Science fiction has a problem: everyone looks the same. I know there are a few series that have aliens that look unimaginably different from human beings. But those are the exception, not the rule. Most major sci-fi series – Star Wars, Babylon 5, Mass Effect, Star Trek, Farscape, Stargate – have alien species that are hominid.

Consider the above image. Of the twenty visible species, only five are visibly not hominid. That’s right, I count the prawn, xenomorph, predator, Cthulhu and A.L.F. as being hominid. I grant that it’s a bit of a stretch. A more conservative evaluation would be that only two of the twenty are truly hominid. The others, which we’ll call pseudo-hominids, still share the following with humans: bipedal locomotion; bilateral symmetry; a morphology of head, trunk, two arms, and two legs; upright posture; and forward-facing, stereoscopic eyes. I grant they don’t look precisely human, but the similarities are too striking to be swept into the nearest black hole.

Even the most strident supporter of parallel evolution would laugh in the face of anyone who claimed that the most intelligent species on nearly every planet in the universe just happened to evolve the exact same physiology. In series like Star Trek and Mass Effect, where interspecies relationships are possible, this cross-species compatibility is made even more preposterous. We all suspend our scientific disbelief to enjoy the story and the characters. No one believes for a second that the first species we meet in the cosmos is going to look just like us save for some pointy ears and a bowl haircut.

But what if many species in the universe do look like humans? How in Carl Sagan’s cosmos could we explain parallel evolution of that magnitude? Star Trek: The Next Generation, manages to give a scientifically plausible answer to the question of hominid and biologically compatible alien species in an episode entitled “The Chase.” Which lead me to develop the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens.

My guess is that the writers of ST:TNG didn’t intend to plug a genre-spanning plot hole in “The Chase” given that it is, on its own, a pretty goofy episode. But, intentional or not, they gave me enough fuel to come up with a theory that would explain away a lot of sci-fi alien species similarity without resorting to a “that’s just how it is” answer. That said, I’m going to ignore the plot and jump right to the meaty conclusion. At the end of a string of clues, the crew of the Enterprise, along with a begrudging team of Klingons, Cardassians, and Romulans, activate a message from a past species. Star Trek lore is mixed as to what the nature of this species actually is, so I’m going to leverage some creative license and summarize it as I see fit. In short, an ancient hominid species sends a message to all future hominid species. That message is as follows:

Intelligent life evolved in the universe – once. The First Intelligent Species became spacefaring but, unlike the adventures depicted in most science fiction, they found an uninhabited universe. Non-intelligent species were too rudimentary or too far away to be detected. Thus, as both a memorial to themselves and to enliven the universe, the First Intelligent Species seeded the necessary DNA for the eventual evolution of intelligent life in the primordial oceans of every planet that could support life. The First Intelligent Species did not only design the DNA to evolve intelligently, but to parallel their own evolution. An application of the idea that “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” on the scale of life itself. Our corner of the universe thereby became the home of Vulcans, Romulans, Cardassians, Humans, Betazoids, and other hominid species which are all decedents of the First Intelligent Species. Therefore, in the eyes of the universe, the many hominid species are closely related despite their disparate home planets.

The Hominid Panspermia Theory, as I call it, explains a lot. Why are most hominid species variations only cosmetic and cultural? Because their genetics are designed to prevent significant deviation from the First Intelligent Species’ mold. How can species interbreed? They share a distant ancestor the way lions and tigers do. How are there so many species at nearly the same level of technological development? Life was seeded on many planets at approximately the same time. These nagging, infuriating questions that take me out of the story can be set aside because I have a plausible scientific explanation. The Hominid Panspermia Theory also titillates my need to believe we are neither the only nor the first intelligent species in the universe.

The Hominid Panspermia Theory also helps explain how there are so many bizarre life-forms throughout the universe without invoking near-deity races like the Q. One could argue that in the time that it took the seeded planets to evolve spacefaring hominid species, many other forms of life, intelligent and otherwise, evolved as well. The result is a near-universe that is largely populated by hominid alien species and a far-universe populated by inconceivably strange alien species. Furthermore, unintentional forward-contamination from the First Intelligent Species would have allowed unguided panspermia to trigger life in unexpected and unanticipated ways. Thus, many alien first contacts with Humanity were with hominid aliens. As exploration continued outward from the seeded galaxies, stranger and more truly alien species were encountered.

Finally, the Hominid Panspermia Theory still requires abiogenesis at some point and allows for multiple occurrences. That is, human beings could theoretically be the First Intelligent Species. Or among some of the only life in the universe. You don’t have to presume humanity is the product of some previous species to believe the Hominid Panspermia Theory is a scientific possibility, nor does Hominid Panspermia Theory fall prey to the “well who seeded the seeders?” reductio.

I apply the Hominid Panspermia Theory theory to pretty much every sci-fi series I encounter that involves multiple alien species that are hominid. For series in which the species are distinctly hominid but not mammalian, such as Mass Effect, I just modify the theory so that the First Intelligent Species was arbitrarily dumping seed genetic code into every splash of primordial soup they could find with no intent to reproduce themselves and/or that their explorations recklessly forward-contaminated the universe. Life with a very similar genetic base still gets scattered about, but less planning leads to much less parallel evolution.

Thanks to the Hominid Panspermia Theory of Science Fiction Aliens, my neurotic need to explain the similarity among spacefaring species is sated and I can go back to enjoying the photon blasts and spaceship explosions.

Bonus Points: Can anyone name all the aliens in the picture? I only managed fourteen out of twenty.

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

Image of diverse aliens via alien species wiki. Image of ancient hominid via memory alpha.

Do you ever worry that Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) wasn’t really giving informed consent when he agreed to become enhanced? Or are curious as to why someone might choose a bionic hand over a real one? The awesome Maggie Koerth-Baker of boingboing.net and I had some of the same questions. We chat about the ethics of superheroes and our perception of science in this week’s Science Saturday on bloggingheads.tv. Enjoy!

I love Pixar. Who doesn’t? The stories are magnificently crafted, the characters are rich, hilarious, and unique, and the images are lovingly rendered. Without fail, John Ratzenberger’s iconic voice makes a cameo in some boisterous character. Even if you haven’t seen every film they’ve made (I refuse to watch Cars or its preposterous sequel), there is a consistency and quality to Pixar’s productions that is hard to deny.

Popular culture is often dismissed as empty “popcorn” fare. Animated films find themselves doubly-dismissed as “for the kids” and therefore nothing to take too seriously. Pixar has shattered those expectations by producing commercially successful cinematic art about the fishes in our fish tanks and the bugs in our backyards. Pixar films contain a complex, nuanced, philosophical and political essence that, when viewed across the company’s complete corpus, begins to emerge with some clarity.

Buried within that constant  and complex goodness is a hidden message.

Now, this is not your standard “Disney movies hide double-entendres and sex imagery in every film” hidden message. “So,” you ask, incredulous, “What could one of the most beloved and respected teams of filmmakers in our generation possibly be hiding from us?” Before you dismiss my claim, consider what is at stake. Hundreds of millions of people have watched Pixar films. Many of those watchers are children who are forming their understanding of the world. The way in which an entire generation sees life and reality is being shaped, in part, by Pixar.

What if I told you they were preparing us for the future? What if I told you Pixar’s films will affect how we define the rights of millions, perhaps billions, in the coming century? Only by analyzing the collection as a whole can we see the subliminal concept being drilled into our collective mind. I have uncovered the skeleton key deciphering the hidden message contained within the Pixar canon. Let’s unlock it.

Before we begin, I ask you to watch the video below. Leandro Copperfield stitched together this seven minute tribute to “The Beauty of Pixar.” Full screen. HD. I dare you to not be moved.

People love these films. They are a part of our lives and of our culture. Pixar has artfully built a universe of beloved critters and beings that populate our popular consciousness. The analysis that follows is in the spirit of reverence and respect for the great contribution Pixar has made to our world.

To understand Pixar films, one must first to go back to Disney before Toy Story was released – to be precise, The Lion King. On top of being my favorite Shakespeare adaptation, The Lion King is the only Disney film to date with zero references to the existence of human beings. Disney and Pixar rarely have humans as the sole intelligent entities in their movies. Excluding plots requiring magic, non-human characters in Disney films are either anthropomorphous animals (e.g. walking upright, wearing clothes, drinkin’ out of cups) that take the place of humans (e.g. Robin Hood or The Rescuers) or are animals with a preternatural awareness of and ability to interact with feral human beings (e.g. The Jungle Book or Tarzan). The Lion King stands out in that the universe is animal only. There is no trash on the Serengeti, no airplanes flying over, no animals in hats or walking unnaturally on hind legs. You can’t even date when the story takes place, because there are no human references from which to calculate an approximation. Save for the fact that Zazu knows “I’ve Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts,” there is no evidence that the characters within The Lion King even know humans exist.

