Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Friday, December 28, 2012
Operation Frankenweenie
Let's say that tomorrow, a heartbroken billionaire comes to me with a desperate problem. His beloved elephant, Jumbo, died just ten minutes ago. The massive team of the world's best biotechnology experts tell him that death is permanent, and he should accept this, but he'd given anything to get his elephant back. Sane science has denied him, so now he's turned to me to try something psychotic. And of course, I agree.
The process would be upsetting to watch, being a surgery and all, so we tell him to do his job, while I and his team do ours. I tell the biomedical team to separate Jumbo's various organ systems, and put them into vats of saline to halt the decay. I then review the situation.
All death is brain death primarily. Your body fails to provide the glucose and oxygen that your neurons need, which makes them fail, the way that a hammer strike to the motherboard takes out a computer. If my heart were to abruptly fail while I was in a hospital, the doctors could save my life by immediately hooking me to a cardiopulmonary bypass machine, and find some sort of replacement heart, such as one donated by a person who is too dead to need it anymore, or perhaps a mechanical replacement. Same for my lungs. My digestive system could be replaced by a nutrient IV drip, and my kidneys and bladder by dialysis. However, without a working brain, that's pretty much the end of me. So to fix the whole death situation, I'm going to repair Jumbo's brain. First, a review of the medical team's technology.
I order a cardiopulmonary bypass system and a saline-and-glucose IV for each of the organ systems, and a virtual reality system to keep the brain sane as I repair it. I then use the medical team's deep scanners to record the neuron patterns of which cell are connected to which cell, which is written to the massive RAID array. This takes countless exabytes of data, but I'm not footing the bill on this.
Next, a sample of Jumbo's DNA is taken from his muscle cells, and used to make a huge vat of stem cells. I write a program to check the brain records in the array, and one by one replace the dead neuron with a stem cell. The cell is influenced into becoming a neuron cell, and the program then tries to force it to make the connections that it's predecessor had. This automated process is replacing a hundred thousand cells per second, but will still take several months to complete. I have the VR system keep this growing brain in a delta-wave state -- deep sleep. The IV system is feeding it the nutrition that it needs to survive, the cardiopulmonary bypass system is keeping blood circulating, and the dialysis machine is purifying the waste. When the process is done, a disembodied Jumbo brain will be floating in the tank.
However, since our billionaire donor expects to be able to interact with his pet outside of VR, we will now have to repair the rest of the body as well. This is somewhat simpler. We dissolve the cells from each of Jumbo's organs, then leave the extracellular matrix in a vat of stem cells. These quickly repair into organs, which we keep alive in vats with a cardiopulmonary bypass and a dialysis machine keeping them individually alive and functional. It is here that I learn Jumbo's cause of death -- his heart developed a clot, starving the rest of his body of food and oxygen. Jumbo had died of a heart attack.
I have to periodically monitor the brain's progress. Three months in, the brain is 75% repaired. I adjust the VR system to move from delta, up to gamma, to nearly beta, then back down again, just as in real sleep. Jumbo's brain will now "dream," keeping it healthy.
We then work to recombine Jumbo's organs and muscle systems, minus the skull. This allows us to simplify the life support system, and sell off about half of the equipment. It will also give Jumbo a head start on healing, and at this point he's stitched together like Dr. Frankeinstein's monster. I can now report to our sponsor that Jumbo is alive, mostly. Cold hand of death, release him! However, he will need another six months before he can play with his master again. Our billionaire is tearfully grateful.
A month later, I allow the VR system to bring the brain periodically to full beta, allowing Jumbo to "wake." I have programmed a virtual environment of a grassy field with fruit trees, and monitor how Jumbo navigates this environment. Mostly, I want to see that this experience has not rendered him insane or traumatized. So far so good.
Three months later, we need to reattach the brain. We slip the brain into the skull while still in the tank, then I have the surgeons reattach the skull to the rest of the elephant. The blood vessels and nerves are very carefully moved from the cardiopulmonary bypass and other life support machines to the elephant body.
