adult creatures, the techniques of “somatic gene therapy” could be used. In a nutshell, this involves taking a infectious agent, such as a virus, and modifying it to transport the desired new DNA into the subject’s cells. With some agents, known as retroviruses, the new DNA is integrated into the cell’s genome, along with the rest of the cell’s native DNA. This means that as long as the cell is alive, the altered DNA will continue to function, and if the cell divides, the new DNA will be passed onto to its daughter cells. Other methods of delivery do not integrate the new DNA into the cell’s genome, meaning that the effectiveness of the therapy can decline over time, as the host body makes new cells without the modified instructions.

Gene therapy is promising in theory, and there have been some early successes in treating genetic diseases, but there also have been some disasters. Cancer is a possible side effect. There is also always the risk of triggering a massive immune response, which is what killed the most famous victim of gene therapy-gone-bad, 18-year-old Jesse Gelsinger. He died of multiple organ failure within four days of receiving an experimental gene therapy intended to treat his liver disease.

If you are willing to ignore a lot of laws, you could do away with gene therapy and start with a human egg. Developing an egg fertilized with altered DNA into a baby would automatically mean that every cell in the subject’s body would have the new genetic material, and could pass those genes on to his or her descendants. This situation is analogous to what occurs when a natural mutation arises, and can also give rise to extraordinary abilities. For example, in 2005, DISCOVER reported on a six-year-old boy, dubbed “Superboy” who was born with bulging muscles. By age six, he could easily lift two seven-pound weights with arms held out horizontally. Researchers identified the cause of his super strength as being due to a mutated gene for myostatin, a growth factor that tells muscles when to stop growing.

Why not give all our children the gene for superstrength? Or a gene related to higher intelligence? The problem is that when we go beyond treating a disease and trying to enhance humans in this way, we would lose a vast amount of genetic diversity, which would sooner or later come back to bite us in the ass. Genetic diversity is so important to the survival of higher life forms that it prompted the evolution of sex, despite all of the drawbacks and effort involved in trying to find a mate.

Sex is a great way to let a species constantly shuffle and recombine DNA from a pool of genes. This helps us keep one step ahead of all sorts of challenges, including pathogens. If we selected a handful of favored genes, and spread them throughout the population at the expense of other genes, we would be at risk of creating a human genetic monoculture. Monocultures are notoriously prone to falling prey to epidemics of disease, as occurred in Ireland in the 19th century when the dominant strain of potatoes turned out to be very susceptible to blight. The resulting famine killed a million people.

But what about giving your superhero powers beyond those found in nature, like the ability to shoot a freeze-ray from their hands or telekinesis? There we must step beyond the bounds of pure genetic engineering and start using nanotechnology or cybernetic modifications, both of which will be the subject of future Codex Futurius entries.