The Lion King gives us a clean slate. We know what a non-human world looks like. Now we can tackle how Pixar handles people.

The relationship between humans and the non-human characters is critical to understanding Pixar’s movies. There are certain rules in Pixar movies that make things far more interesting than the average Disney fairy tale. The first is that there is no magic. No problems are caused or fixed by the wave of a wand. Second, every Pixar film happens in the world of human beings (see why I excluded Cars? It’s ridiculous and out of character for Pixar). Even in films like a A Bug’s Life and Finding Nemo, in which humans only exist as backdrops for the action, humanity’s presence in the story is essential. The first two rules are pretty direct: the universe Pixar’s characters inhabit is non-magical and co-inhabited by humans.

The third rule is that at least one main character is an intelligent being that isn’t a human. This rule is a bit complex, so let’s flesh it out. There are two types human roles in Pixar films. The first is Human as Villain. In films like the Toy Story 1, 2, & 3, A Bug’s Life, and Finding Nemo, the protagonists are all non-human. Ancillary characters like Sid, the Collector, and Darla are not main characters. A more accurate description would be that they are pieces of the environment and, on occasion, playing the role of supporting antagonist. The second type of Pixar film is Human as Partner. In these films, the main character befriends a human being as part of the hero’s journey: Remy, Colette, and Linguini; WALL-E, EVE, Mary and John; Sully, Mike, and Boo; Russell, Carl, Kevin and Dug. These are the heroic teams of their respective films.

In each Pixar film, at least one member of the team is human and at least one member is not human but possesses human levels of intelligence.

You can see where I’m going here. Particularly in WALL•E, Ratatouille and Up! there is no ambiguity about the reality of intelligence in the non-human characters. Each Pixar film asks us to accept one deviation from our reality. While it seems like the deviation is different in every case (e.g. monsters are real, robots can fall in love, fish have a sense of family, Kevin is a girl, a rat can cook), the simple fact is that Pixar only asks us to accept one idea over and over and over again:

Non-humans are sentient beings. That is the central difference between Pixar’s universe and our current reality.

That idea alone would suffice to show that Pixar films are all but propaganda for the concept of non-human personhood. But that is where the hidden message begins.

What makes these films so astonishing and the message so powerful is the story arc of the Human as Partner narrative. The story begins with a non-human living among a familiar setting. Be it WALL-E alone among the garbage, Remy with his massive extended family, or Sully and Mike Wazowski on their way to work, we are introduced to the hero in relative normalcy. Yet each of these characters deviate from their fellow non-humans. Remy wants to cook. WALL-E falls in love. In each case, the deviant non-human is ostracized. Dug is laughed at for his ineptitude and Sully and Mike are banished to live with the Abominable Agreeable Snowman.

In being ostracized, however, the non-human encounters a human. Remy, lost in the kitchen, meets Linguini. Kevin and Dug both partner up with Carl and Russell. The deviant behavior acts as a catalyst for the first interaction. Furthermore, the human is also deviant. Boo is not afraid of monsters. John and Mary (the two people who help WALL-E and EVE) get out of their hover chairs and look away from the screens. Carl escapes the old folks home with a balloon-house airship. A team is formed when the mutual outsiders recognize a shared sense of purpose. Human and non-human rebels alike seek out each other. In combining efforts, however, the team doubles their opposition, with the non-human and human normative majorities rejecting and condemning their behavior. Remy is criticized by his father and alienates his friends while Linguini loses the respect of the entire kitchen and is at risk of having the restaurant closed for health violations. There is a high cost for non-conformity.

The new is seen as dangerous and therefore feared. Pixar’s Human as Partner films emphasize that should a non-human intelligence arise, be it a rat or a robot or a monstrous alien, there will be no welcoming with arms wide open from either side.

Victory in the battle for the rights and respect from both groups will come from an act of exemplary personhood and humaneness by those who dare to break ranks with their kind. Thus, the Human as Partner story arc ends with the capitulation of those who refused to recognize the personhood of the non-human and a huge reward coming to those who accepted the non-humans as fellow persons. In Monsters Inc. Mike and Sully discover that laughter yields far more energy than screams. In Ratatouille Anton Ego has an epiphany and gives one of my favorite speeches of all time in response to a Proustian flashback he experiences after eating Remy’s cooking. In WALL•E none less than the human race is saved from the brink of self-induced-extinction. In short, the benefits for humanity are tremendous in every case where non-human persons are treated with respect.

There is one Pixar film that does not fit either the Humans as Villains or Humans as Partner structure: The Incredibles. Instead of non-human protagonists, we are treated to super-human protagonists and antagonists. Yet the struggle from outcast to redeemer is the same, only this time, it is because the super-humans come together as a family. What enables the Incredible family to succeed is not that they are superhuman but that they are humane; that they love, support, and protect one another. As a result, the society that once feared and banished them sees the supers not as Others, but has fellow members of humanity.

Taken together as a whole narrative, the Pixar canon diagrams what will likely this century’s main rights battle – the rights of personhood – in three stages.

First are the Humans as Villain stories, in which the non-humans discover and develop personhood. I mean, Buzz Lightyear’s character arc is about his becoming self-aware as a toy. These films represent nascent personhood among non-human entities. For the viewer, we begin to see how some animals and items we see as mindless may have inner lives of which we are unaware.

Second are the Humans as Partners stories, in which exceptional non-humans and exceptional humans share a moment of mutual recognition of personhood. The moment when Linguini realizes Remy is answering him is second only to the moment when Remy shows Ego around the kitchen – such beautiful transformations of the Other into the self. These films represent the first forays of non-human persons into seeking parity with human beings.

Third, and finally, there is The Incredibles, which turns the personhood equation on its head. Instead of portraying the struggle for non-humans to be accepted as human, The Incredibles shows how human enhancement, going beyond the human norm, will trigger equally strong reactions of revulsion and otherization. The message, however, is that the human traits we value have nothing to do with our physical powers but are instead based in our moral and emotional bonds. Beneficence and courage require far more humanity than raw might. The Incredibles teaches a striking lesson: human enhancement does not make you inhuman – the choices you make and the way you treat others determines how human you really are.

Pixar has given those who would fight for personhood the narratives necessary to convince the world that non-humans that display characteristics of a person deserve the rights of a person. For every category there is a character: uplifted animals (Dug), naturally intelligent species (Remy and Kevin), A.I robots (WALL-E, EVE), and alien/monsters (Sully & Mike). Then there is the Incredible family, transhumans with superpowers. Through the films, these otherwise strange entities become  unmistakably familiar, so clearly akin to us.

The message hidden inside Pixar’s magnificent films is this: humanity does not have a monopoly on personhood. In whatever form non- or super-human intelligence takes, it will need brave souls on both sides to defend what is right. If we can live up to this burden, humanity and the world we live in will be better for it.

An entire generation has been reared with the subconscious seeds of these ideas planted down deep. As history moves forward and technology with it, these issues will no longer be the imaginings of films and fiction, but of politics and policy. But Pixar has settled the personhood debate before it arrives. By watching our favorite films, we have been taught that being human is not the same as being a person. We have been shown that new persons and forms of personhood can come from anywhere. Through Pixar, we have opened ourselves to a better future.

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

Image of Dug seeking a squirrel via The Pixar Podcast.com

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.

Back in the early 1990s, Jon Durant very usefully outlined out the three main types of scientific literacy. This is probably as good a place to start as any:

• Knowing some science – For example, having A-level biology, or simply knowing the laws of thermodynamics, the boiling point of water, what surface tension is, that the Earth goes around the Sun, etc.
• Knowing how science works – This is more a matter of knowing a little of the philosophy of science (e.g. ‘The Scientific Method’, a matter of studying the work of Popper, Lakatos or Bacon).
• Knowing how science really works – In many respects this agrees with the previous point – that the public need tools to be able to judge science, but does not agree that science works to a singular method. This approach is often inspired by the social studies of science and stresses that scientists are human. It covers the political and institutional arrangement of science, including topics like peer review (including all the problems with this), a recent history of policy and ethical debates and the way funding is structured

On the first point, I do think that there are some basic science facts which should be required fodder in K-12 education. From my field alone, people should not only know that Earth orbits the sun, they should know that our year is based upon the time takes Earth to complete the journey.  Don’t laugh. On my last birthday, when I told folks that I’d completed another orbit of the Sun, a distressing number of them did not understand the implication and, upon further questioning, didn’t know that Earth’s orbital period was the basis of one year. K-12 students should know that the Moon orbits Earth, why it goes through phases, and given it’s significance (in particular for several religious holidays), that our month is based upon that orbital period. Finally, everybody should know why we have seasons.