Jumbo is now quite obviously alive, but paralyzed and sore. We keep up a medical treatment of intervenous feeding, and nerve repairing blue dye. It is now for the first time in seven months that our sponsor has seen his pet. At this time, I've done all I can do.
Five months later, I get a postcard from our sponsor. He's playing with Jumbo, who is now biologically a young adult. Jumbo has a renewed vigor, and a zest for life that our sponsor finds deeply inspiring. The biology team has him on a treatment for his blood condition, and Jumbo will easily outlive his master this time around. And I? My research paper on reversing death itself has led to a nomination for the Nobel prize in medicine. I must share credit for this with the biomedical team, but honestly, I'd rather that they take all the credit. Fame is not for me when mad science is on the line.
Friday, March 2, 2012
Bodyswaps
A common element in fiction is to have two characters exchange bodies. Guy A and Guy B swap, so now Guy A's body has Guy B's personality and mind, and Guy B's body has Guy A's personality and mind. How does this happen? It's hand waved away as inexplicable magic, usually, and the plot usually revolves around developing a greater respect for each other, with various comedic misunderstandings along the way, as no one seems to recognize the abrupt changes in behavior and knowledge, or any of the other clues that this has happened. Sometime before the end of the story, they get to swap back.
The closest real life version of this is a brain transplant, or more pedantically, a body transplant. After millions of attempts, we finally succeeded with monkeys, transferring the brain of one monkey into another, and vice versa. This was significantly harder than it sounded, mostly due to the difficulties in reconnecting the nerves, and both monkeys were thereafter paralyzed below the neck for the rest of their lives due to the insufficient reconnection of nerves. But what if there was a cheap, reversible, reliable, consequence free means of completely seizing another person's body, which most realistically will be done by putting your brain in their skull and reconnecting every single nerve. (Again, way harder than it sounds. Especially because a living brain is about the consistency of a raw egg yolk, and every severed nerve is basically going to stay severed forever.)
I'm imagining that this actually has commercial potential for a lot of people. A body builder and I go down to the transplant center, and we swap bodies. I am now a muscular 25 year old man, and he is now a 31 year old fat bespectacled nerdy man. We also have to register this for security and legal purposes, which I will get into later. Surprisingly, we can both get something out of this.
My benefit is more obviously immediate. I'm no longer fat, I can run for miles at a time, I have huge muscles and the strength to lift small cars, or at least motorcycles. I can easily climb the stairs to the top of my workplace without breaking a sweat. However, on the downside, our bodybuilder has also heavily into steroids. This has taken a major toll on his body, and he can no longer work out, his favorite pastime, without breaking his arms. He also may have developed hormonal issues, which can lead to such strange issues and gynecomastia, in which he's developed a case of awkward, teen-esque breasts (likely misshapen) and will need to wear a bra. His body has bizarre pimples and random hair growth from a case of puberty that eternally mutates into a worse version. His genitals no longer function, much to the annoyance of him and anyone he's seeing romantically. Since I had neither the inclination to use steroids, nor the knowledge of where to find them, my body does not have these issues.
For him, he regains the ability to work out, and while we should probably remain celibate for the duration lest we cause extremely awkward feelings with our respective loves, he can enjoy some alone time, if you know what I mean. I will also care similarly for his body, and while he'll lose muscle mass and probably gain weight, I won't do steroids, and his body will become more fit for exercise over time, and his hormonal issues will subside as his body, under my control, returns to equilibrium. Under my direction, his body will repair injured muscles as well. He will have significantly better gains when he regains it.
With my body, he'll have to start over from scratch, exercise wise, but his exercise hobby will lead to him pushing it quite hard. I anticipate easily losing 10 to 20 pounds from his anaerobic exercise alone, and that's assuming that he doesn't also do cardio exercises such as bicycling, swimming, and other sports popular with weightlifters. We'll remain swapped for two weeks to a month.
When we trade back, his body is weaker than before the swap, but still very muscular and strong, fully repaired, fed a balanced diet, and ready for some seriously awesome exercise. His hormonal issues are gone, which his girlfriend will surely appreciate. After just two weeks of exercise (which will be both fun and easy for him), he will be able to show off his body proudly, and people will be able to enjoy looking at it.
For me, under his direction, my body has lost weight, and gained serious muscle mass. If he hasn't done steroids while using my body, then my body is now looking quite nice. If he has, then I can treat it the way I treated his body, and the issues will fade. I look quite nice, and my girlfriend will surely appreciate it.
I imagine other people will also quite cheerfully swap bodies to handle mutual issues. A cancer patient who can't keep weight down can swap bodies with an obese gourmand. A person who loves a food they are allergic to swaps bodies with someone who has no allergies, but doesn't like that food. (or could live without it.) A person who's too ill to leave the house swaps bodies with a shut-in who didn't want to leave the house in the first place. All sorts of benefits could happen.
However, on the security angle, this would have to be tightly controlled. Say I, in a fit of nefariousness, swap bodies with a hobo, and use the hobo's body to commit lots and lots of crime. After the end of my crime spree, I then swap back and leave the country. The police swiftly arrest the hobo, who was seen on camera robbing banks, breaking into houses and stealing from them, punching people that I didn't like, and other highly illegal things. If he's particularly illucid or incoherent, he'll find it quite impossible to defend himself, and spend years and years and years behind bars for my evil deeds. I meanwhile live off my ill gotten gains where they'll never find me. The only way I could be caught would be if there was a record of the body swaps, showing that I was the actual identity of the man on camera committing all that crime. They would also have to catch me before I left the jurisdiction in favor of one with no extradition treaty. There's also the issue of property. The hobo now looks like the man in my wallet, and unless my wallet is taken out of my pants and moved to the hobos at the time of the surgery, he could very easily take it and my credit cards to whatever store he felt like, and I'd have a real hard time arguing that it wasn't me.
Of course, Neurology is currently way too primitive to pull this off yet, so this is all moot, at least within my lifetime. The possibilities are truly crazy.
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Hypertime and the Electric Plants
In a lot of media, there's places where time flows at a different rate than normal. The amount of time in and the amount of time out don't match. The closest real equivalent to this is special relativity time dilation, and that usually works in the opposite way. (The person accelerating experiences less time than everyone else.)
Anyway, this got me thinking about the movie "Clockstoppers" and their central mcGuffin, the "Hypertime". In the movie, the protagonist's scientist father invented a device that shifted him into a paralell time axis, ("Hypertime"), in which one could do time-like things and yet no time would have passed. After a long sequence of teenage boy antics and showing off for a girlfriend, the device is stolen by the movie's villain to set the center stage for the plot. And this gave me ideas.
I'd sleep in hypertime. I'd arrange for a hypertime room at work, and breaks there. When some problem has be absolutely screaming in irritation, I'd punch out, go to the hypertime room, take an eight hour nap under sedation, goof off for another four, and then return to work as no objective time had actually passed. I'd write this blog in hypertime and have two or three posts a day. Except, nags the nerdy part of me, some of this is just plain implausible.
No time means no outside electricity and no airflow. I'd suffocate while asleep. While there are existing solutions to this, such as chemical rebreathers (they have caustic solutions that absorb the carbon from your breath), my mind was already at work for alternatives, which could be useful in the real world.
The electric plant would, given electricity, strip carbon off of carbon dioxide, thus keeping air breathable in sealed environments. And provide a large source of carbon powder, which can later be sold as fuel, recovering some of the cost of the electricity. Extra bonus in solar-heavy rural areas like eastern California and Arizona, where you could have entire ranches of solar panels plus electric plants, sucking the carbon out of the air and gathering it for sale. Both to the coal plant to burn as fuel and to the pencil factory to stuff into pencils.