Knowing how to find Polaris, the North Star, and why your satellite TV installer pointed the dish south-facing, are both practical, but I’d place those in the category of “nice to have” not “need to have.” At the same time, I also think there’s a fourth bullet item that Dr. Bell could have included, one to which she alludes in the body of her text:

Science isn’t necessarily a transferable skill. This is easily demonstrated by examining carefully the lives of scientists outside of the laboratory (or, to put it another way: “yeah, cos scientists are all sooo well organised outside of work, living super-rational evidence-based lives, all the time”). It would be lovely if we could provide a formula for well-lived lives, but people just aren’t that consistent.

In addition to teaching factoids—even useful ones—about science, and in addition to educating non-scientists about the process of science, educators need in instill  a willingness in people use the lessons learned and knowledge imparted. Why do we learn this stuff? Why is it practical?

At the same time, there is a human tendency, to which Dr. Bell alludes in her quote above, to compartmentalize our knowledge. Dr. Bell implies, rightfully so, that many, arguably most, scientists check scientific thought at the door as they leave work–when it would be equally useful in organizing their (our) personal lives. Related, talk to any science educator who’s given a writing assignment. I can guarantee that, at some point(s), the assignment was met with the student question, “Are you going to grade off for English?” as if proper grammar is the purview of English class alone and slacking is allowed in biology (or pick your favorite science). Author Jennifer Oullette uses this notion—that life runs more smoothly and interestingly when met with a dose of science and math–in her Calculus Diaries: How Math Can Help You Lose Weight, Win in Vegas, and Survive a Zombie Apocalypse.

What got me jazzed on this topic, enough to write at length about it, was the confluence of two events – one fun, quirky, and topical, one somewhat more on the horizon – both of which benefit when approached with a due application of scientific skepticism. The first was a recent web buzz, where a Charlie Chaplin movie (and not a particularly good one at that) was, in essence, promoted from the genre of comedy to science fiction. A woman in the 1928 Charlie Chaplin film The Circus appears to be talking on a cell phone, which wasn’t invented until decades later.

A short Google search turns up countless, and often very amusing, analyses on this video like this one from the Washington Post. Apparently George Clark of Yellow Fever Productions noticed the quirk  of the “woman on a cell phone” in the background when he was watching the DVD extras for the film, and after a year of studying this clip, he concluded:

This short film is about a piece of footage I (George Clarke) found behind the scenes in Charlie Chaplin’s film ‘The Circus’. Attending the premiere at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, CA – the scene shows a large woman dressed in black with a hat hiding most of her face, with what can only be described as a mobile phone device – talking as she walks alone.

I have studied this film for over a year now – showing it to over 100 people and at a film festival, yet no-one can give any explanation as to what she is doing.

My only theory – as well as many others – is simple… a time traveler on a mobile phone. See for yourself and feel free to leave a comment on your own explanation or thoughts about it.

Seriously? NOBODY could give an explanation better than that of a time-traveling cell phone user? Well web sites and surfers alike certainly offered up their speculation.

What was surprising, nay a wee bit appalling, was the ratio of conspiracy theories—and just plain “out there” speculation—to critical and/or scientific thought (Though if you read one article, the second post in the talkback, there’s a hilarious example of somebody who tried too hard to apply too much science to the problem, and winds up writing a lengthy discourse, nay manifesto, about Einstein and time and relativity and GPS satellites and the speed of light and… what were we talking about again?).

One simple “Where’s the cell tower?” comment (and thankfully there were some of these) in the articles’ talkbacks  should have been “End of subject”, at least as far as the object being any kind of communications device, and in too many cases it wasn’t. Do the search yourself, even when there were posts of this nature they were often ignored, and outlandish hypotheses floated instead. While I’m not beyond my own tongue-in-cheek blog posts (muzzle flashes from alien warfare anybody?), it’s astounding to me how many Twilight Zone-caliber theories were floated on the 1928 cell phone user that weren’t intended as glib. (Trust me, I’m from the future, and we have way better communication devices than cell phones.)

Which brings me to the second topic that got me to write this, my own manifesto, which is one that is still ahead of us but one on which I’ll posted increasingly often. It’s late 2010, and in the runup to 2012 a quick Google search reveals that the whole Mayan Calendar mythos is still generating a vast amount of fear and fear-mongering.  We will all soon be subject to an onslaught of sketchy scientific claims, references to “lost” ancient wisdom, and predictions of gloom and doom on this front from now until January 2013. Not only is is useful to have Mad Science Skillz to combat outlandish claims, we have to be both willing to use the tools at our disposal and to pay attention when the scientifically perspicacious make what should be topic-concluding “Where’s the cell tower?”-like observations.

Are zombies really dead? How do we know? People are often reported “clinically dead” only to be revived later. If it is moving, if it reacts to stimuli like a food source or sounds, and if metabolic processes are in play, how can we call a zombie dead?

The most basic definition of life is the ability to have “signaling and self-sustaining processes” as the all-knowing Wikipedia tells us:

Living organisms undergo metabolism, maintain homeostasis, possess a capacity to grow, respond to stimuli, reproduce and, through natural selection, adapt to their environment in successive generations.

Zombies do indeed undergo a qualified form of metabolism, sort of maintain homeostasis, and definitely respond to stimuli. Alternately, zombies do not grow, reproduce, or go through natural selection. So much for a clear answer there.

Consider the following: When we “kill” something, we are implying that our action has made an “alive” thing “dead.” We commonly refer to “killing” zombies. Therefore, a zombie is alive until it is killed. Not quite, some might argue, a zombie is undead. Undead is a special word that describes an entity which was once alive in the full meaning of that word, then died, and was then re-animated (e.g. a zombie). The zombie was not re-vivified, that is, brought back to life, but its bare biological systems were re-started.

For example, dismembered frog legs that are given electrical shocks are not “alive” they are merely re-animated. But the frog leg example is insufficient, because the electrical shocks are external, and not part of an organism. In the case of a zombie, the electrical shocks that trigger muscle movement are, as with a living being, generated internally by metabolic processes and neural pathways. The frog legs are not “re-animated,” just artificially stimulated.

At the other end of the spectrum, how about a person who has a heart attack and, due to a delay in resuscitation, temporarily experiences cardio-pulmonary-death and brain-death: a total cessation in life functions. The person is, for a moment, clinically dead. That person is then successfully revived. The heart and lungs begin functioning again and the re-oxygenated brain “comes back to life” with no harm done. This person who is “back from the grave” is revivified. Though their biological functions ceased, for a variety of reasons the destructive postmortem processes were delayed long enough to allow total system restoration.

A zombie isn’t a shocked frog leg nor is it a revived person. Instead, we want to understand whether or not a moving, metabolizing, stimulus-responding corpse is alive. I submit that various parts of a zombie may resemble life, but in reality, it has less “life” than the bacterium eating its eyeball. It is more accurate to say that the pathogen inside the zombie is alive, while the corpse itself is dead. The corpse, as noted in my description of a zombie, is in a constant state of decomposition. While decomposition may be slowed by the pathogen, the process is not stopped.

Most important to the entire discussion, however, is brain activity. Though the body and some parts of the brain stem are reactivated, a zombie is, quite literally, brain-dead. Beating-heart cadavers are a primary example of a “functioning” body preserved by external means. In a zombie, organs function independently to a minimal degree and reflexes (such as balance) exist to some extent. Thus, while the zombie pathogen would do more than our current medical technology can do for a beating-heart cadaver, it neither reverses brain-death nor does it properly maintain basic conditions of life like metabolic processes or homeostasis. Some specific stimulus response systems are re-animated, but this is an illusion of bodily life, not an actual case of life.

Thus, a zombie is a dead body that affects some life-like behavior because it is being controlled by a living pathogen. “Killing” a zombie is, in effect, destroying it in a sufficient way to prevent the pathogen from utilizing the corpse.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part II of IV. (Check out parts I, & III)

Before we can start investigating whether or not something that craves brains has a mind or should be pitied, we need to define just what, exactly, we’re talking about when we talk about zombies.

I’m going to start by ruling out the 28 Days Later zombies and the voodoo/demonic zombies of Evil Dead. First, the name of this blog is Science, not Fiction, which means any religious hokum is right out the door. Demon possession, souls back from Hell, and voodoo are not going to be considered in this investigation. On the other end of the spectrum, in 28 Days Later anything infected with “Rage” becomes a “fast” zombie. In essence, Rage is rabies only way, way scarier. Thus we aren’t dealing with the “undead” so much as the violently insane. So non-fatal pathogens don’t count either. If the pathogen doesn’t first kill you, then re-animate you, then you aren’t a zombie.

Which leads us to the next question: how does the pathogen work? I am not denying here the multitude of variations and nuances among zombie plague viruses, so we have to come up with a generic, realistic version to have our discussion. Zombies generally meet three important criteria. They are 1) stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh 2) continually decomposing and 3) contagious via bodily fluids. If we can explain, reasonably, how and for what reason a pathogen might cause/allow these conditions, we can describe a realistic zombie pathogen.

Condition 1, that zombies are stimulus-response creatures that seek flesh, implies that the pathogen must act to re-animate the existing neural pathways and motor functions in some fashion. Let us presume human-only infection and that the virus, being species specific, results in a cannibalism preference. Thus the sensory systems which are re-activated are capable of distinguishing four key things: flesh-vs-not-flesh; species; infected-vs-uninfected; self. Furthermore, for the sake of simplicity, the virus does not create any new systems, it merely hijacks existing ones.

Next, we have to remember that contracting the zombie pathogen is terminal. Whatever the hijacking process involves, we must presume that an intermediate stage of infection between contamination and zombification is fatal. If I had to guess, the infection of the medulla oblogata – where most automatic processes are regulated – is what results in cardio-pulmonary death, followed shortly by brain-death. Sometime after brain-death the medulla is fully hijacked by the zombie pathogen, jump-started (I won’t attempt an explanation) and re-animation is underway.

Whether it is musculature, perceptive organs, or circulatory and digestive systems, the virus must work with what it has. The metabolic process continues, arguably for both the body and the pathogen, which in large part informs the indiscriminate hunger for flesh. It is critical here to note that a zombie body is not uniquely strong (in fact, the opposite), nor can the body function properly without oxygen, waste disposal, and nutrients. We can, however, presume that a zombie body can, in its own way, marginally function when some of these requirements are missing. However, when an eyeball is gone or the intestines finally rupture, that zombie has lost whatever sense or function was associated with the now deteriorated organ: no healing happens.

Which leads us to Condition 2, that zombies are continually decomposing. No one thinks of a zombie as a healthy, mindless body; you think of a corpse that moves. The re-animation process is, we assume, imperfect or it would be revivification. One of the imperfections is that autolysis – the process wherein a cell’s own enzymes begin to consume it – is not stopped or reversed. As autolysis is the first step in postmortem decay, even a brief period between death and re-animation would cause it to start. Other aspects of decomposition, such as purification and insect infestation, though significantly slowed would likely continue as well.

Based on the average zombie, we can presume a few things about the virus’ relationship to decomposition. First, is that the zombie virus slows decomposition by providing cells with some nutrients. Second, is that the immune system, at least a crippled version, still functions to slow human bacterial flora from consuming their host. Third, it could be presumed that while some cell division continues, repairs and restoration are lost. Fourth, the virus would likely only preserve essential functions, allowing irrelevant parts of the body, such as skin, secondary musculature, and some organs to decay. Finally, we can presume the virus itself must consume flesh to some degree, rendering the zombie’s metabolic processes incredibly inefficient and explaining the insatiability of a zombie. Thus, a zombie frozen in the arctic would likely re-animate upon thaw (pathogen in stasis; corpse preserved) while a zombie at the bottom of the ocean would first suffocate (albeit more slowly) and then be crushed.

Condition 3, that the pathogen is contagious via bodily fluids only, is a critical detail in terms of both staying true to the mythology of zombies and for presenting a scenario in which not everyone would instantly be zombified. An airborne pathogen, particularly one with any sort of incubation period, would be total, unstoppable pandemic. But, more importantly, we are dealing with a creature of fiction. And, just as with other members of the undead (e.g. vampires, werewolves) the bite gets in the blood and turns you

Remember, we almost never see someone getting bitten by a zombie and then not dying and “coming back.” The reason is that a bite both by-passes traditional levels of the immune system and delivers a huge dose of the pathogen directly into the circulatory system. Furthermore, it immediately contaminates the flesh directly exposed. As the zombie pathogen, whatever it is, seems able to interact with most cell types, not just specific ones (as with HIV), it would make sense that direct exposure would allow the virus both permeate the whole system (body) while beginning total infection at the site of contamination as well. It only takes one bite!

There you have it. A zombie pathogen must 1) be transmitted via bodily-fluids to 2) ensure sufficient and total infection which 3) is always fatal due to the fact that pathogen must 4) either consume the host or host-acquired flesh 5) hijack all the necessary functions for movement and sensation 6) provide at least some nutrients to itself and the body 7) allow continued movement and 8.) slow the decomposition of the host body.

Promotional Image via AMCtv.com by Scott Garfield

Halloween is a-comin’ and this Sunday brings us AMC’s The Walking Dead. In honor of that, we’re discussing The Ethics of the Undead here at Science, Not Fiction. This is part I of IV. (Check out parts II, & III)

Zombies are everywhere! Zombieland, Shawn of the Dead, and 28 Days Later in the movies; World War Z and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies on the bookshelf; Left 4 Dead, Dead Rising and Resident Evil in your video games - not to mention the George A. Romero and Sam Rami classics in your DVD collection. And this Sunday Robert Kirkman’s epic The Walking Dead lurches from the pages of comic books onto your television thanks to AMC.

Where ever you turn, zombies are there. We can’t seem to get enough of the re-animated recently departed. But why do we love these ambling carnivorous cadavers so?

Zombies are horrifying. An outbreak would almost certainly lead to global apocalypse. Unrelenting, unthinking, uncaring, undead, they are a nightmare incarnate. They remind us of mortality, of decay, of our own fragility. Perhaps worst, they remind us of how inhuman a human being can become.

Zombies are familiar. Refrains of “Brains!”, guttural groans, and mindless shambling instantly trigger the idea of a zombie in our mind. We all know, somehow, that decapitation – that is, destruction of the zombie brain – is our only salvation. I bet you’ve dressed as one for Halloween. Every time “Thriller” comes on you probably dance like a zombie. Some mornings I feel like a zombie. Even philosophers talk about zombies. We know zombies. They are hilarious, they are frightening, they are part of us. And that is why we love them.

But have you ever asked yourself: is a zombie still a human? is a zombie dead, really? can it feel pain? does a zombie have dignity? Has the question ever popped up in your quite-live brain: is it ok to kill a zombie? Could a zombie be cured? If you could cure it, would you still want to? In honor of Halloween and our culture’s current love affair with brain-eating corpses, I present The Ethics of the Undead, your universal guide for answering all of your most pressing zombie questions. Stay tuned for posts throughout Halloween weekend!

Images via ThatZombiePhoto.com and lolzombie.com

In the early 1930′s, Tesla claimed that he had invented a death ray that would benefit the military in battle—one capable of destroying up to 10,000 enemy aircraft at distances of up to 250 miles.  It was so lethal that it would end the spectacle of war.

Tesla died before he could build this death ray, and he had no documentation hinting at its design in his personal effects. Nobody (not even the FBI) knows what happens to the death ray plans, if any existed.

Now it seems that Tesla’s missing death ray has been found, and it’s working, operational, and frying guests at the Vdara Hotel in Las Vegas.

Just a heads up: The content is explicit, so if frank discussion of sexuality, bodies, and politics is upsetting to you or anyone who may overhear, I’d recommend not listening–or at least wearing headphones.

For those of you comfortable with whatever we may say, you’ll be happy you listened and even happier to discover Kink on Tap.

Image via J (mtonic.com) on Flickr

1. Model implantable artificial kidney getting tested. Make sure you pay your bills or expect the repo men.
2. Locked-in patients get another new way to communicate – MIND SPEECH.
3. “Delusions of Gender.” Everything you think you know about male/female brains is wrong.
4. Progeria (early, rapid aging) has been linked to normal aging. Solve one, help solve the other (maybe).
5. Your brain has a pretty flexible idea of what is actually a part of your body.
6. Three arguments for the consciousness of cephalopods – Annalee Newitz condenses Mike Lisieski’s essay defending the intelligence of these aliens in our backyard. Add them to the list of animals with partial personhood.
7. Five Ways to Well-Being – Wanna live longer? Live better.
8. A Victorian Era prosthetic arm (pictured) is on display at the Science Museum, London. Ash and his boomstick are unimpressed.
9. Hollywood is redesigning humanity! Transhumanism is in vogue.
10. E.O. Wilson attacks selfishness as an evolutionary force.
11. The top 20 essential science fiction TV shows [Scifi 101] – part of io9′s Sci-Fi University, these shows are required reading if you’re gonna really enjoy this blog.