Portable power systems are a little more practical. Car battery, basically, that would be charged in a time environment.
Anyway, this got me thinking about the movie "Clockstoppers" and their central mcGuffin, the "Hypertime". In the movie, the protagonist's scientist father invented a device that shifted him into a paralell time axis, ("Hypertime"), in which one could do time-like things and yet no time would have passed. After a long sequence of teenage boy antics and showing off for a girlfriend, the device is stolen by the movie's villain to set the center stage for the plot. And this gave me ideas.
I'd sleep in hypertime. I'd arrange for a hypertime room at work, and breaks there. When some problem has be absolutely screaming in irritation, I'd punch out, go to the hypertime room, take an eight hour nap under sedation, goof off for another four, and then return to work as no objective time had actually passed. I'd write this blog in hypertime and have two or three posts a day. Except, nags the nerdy part of me, some of this is just plain implausible.
No time means no outside electricity and no airflow. I'd suffocate while asleep. While there are existing solutions to this, such as chemical rebreathers (they have caustic solutions that absorb the carbon from your breath), my mind was already at work for alternatives, which could be useful in the real world.
The electric plant would, given electricity, strip carbon off of carbon dioxide, thus keeping air breathable in sealed environments. And provide a large source of carbon powder, which can later be sold as fuel, recovering some of the cost of the electricity. Extra bonus in solar-heavy rural areas like eastern California and Arizona, where you could have entire ranches of solar panels plus electric plants, sucking the carbon out of the air and gathering it for sale. Both to the coal plant to burn as fuel and to the pencil factory to stuff into pencils.
Portable power systems are a little more practical. Car battery, basically, that would be charged in a time environment.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Quantum Entanglement Network
As an initial disclaimer, physicists have basically outright said that what this project proposes is impossible, on the grounds that no signal can be sent by this means. I'm not sure how much credence to give it, since a) they never include any actual math, and b) I probably wouldn't understand the math anyway. (In fact, most of it just states "well it violates relativity, therefore no.")
Quantum Entanglement is when two atoms are linked, and at all times maintain opposite spin values. (Atom's have a property called "spin," and the two states are arbitrarily called "up" and "down." For computer networking purposes, "up" is "1" and "down" is "0.") They manage to do this even if separated by considerable distance, in violation of relativity. (Relativity asserts that the speed of light, c, is the maximum possible speed for any thing, signal, or event.) Hypothetically, one can read the value of an atom's spin, at the cost of swapping the atom to the opposite state.
I'm seeing a network box with an RJ-45 jack, and an atom entangled with another box. They are then synchronized to read their respective atoms at a periodic rate, both at exactly the same time. There are two spin states, and my teachings in logic teaches that NOT NOT A is equal to A, therefore nullifying the effect of the read.
I'm not sure how writing to the atom would work, but reading it and discarding its state may be one way to do it.
Anyway, I can see a sci-fi galactic empire operating with these. Star ships each have an entanglement box somewhere in their internal network, linked to one in a big closet in the capital of the galactic empire. In the capital closet, the entanglement boxes are networked to both each other and to the national internet, allowing communication throughout the empire. Other nodes would connect to other planet's internets, thereby establishing the galacta-net.
Since quantum entanglement is instantaneous, all of the galactic empire can respond with a ping time of at most 2000ms. (And this assumes from the far side of one planet, to the far side of the capital planet.) The FTL allows the commerce and communication needed to maintain the galactic civilization. (So yes, when I sell three tons of nanocomputers, their credit card payment goes through, and I pay my taxes, and so on.)
As a secondary advantage, quantum entangled communications would be untraceable. Earthly military forces could decide not to bother with encryption, since it's literally impossible for the enemy to intercept the message: it's not there to intercept. Unless they steal the entanglement box itself, and any good soldier would make a point of destroying it if it came to that. A definite advantage over radio and such.
Perhaps this is a good basis in sci-fi, where one must bend certain rules to have an exciting narrative. I shall try to read up why this wouldn't actually work.