Once or twice before I’ve made a case for diversity as a hallmark of good science fiction. Regardless of one’s present political affiliations, we like our sci-fi casts to be a plurality of uncanny and unfamiliar characters. The future of our species is, in part, dependent upon how well we get along with other forms of sentient life. So which stellar explorers would earn the stamp of approval from the Rainbow Coalition of the 24½th Century? After weeding out (most) all-human crews (sorry BSG!) and some of the less well-known teams (sorry Bucky O’Hare!), I’ve come up with a top five list. We’ve got genetic mutants, alcoholic robots, holograms, bisexual aliens, snarky A.I., clones, cryonauts, cyborgs, and every variant of human being imaginable. Did I leave anyone out?

5. The Space Shuttle Discovery Crew Mission STS-116 (pictured above)

The only all-human (and real) crew on my list, the STS-116 mission broke all sorts of records, with two African-Americans, two women, two European Space Agency astronauts, and a Jewish-Korean American pilot. Normally I am loath to describe any group of people by their various identities, instead of their individual personalities and achievements, but in light of the homogeneous nature of the earlier space program and much of sci-fi, the fact that a crew this diverse already exists is wonderful. STS-116 is both an excellent sign we’re moving in the right direction and a perfect first entry for this list.

4. Red Dwarf

A British comedy, Red Dwarf is about the misadventures of the remaining crew from the titular mining ship. Due to a radiation leak and an serendipitous bit of stasis, David Lister was awoken after 3 million years to discover he was the last person alive in the whole universe.

The least diverse of the top five, the crew of the Red Dwarf is comprised of David Lister, the last (and most disgusting) human in the universe; Arnold Rimmer, a hologram of his former-self; Kryten, an anal-retentive, know-it-all android; Cat, a humanoid descendent of Lister’s cat, has fangs, narcissism, and style like no one else; and finally, Holly. Sometimes male, sometimes female, always maintaining a stiff-upper lip, Holly is an A.I. that keeps things ostensibly running on the derelict ship. For a show that pretty much just has these five cast members, Red Dwarf makes the most of its motley crew.

3. Star Trek

The various and varied crews of the USS Enterprise and its sister ships in Star Fleet are too numerous to list, but the first crew set a new precedent for television. Kirk’s crew, first introduced to Americans in 1966, had Uhura, Sulu, and Checkov on the main bridge, with Spock, an alien, as the first officer. Sadly, the original Star Trek is still a high-water mark for diversity on television, matched only by its successors, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 and Voyager.

Complementing the already ethnically diverse humans, notable crew members from each series include: Worf, the first Klingon in Star Fleet; Data, the first sentient android; Odo, a changeling; and Seven of Nine, a de-assimilated borg. In addition to these prominent non-humans, many members of each crew are at least partially cybernetic (Picard has an artificial heart, Jordi’s trademark Chevy-grill visor), and, like Spock, many are half-human, half-alien. Roddenberry’s commitment to unique cultures for each alien, as well as his preservation of many human ethnic traditions deep into the future, created a universe that set the gold standard for how a human future in space might be.

2. Futurama

Futurama is that perfect blend of homage, pastiche, and parody. Gene Roddenberry’s future was a believable utopia; Matt Groening and David X. Cohen’s future is a believable madhouse. The Planet Express crew does the Star Trek: Next Generation Crew a step better, having not just a robot (Bender) and an alien (Zoidberg), but also a cryonaut (Fry), a mutant (Leela), and a clone (Hubert Farnsworth). Throw in the recurring cast members of Lt. Kif Kroker, Lrrrr of Omicron Persei 8, Robot Nixon, celebrity heads in jars, and Nibbler and, well, it’s hard to get more diverse than that.

But they do. This season, the entire crew switched bodies and Bender bent his sexuality (again). That nearly every member of Planet Express has made out with or been to the “Lovenaisium” with another species, a robot, and/or changed genders is, I believe, a unique achievement.

1. Mass Effect

Mass Effect may be the most important new sci-fi story out there. Cliff Bleszinski calls it the “Star Wars for the next generation,” and I’m inclined to agree. In the universe of Mass Effect, humans have only recently become an interstellar species. Not only are we relative newcomers to the intergalactic community, we don’t even have a seat on the Council, which governs the dozens of races present in Mass Effect‘s universe. Unlike Red Dwarf, Star Trek, and Futurama, Mass Effect’s entire narrative puts humans in the position of the minority. By the end of Mass Effect 2, Commander Shepard’s crew on the Normandy consists of fifteen characters, the majority of which are non-human.

If you play Mass Effect as a female Shepard (as you should), your crew by the last mission has eight female members and seven male members. Among the humans, one is a clone (Miranda), one is telekinetic (Jack), one is a cyborg (Shepard), and the pilot (Joker) is crippled by a disease. All the non-human crew mates (there are eight) are either a unique alien race (among nineteen options) or are synthetic life, including EDI (the ship A.I.) and Legion, a member of the Geth (a collective robotic species). Among the various species, skin color and body type are only the beginnings of their differences. Sexuality, gender representation, gender hierarchy, immuno-response, diet, life-span, intelligence, thought patterns, aggression, empathy, and genetic variety all differ from species to species. These fundamental biological differences are reflected in the total culture of each species as well as within the individuals on the crew of the Normandy, creating a staggering potpourri of characters that populate the universe of Mass Effect.

As with all video games, the sense of immersion is even more intense than on a television series, which in turn makes the feeling of unity and loyalty to the crew unparalleled. The resulting effect is that you, the human, come to implicitly trust, care for, and even mourn beings that repulsed, angered, or horrified you. At the beginning of Mass Effect, you are a member of humanity. By the end of the second game, you are a citizen and hero of Council space, and see yourself linked to not merely your crew members, but the species and cultures they represent.

Like Futurama, Mass Effect is a work in progress. As the series both continue, expect more new and strange permutations to push the boundaries of whom we consider “one of us.”

Image of STS-116 crew via Wikipedia, Red Dwarf crew via Topless Robot, Futurama crew via Wired, and Mass Effect via the Mass Effect Wiki and my Photoshop skillz.

The exhibit is broken down into four areas:

ALIEN FICTION

The alien fiction section was small, and had a collection of movie props, videos, and sections devoted to Roswell and the Alien Autopsy video.  Interestingly the content in the Roswell section was donated by the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, NM, so I felt it was slightly skewed in favor of the object that crashed at Roswell being of an extraterrestrial nature, while the content provided for the Alien Autopsy video practically screamed “THIS WAS A HOAX!”

ALIEN SCIENCE

What might aliens look like?  Where might we find them? Are alien life forms most likely to be (from our viewpoint) extremophiles?  While astronomers and planetary scientists often make the claim that “we study other worlds to learn more about Earth,” this section emphasizes the reverse:  What have we learned about our planet, its life, and the Solar System to further help us find life “out there.”  There are exhibits that describe potential abodes of life in the Solar System, extremophile life, even bizarre Earth creatures that simply look alien. Of the four sections, this is the least speculative, most grounded in science. Later one of the docents told me that, surprisingly, this section is overwhelmingly the most popular with kids.

ALIEN WORLDS

To me this section was, by far, the most interesting of the exhibit. This section details the hypothetical worlds Aurelia and Blue Moon: the worlds and their ecosystems.  Aurelia is a hypothetical planet that is tidally locked to a red dwarf; Blue Moon is an Earth-sized moon orbiting a jovian gas giant planet. These planets and their creatures were designed by scientists who study extremophile life forms, planetary scientists, and scientists who search for extraterrestrial civilizations. In fact, the creatures inhabiting both of these worlds are very reminiscent of those from Wayne Barlowe’s Expedition. It was also in this section that I was “adopted” by a very nice docent named Ann who personally showed me the aspects of various exhibits that she found most interesting.

Thor! Buddy! Tell me if you’ve heard this one. An Asgard walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Why the long face?”

ALIEN COMMUNICATION

What is the like likelihood of there being other civilizations out there? If they are out there, how would we communicate? That’s the theme in the final section of the exhibit.

Hey I recognize that! The Drake Equation.

After examining all the bizarre earthly “alien” life forms in “ALIEN SCIENCE”, and after being transported to both Aurelia and Blue Moon in “ALIEN WORLDS,” I found this last section relatively anticlimatic, and probably the least interesting of the four sections. There was, however, a fun little alien gift shop immediately beyond. I like little shops.

Yes, I realize that I should have visited/posted before San Diego Comic-Con, when so many more people — the kind who are likely to enjoy this kind of thing — could have stopped in. Still, the San Diego Air and Space Museum will be hosting the Science of Aliens from now until the end of the year.

We are a group of professionals. We treat each other with respect and we have a great working relationship. Personal relationships are not … an issue. We don’t have them and we won’t.

Hang on a second. I’m not sure that the concepts of “sex in space” and “professional” are mutually exclusive. I’m sure that, given what we’ve learned about human physiology because of spaceflight, that there are any number of cardiologists, internists, endocrinologists, OB/GYNs, and a whole host of other health-care professionals and researchers who would love to have physiological data taken of a couple before, during, and after a union in a microgravity environment. These researchers would be the Masters and Johsons, Kinseys, and perhaps even the Shere Hites of their time.

For me, though, when I first read Poindexter’s denial about sex in space, the first thing I thought of was Gene Cernan.

Wait, that came out wrong. Better elaborate.

Gene Cernan (the last human to leave the lunar surface, fellow Purdue Boilermaker, and one of my personal heroes) did one of NASA’s first spacewalks on Gemini 9. Unlike the previous EVA (extra-vehicle activity) of Ed White in Gemini 4, Cernan did not have a hand-held thruster unit — the goal of the EVA was for Cernan to make his way to the back of the spacecraft and don a much larger maneuvering unit, like the MMU operated almost 20 years later. Cernan had a very difficult time maneuvering his body in the airless/microgravity environment of space, his visor fogged, his suit overheated, and he never made it to the back of the spacecraft. Michael Collins had similar difficulties aboard Gemini 10. Learning of the low-gravity tribulations of Cernan and Collins, Astronaut Buzz Aldrin designed tools, handholds, and techniques for his flight aboard Gemini 12, and moved comparatively effortlessly.

NOW you can probably see where this is going.

On Earth, when it comes to the act of making love, gravity is a great enabler — certainly when it comes to the, uh, harmonic oscillations one normally associates with various sexual acts. In microgravity, a whole host of Newton’s Laws of Motion come into play, and clearly one would need a bevy of straps, velcro, and fasteners — and that’s WELL before even coming close to the realm of  kinky or B&D.

The book “Sex in Space” by Laura Woodmansee describes several potential positions by which low-gravity sex could be performed, but after reviewing the book (strictly for scientific curiosity, mind you), it looks like many of those positions would leave Barbarella and Buck flailing about — not unlike Gene Cernan on Gemini 9. Space.com did a review on the book, covering some of the topics explored within, but they didn’t discuss the topic of potentially enabling positions. (LiveScience did, however, discuss this notion briefly; so did Robert A. Freitas, Jr.)

On the reverse side of that, under the right conditions the microgravity environment of near-Earth orbit might allow a return to intimacy for people who, because of injury or disease, can’t have sex on Earth. So after the upcoming explosion of private space flight, after we’ve established lunar colonies, you can almost see that the Sandals Resorts will get into the game with a new resort called “Moon Boots.”

Humor aside, and as “clinical” as this sounds, it might not be a bad idea to consider monitoring people having sex when there are protocols and experimental controls in place, instead of allowing people who simply want to join the “Hundred Mile High Club” experiment haphazardly.

We’d learn a lot about human physiology, and imagine the spinoffs!

I’ve always maintained that in science fiction TV and cinema good science should be jettisoned in deference to drama as a last resort only–and then when you have all your other  ducks in a row. If the science is solid in the large bulk of your work, we’ll make the leap with you when you get a bit more… speculative. Some works stick to grounded science well, some do not.

Therefore, for my clips, I chose two instances of the same type of  event–the impact of a comet/asteroid with Earth — one done well (Deep Impact), one that could have been done better (Armageddon).

Since Deep Impact‘s science is fairly solid, and their science advisor (they actually had one!) once told me “We pretty much get our mistakes out of the way in the first five minutes”, there’s little to say. There’s plenty to say with the Armageddon clip I chose — which was the first 40 seconds of the movie. The opening of Armageddon purports to show what is called the K/T Event — the asteroid or comet impact 65 million years ago that caused most of life on Earth, including the dinosaurs, to meet extinction.

The opening narration, done by Charlton Heston doing his best Moses voice, starts out:

It hit with the force of 10,000 nuclear weapons.

Here’s where getting the science right would have improved the drama.  To be more correct, Charlton Heston wouild have said:

It hit with the force of over 19 million 1 megaton nuclear weapons.

Or

It hit with a force almost 1.5 billion times the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

While Charlton narrates, the video shows the impact, and a blast wave traveling over the entire planet. While normally willing to suspend disbelief happily, from a science standpoint this movie lost me in the first 30 seconds when I first saw it in the theatre. The blast would not have traveled that far. What the video could have shown, and Charlton could have described in his best “The Dinosaurs Have Been Smote” voice was the several-hundred-foot-high tsunami that raced away from the impact. Or the chunks of impactor and target rock that fell back to Earth as secondary impacts, setting most of the world’s forests on fire.

What Charlton says instead is:

A trillion tons of dirt and rock hurtled into the atmosphere.

That’s about 1/10 the mass of the impactor (assuming it was an asteroid), so that number isn’t too bad, but, where’s the drama? What is the result of this?  He continues with:

…creating a suffocating blanket of dust the sun was powerless to penetrate for a thousand years.

Probably not that long, the dust probably settled out faster than that — without the sun’s life-giving radiation, it would not have taken long for Earth’s ecosystem to collapse.

It happened before.  It will happen again.

Yay! They got something right!  It’s clear that had the folks who made Armageddon stuck to known science, they could have made this scene simultaneously more realistic and more dramatic.

If you missed the panel, weren’t able to attend Comic-Con, or were turned away at the door because the room was packed, here’s the video:

The “Science of Science Fiction” panel will be back at San Diego Comic-Con again next year — hopefully in a much larger space (and hopefully it will still be in San Diego).

The Bradbury panel featured Bradbury talking to his biographer, Sam Weller. I’m just going to share select quotes from his remarks. These are in order, but incomplete.

“The Internet to me is a great big goddamn stupid bore.”

“I got a call from a man who wanted to publish my books on the Internet. I told him, prick up your ears and go to hell.”

[Bradbury has met most, if not all, of the Apollo and Gemini astronauts.]

“All those astronauts had read the Martian Chronicles. When they were young men, they read my books and decided they wanted to become astronauts.”

“[Twilight Zone creator] Rod Serling came to my house many years ago, he didn’t know anything about writing science fiction and fantasy. So I took him down to my basement and gave him copies of books by Richard Matheson, copies of books by Henry Kuttner, copies of books written by Roald Dahl and by John Collier, and a couple of books by myself. And Rod Serling forgot he read all those books, and when he wrote the program, he copied some of the ideas without telling me. So we got into a big argument, so finally I walked away from the Rod Serling show. He had a great show, but he forgot the basis of the show were all the books I gave him by all my friends.”

[* Thanks to commenter John Joseph Adams for figuring this one out.]

“I read comic strips all my life I have all of Prince Valiant put away. I have all of Buck Rogers put away, too. I put away those starting when I was 19 years old. So my background in becoming a writer was falling in love with comic strips.”

“I read the comic strips, I learned how to write.”

“My favorite that’s in the paper every day is called Mutts.”

[Bradbury is a tireless advocate for free public libraries.]

“When I left high school, I had all my grades to go to college, but I had no money. I decided I will not worry about getting money to go to college, I will educate myself. I walked down the street, I walked into the library, for three days a week, for 10 years, and educate myself. It’s all free, that’s the great thing about libraries. When I was 28 years old, I graduated from library.”

“We have to reinvest in space travel. We should never have left the moon. We have to go back to the moon and build a firm base there, so we can take off from there to the planet Mars. We have to become the Martians. I tell you to become the Martians. We have to civilize Mars, build a whole civilization on Mars, and then move out 300 years from now, into the universe, and when we do that, we have the chance of living forever. Our future is investing right now in space travel. Money should be given to NASA to build the rockets to go back to the moon.”

“It’s been 90 god-damned incredible years.”

“Every day I’ve loved it. Because I’ve remained a boy. The man you see here is a 12-year-old boy, and the boy is still having fun.”