Quantum Entanglement is when two atoms are linked, and at all times maintain opposite spin values. (Atom's have a property called "spin," and the two states are arbitrarily called "up" and "down." For computer networking purposes, "up" is "1" and "down" is "0.") They manage to do this even if separated by considerable distance, in violation of relativity. (Relativity asserts that the speed of light, c, is the maximum possible speed for any thing, signal, or event.) Hypothetically, one can read the value of an atom's spin, at the cost of swapping the atom to the opposite state.
I'm seeing a network box with an RJ-45 jack, and an atom entangled with another box. They are then synchronized to read their respective atoms at a periodic rate, both at exactly the same time. There are two spin states, and my teachings in logic teaches that NOT NOT A is equal to A, therefore nullifying the effect of the read.
I'm not sure how writing to the atom would work, but reading it and discarding its state may be one way to do it.
Anyway, I can see a sci-fi galactic empire operating with these. Star ships each have an entanglement box somewhere in their internal network, linked to one in a big closet in the capital of the galactic empire. In the capital closet, the entanglement boxes are networked to both each other and to the national internet, allowing communication throughout the empire. Other nodes would connect to other planet's internets, thereby establishing the galacta-net.
Since quantum entanglement is instantaneous, all of the galactic empire can respond with a ping time of at most 2000ms. (And this assumes from the far side of one planet, to the far side of the capital planet.) The FTL allows the commerce and communication needed to maintain the galactic civilization. (So yes, when I sell three tons of nanocomputers, their credit card payment goes through, and I pay my taxes, and so on.)
As a secondary advantage, quantum entangled communications would be untraceable. Earthly military forces could decide not to bother with encryption, since it's literally impossible for the enemy to intercept the message: it's not there to intercept. Unless they steal the entanglement box itself, and any good soldier would make a point of destroying it if it came to that. A definite advantage over radio and such.
Perhaps this is a good basis in sci-fi, where one must bend certain rules to have an exciting narrative. I shall try to read up why this wouldn't actually work.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Awesome Fictional Things: Webcomic Edition
Comics have often depicted fantastic worlds of their author's imagination. Some of them are sci-fi worlds with semi-plausible concepts, some of which I'd love to have, and I'll explain why.
A note that this contains major spoilers for those who have not read the series I discuss. If you hate spoilers, feel free to come back tomorrow.
Also, I'm going to try to limit this to Sci-Fi type strips. Fantasy strips with outright magic are awesome, but a bit too far from actual reality to have anything to do with this blog.
Idea: Dimensional Door
Taken from: Real Life
The Dimensional door is, in the comic, the invention of Tony, a mad scientist, who also makes various other impossible things, like a huge space station with artificial gravity, an instantaneous, conservation-of-matter-defying, cloner, and a trans-dimensional portal.
The dimensional door is wrapped around a regular door frame, after which it connects two very separate points in space as if they were together. This is Tony's favorite means of transportation, and he tends to show up frequently in places that he logically shouldn't be using this technique. He has, however, since the construction of his space station, cut down on this, citing security concerns. (He doesn't want government forces to just waltz into his space station and start telling him what to do.)
The main character, Greg, seems ignorant of the implications of this invention. Greg lives in a modest San Franciscan apartment. If I had access to dimensional doors, I would live in a glorious mansion, most of which would be in states with cheap land, and with a few tiny rooms in expensive places like San Francisco. I would utilize climate disparities to minimize heating and cooling expenses
Idea: Robots
Taken from: FreeFall
In Free Fall, set in the distant future on a far-away terraformed planet, robots outnumber humans and perform all the cheap labor. The robots are built with Isaac Azamov's three laws: Non-injury to humans, obedience to humans, and self preservation. I rather like the robot's personalities for the most part, who tend to be inquisitive, polite, even charming. And if one is a jerk, I can order him to pull his own head off.