“You remain invested in your inner child by exploding every day. You don’t worry about the future, you don’t worry about the past, you just explode. If you are dynamic, you don’t have to worry about what it is you are. I’ve remained a boy, because boys run everywhere, they never look back, they run everywhere, they keep running running running. That’s me, the running boy.”

[Weller asked: Do you have any regrets?]

“I regret that I didn’t have more time with Bo Derek.”

“She came up to me in a train station in Paris 30 years ago and said ‘Mr. Bradbury?’, I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘I love you,’ I said ‘Who are you?’ She said. ‘My name is Bo Derrick Derek.” She said, “Mr. Bradbury will you travel on the train with me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I will.’”

“Mel Gibson owns the [movie] rights to Fahrenheit 451. Did you see him on TV last week? Right now he’s not doing a thing with Fahrenheit 451.”

“I’ve got a new book of short stories, I’m working on, that will be published next Christmas. The title of it is Juggernaut, a book of 20 new short stories, which will be published next Christmas.”

Max Brooks (World War Z): “Fast versus slow? Slow zombies are based on the hypothetical mobility scenario of necrotic flesh subjugated to high impact energy… and fast zombies suck.”

“The whole thing about zombies was the sheer size of the problem. The whole thing about monsters is you have to make a personal choice to go find them…you have to make a choice. With zombies, they come to you, and there is no safe place. That’s thing about zombies is they are global, it is big, it is all-encompassing. You could still make the right decisions, they would come for you, and it didn’t matter if you were a hot chick or a token black guy,  you were dead.”

Mira Grant (Newsflesh Trilogy): “Zombies are humans enhanced chemically or by virus. Undead flesh eaters cannot be considered zombies. Only virologically or chemically enhanced humans can hold their heads high under the zombie name, preferably to better chew on your throat. I would posit they’d begin fast, then be reduced to the traditional zombie shamble, respirating the whole time.”

“Thanks to the humanization of vampires they are the only monster that it is universally OK to kill.”

“I view zombies as a metaphor for contagion. The way I approach them, they’re the flu we can see coming, and the quarantine you can enforce with a shot gun.”

Seth Grahame-Smith (Pride and Prejudice and Zombies): “Zombies are what I saw in Night of the Living Dead, and everything else is not a zombie. 28 Days is not a zombie movie.”

“Zombies are literally just dumb things for hot chicks to kill.”

Walter Greatshell (Xombies): “Return of the Living Dead. ”

Describing the zombies he wrote: “They don’t eat brains, they sort of suck your soul.”

Amelia Beamer (The Loving Dead): “Zombieism can be a kind of STD.”

Joan Frances Turner (Dust): “People who are now dead and can remember who they were before they died. Part of being trapped in a body that is literally collapsing into nothingness. As for slow versus fast, slow.”

“That’s somebody’s mother. It’s as if they’re living out their after life in our world.”

Ryan Mecum (Zombie Haiku): “I like slow zombies/ Fast zombies are less creepy/ George Romero, yay.”

John Skipp (Book of the Dead (ed.)): “Zombies make me sad, ultimately. It blows being a zombie, being that utterly empty, and what really blows is being stuck in a world full of them. There’s no one to talk with anymore, and they want to eat you.”

“Zombieism gives us this libertarian wonderland, where everyone we ever disagreed with, we get to shoot them with a gun.”

I’ll finish with one more remark from Max Brooks:

“The last time zombies were really popular was the 1970s, and it was a time of global tension. We had terrorism, and unpopular wars, an energy crisis and recession. I think as the world gets its shit together and calms down, we’ll all be on the staff of Twilight, the sit-com.”

• Superhero comics are not SciFi. They’re stories of emotion and character embroidered with these scientific ideas.

• Fantasy and Sci-fi are both speculative fiction, but approached from different angles. Where Sci-fi builds on physics and chemistry and the laws of nature, fantasy, when done well, draws from the “softer sciences” (McNeil’s phrase) like sociology and anthropology. When I think about the fantasy novels I’ve read, at least the good ones, I think she’s spot on. Also, by this rule, superhero stories like Spider-Man and Superman are works of fantasy, not works of science fiction.

• I asked her thoughts on the question of breaking the rules that I raised in yesterday’s post. She pretty much admitted that one of the big problems is that a lot of sci-fi and fantasy writers simply don’t know the rules of science well enough to know when they’re breaking the rules. But she also agreed with Zack Stentz, in that she said she obeys “the rule of cool”: If it’s cool, you can break the rule. The art of the writing is making the rule-breaking not off-putting or boring.

A quick note for McNeil fans, she recently signed with Dark Horse Comics after years of self-publishing. She said the relationship is great so far, but still new. It’ll be interesting to see how or if the books change.

Jamie Paglia (Co-creator of Eureka) conceded that sometimes he’s had to “stretch the boundaries a little thin for my comfort zone,” and he was somewhat abashed thinking of those moments. But Fringe producer Zach Stentz threw down the gauntlet.

“Sometimes you have to break the rules to tell the story you want to tell,” he said, and ran a Fringe clip in which Olivia and Peter realize that Bell has  extracted memories from Walter’s brain by removing actual pieces of Walter’s brain.

“He literally had his memories removed,” Stentz said. “We knew when we wrote it that memories aren’t stored in a discrete portion of your brain.”

Which I thought was a pretty direct challenge to Kevin Grazier, Sean Carroll, and Phil Plait, all scientists trying to make the case that accurate science can ratchet up the tension and provide a more satisfying resolution.

Alas, the argument never got going, and it left me wondering: where’s the line between acceptable and unacceptable scientific rule breaking?

Obviously we accept violations of physical laws all the time in our science fiction, but to my mind, it’s OK to break rules when doing so is a fundamental and permanent feature of the fictional universe–Fringe‘s alternative dimensions and creepy crawlies, Star Trek’s faster-than-light travel, The Force, etc.  Those concepts are fundamental to the universe of those shows, and once established, they become scientific laws unto themselves that other events must bend to.

And the audience is in on it. Everyone knows we can’t travel faster then light, so we accept a universe where we all agree that the technology exists. But the brains/memories plot device hinges on the audience being too ignorant to understand the inaccuracy. The rule-breaking isn’t based on the paranormal or on advanced technology. It’s based on the audience not knowing better. That seems like the wrong kind of rule-breaking to me.

Maybe I’m just being pretentious, I don’t know, but this seems as good a space as any to pick up the argument. Readers, what do you think? Am I just being a poor man’s Sheldon Cooper?

Launch Pad 2010 Attendees

Launch Pad is a free, NASA-funded workshop for established writers held in beautiful high-altitude Laramie, Wyoming. Launch Pad aims to provide a “crash course” for the attendees in modern astronomy science through guest lectures, and observation through the University of Wyoming’s professional telescopes.

The workshop’s mission is to:

…teach writers of all types about modern science, primarily astronomy, and in turn reach their audiences. We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists.

The person who runs Launch Pad, Mike Brotherton, is a wizard at using sci-fi as a vehicle to teach actual science (or, in his own words, he’s a wizard at funding his own science-fiction habit).  A few years ago he received NSF funding to compile ”Diamonds in the Sky” — an anthology of hard science-fiction stories that also can be used by physics and astronomy teachers as a vehicle to teach real science. Some of the stories are quite good and worth the read. Perhaps we’ll see “Diamonds in the Sky II”  in the not-too-distant future, populated with stories from former Launch Pad attendees!

Launch Pad 2011 and 2012 are funded, and there’s still time to apply for next year!

The con’s website bills it as:

A “con” unlike any you’ve ever attended. Scientists, celebrities and sci-fi writers in a mind-meld of entertainment and scientific exploration. Panels, presentations, and face-time with some of your favorite researchers. If you only attend one ‘con’ this year, SETIcon should be it!

While the guest list includes myself as well as my good buddy and fellow Discover blogger Phil Plait, aka the Bad Astronomer, we are mere bugs in comparison to some of the heavy hitters who will be in attendance–names in the field such as Frank Drake, Seth Shostak, Jill Tarter, and others (including non-planet hunting physicist/Discover blogger Sean Carroll).

SETICon is being held at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara August 13th through the 15th.

I felt compelled to give it a chance, however, after flipping to the authors’ page and realizing, to my great relief, that I was dealing with actual scientists. Scientists with a wry sense of humor and penchant for science fiction, as I soon found out. Having listened to (or slept through) my fair share of biology lectures during college, I was curious to see how they would approach such a complex topic–and, more importantly, how helpful their “tips” would turn out to be. I’m happy to report that not only have they written one of the most entertaining, succinct guides to biotechnology and cloning, they have also provided an exhaustive guide on how to best your clone—surely a pressing question for anyone reading this blog.Kurpinski and Johnson do a bang-up job of explaining the nitty-gritty of complex concepts like RNA transcription, epigenetics, and genetic variation in terms that are both easy to follow (without being insultingly simple), and a hoot to read–something I can’t say for the vast majority of textbooks that I’ve suffered through. It doesn’t hurt that they generously pepper their descriptions with clever analogies and examples from sci-fi favorites to help drive home the point.

Even if you’re not too keen on the underlying science, the authors have plenty more on tap, including chapters debunking the most common misconceptions about cloning and biotech (and there are plenty) and outlining the merits of “bioenhancements” (think buffing up your physique or attaining extended life). As befits the general tongue-in-cheek tone of the book, these chapters are equal parts hard science and nerdy conjecture, trading laughs in some instances for hard looks at the moral implications of genetic engineering in others. Indeed, while the authors are generally bullish about the prospects for biotechnology to ameliorate our lives, they urge caution when it comes to taking genetic “tinkering” to its limits.

The book loses a little bit of steam, somewhat unfortunately (given the title), when it offers advice on how to actually defeat your clone. It’s not that it fails to make good on its promise; it actually does so to a fault. Where the other chapters consistently felt snappy and engrossing, this one sometimes felt a little more formulaic, even forced. While it is chock full of helpful suggestions on how to recognize and beat virtually every type of clone you might face, it can start to read like a long list of science-tinged “Fight Club”-esque tips. They could have easily eliminated half of the chapter without losing any of its potency.

How to Defeat is essentially a book about the myths, promises, and potential pitfalls of biotechnology (particularly the threat posed by a cantankerous clone), it also happens to be a solid, and solidly geektastic, primer on genetics, molecular, and synthetic biology. If you ever wanted to learn more about cloning and biotechnology without having to crack open a textbook or highbrow journal, you won’t find a more compact and enjoyable read.

Image: Amazon

Oh REALLY? You honestly want to read my dissertation? Most of my committee didn’t  even want to read my dissertation, but they had to. If you have a sleep disorder, I’m sure your GP can prescribe something…

Well now the American Association for the Advancement of Science has found a way to ease this potentially awkward situation by bringing you the 2010 “Dance your Ph.D. Competition.” Yes, not only can you now  exercise your body as well as your right and left brain, instead of having to give folks a copy of your dissertation, you can simply point to the video of your interpretive dance. You can even become a fan of the competition on Facebook.

While I’m not inclined to do it myself, I’d love to see somebody attempt an interpretive dance of “The Stability of Planetesimal Niches in the Outer Solar System: A Numerical Investigation.”

Before his TV writing career took off, Jaime Paglia, co-creator of SyFy’s number-one-rated show,  had a part-time gig as a program director of a science and technology public radio show called Cambridge Forum.

“It was this rare opportunity to be in Cambridge, Massachusetts where literally you have some of the greatest minds in science and technology,” Paglia told me in an interview recently. “Tim Berners-Lee, who literally invented the Internet, and Rodney Brooks, head of MIT robotics lab, the guy who made Sojourner, and who invented the Roomba in his spare time. Those guys, they see the world differently. There’s a unique way their brains work that allows them to be as creative as they are.”

These Cambridge geniuses eventually found their way into the show, if not as Nathan Stark or Douglas Fargo (Did you know he had a first name? I had to look it up), then at least as Walter Perkins or Carl Carlson. And Paglia also has another inspiration for scientific heroes: Dr. Donald Paglia, UCLA medical professor emeritus and Jaime’s dad.

The elder Paglia was very nearly the medical officer inside Biosphere 2, but decided he’d rather stick around and watch his son grow up some. Instead, Dr. Paglia served as the medical officer on the outside, and he even brought his family down to watch it get sealed for its two-year mission of self-sustainability. The idea of Biosphere 2 led directly to an episode of Eureka (“What About Bob?“) featuring a missing person inside a Biosphere-like place.

So, sometimes the science leads directly to a show, but Paglia says that story and science have about equal weight in driving the arc of a given episode.  Paglia and his team spend a lot of time with science magazines, blogs, and Web sites, and they track all their science and sci-fi ideas on the most important of all scientific tools: a white board.

“In Season One, we put all of our characters on one board, with episodes across the top, and for each one we wrote what we want to have happen to these characters,” Paglia said. “Meanwhile, we had a separate board with all the sci-fi ideas. We made a concerted effort, without being too on the nose, to tie what’s happening with the science to what’s happening to the characters.”

The heroes of Eureka strike a stark contrast with the scientific heroes on other shows, most especially those on Big Bang Theory. In that show, the scientists are depicted as so nerdy and unable to cope socially that one of the leads is assumed to have Asperger’s Syndrome by advocacy groups. Eureka‘s main character may be everyman Sheriff Jack Carter, but the scientific heroes are both brilliant and reasonably well adjusted to social norms. For Paglia, that was a deliberate choice.

“It’s an attractive quality to be smart, and inventive,” Paglia said. “It’s not about biceps and perfect teeth. We wanted to turn things upside down in this town.”

But he still enjoys the contrast between the jock Carter and Eureka‘s smarty-pants.

“Carter is very smart in a street-smart way; he has the ability to see the forest for the trees” he said. “While the scientists are so caught up in what they’re doing, they can’t see that, which was definitely a quality of some of the guys I was interviewing for Cambridge Forum. You could see [yourself saying], ‘I’ll bet you never know where your car keys are, you can’t be bothered by that, because you’re too busy creating new math.’”

Interview audio with Russell T. Davies and Euros Lyn

In the following audio you can listen in on what amounted to a 20-minute chat with David Tennant (The  Doctor, obviously) and Julie Gardner (executive producer and now head of drama for BBC Worldwide)  and five reporters. You’ll here Tennant and Gardner talk about shooting “Planet of the Dead,” the sadness of ending their time working with the Doctor, their futures, and the possibility of Tennant attending the next day’s panel naked. Both are charming, and I think you’ll enjoy it.

(The recording is a little noisy at the start, but on the upside, you’ll get to hear Tennant expressing amazement at all the recorders paced in front of him. Also, you’ll hear a lot of reporters asking questions, but no, none of them are me.)

The Audio Charm of Dr. Who, David Tennant

While we wait for the Doctor Who specials to air on US television screens, the nice people at the BBC sent us this clip of David Tennant‘s guest appearance on Top Gear in a segment known as “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car”. If you don’t know this British show, Top Gear is to cars as SportsCenter is to sport — wry, cleverly written, and fanatic in the best sense of the word. (A DVD of the show’s 10th season was released this week, from whence this segment comes) It turns out that although David Tennant may be a master of time and space when he plays the Doctor, third gear is another matter…

Now, Wolfenstein 3D has been released for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Three things are interesting about this release: first is that the project was handled largely by the John Carmack, the programming genius who co-created the original Wolfenstein for the PC (which, in 1992, meant designing for a world where a 33 MHz 486 was considered to be a computing powerhouse).

Second is that the code used in the iPod version descends directly from Carmack’s original codebase—many ports of classic games on modern platforms are in fact rewrites, which often fail to preserve that magic something that made the original so playable. Carmack has benefited from a decision he made years ago to release the code for the original Wolfenstein to the open source community. The open source code had been modified over the years to run with modern systems, making the port to the iPod platform much easier.

Third, Carmack has come up with a decent way to control the game on the iPod, sans keyboard or mouse. This is pretty significant—although the PC version of Wolfenstein is most celebrated for its impressive graphics engine, it, and its successor, Doom, established a defacto standard for controlling first person games that is still used today on PCs. While other first-person games on the iPod have already been released, I have often found them difficult to play, with non-intuitive controls. But Wolfenstein’s control system is simple, intuitive and effective, allowing me to mow down bad guys and blast through levels just as effectively as I did back in 1992. By creating an effective control interface for the iPod’s touch screen, the rerelease of Wolfenstein may herald a new wave of gaming on the iPod (in fact, the iPod version of Wolfenstein was originally conceived as a toy internal project to test different control interfaces, according to Carmack’s programming notes). Now, if you’ll excuse me, I just happen to have a Pixies playlist on my iPod Touch waiting to go…

If you can’t wait until Friday, come back tomorrow for coverage of tonight’s panel discussion at the United Nations, where the Battlestar crew will be joined by high level UN representatives to talk about the show’s take on human rights, terrorism, and reconciliation.

In other news, Eureka is still on track to return to our screens this summer, and the next season of Sanctuary is getting stuck into production this Monday. I’m also looking forward to Warehouse 13, which is set to premiere this summer and looks like a lot of fun.