However, it is cited that the robots are built cheaply, of cheap plastic, and are flimsier than humans on average (because they're made of low quality plastic), and some of their mental quirks sound a tad frustrating to deal with. For one, they have a conversation once about how it's more important to get the job done than to preserve their own lives. (I would argue that dying mid-job has a way of making it hard to get the job done.)
Idea: Terraport
Taken from: Schlock Mercenary
In the strip, the Terraport system is the big invention of one of the main characters. It teleports things up to 200 light years by sucking them through countless tiny wormholes, and powers the entire system by destroying a small amount of the item's mass. I image that this would cause injury to a person, but somehow it manages not to in the strip. (People are terraported all the time in the strip without injury.)
During the course of the strip, the system is refined four times, developing denial systems (that stop terraports from occurring,) authentication systems (to allow denial systems to decide to allow certain teleports, but not others), and a few other improvements.
Aside from the obvious things to do with teleportation, I think I could terraform Mars and Venus for cheap with something along these lines. Teleport airtight buildings to Mars, teleport Venereal atmosphere into them, and teleport plants into that. Periodically teleport over wearing a space suit and carrying a watering can, and water the plants. Buildings should be human-habitable within a year. From there, I can start importing water from outer-solar system ice, or Venereal sulpheric acid. I could teleport the Martian core around until I have a rotating molten one like the earth does. I could teleport Venus's atmosphere to where it would be the most useful, teleport asteroids into it until it spins fast enough for a 24 hour day, and teleport cities onto it's surface. The terraforming cost is reduced by a factor of at least a thousand. (Maybe even a million...) Governments could afford a billion dollars, and probably would be willing to pay to have it terraformed at that cost.
Idea: Death Ray
Taken from: Narbonic
Narbonic is a strip about a mad scientist. There is a death ray that kills things with a "ZOT" sound. Since everyone is involved is evil, it gets used on people.
I think I'd primarily use it on household pests (cockroaches, moths, wasps), although I imagine if I had one, defense contractors would be drooling down my neck for a copy.
Idea: Bowman's Animals
Taken from: FreeFall
Dr. Bowman is never directly shown in FreeFall, but one does get to meet one of his creations. The main character Florence is Dr. Bowman's modification of a red wolf, producing an anthropomorphic canine. Florence is trained as an engineer. She also has medical and biological knowledge, and is able to explain Dr. Bowman's modifications.
The modifications are described as a "sentient bolt on brain addition." That is, add it to any existing brain and one gets a self-aware person that "threads" from a basic survival brain. The resulting anthropomorphic being has instincts from the lower brain, but sophisticated thoughts from the upper one. It is later revealed that many robots have a Bowman brain, threaded onto a badly functioning neural net. (The initial neural nets were faulty, and Bowman's work was used to "fix" it, with strange results.)
Only Bowman's wolves are actually depicted, but a chimp variant is also discussed. The chimps have rather nasty personality defects, having a poor temper control and a tendency to have poop-flinging tantrums. (There's a one shot joke about them making excellent executives in spite of, or perhaps because of, these flaws.)
Bowman's animals do seem like reliable beings, for the most part, even if they are kludgy in nature (Modifications to their life-cycle to ensure that they live to human-length lifetimes has resulted in Florence growing winter fur every 5 years, instead of every year, which sounds inconvenient) and have mental "safeguards" that would drive almost anyone insane. I'd want to have a collection of certain animals just to see how their instincts and thoughts interact. (Would Bowman's cats be aloof loners, Bowman's cockatoos be emotionally needy dancers, and Bowman's budgies be perpetually happy playful people?)
Idea: Antimatter
Taken from: Schlock Mercenary
In the world of Schlock Mercenary, antimatter is used casually. Many systems are powered by matter-antimatter annihilation reactors, antimatter grenades are commonly carried as weapons, and it seems as easy to buy antimatter in that world as buying gum would be in this one. Since it's set at least a thousand years in the future, presumably some means has been discovered to produce antimatter at less than a trillion dollars per nanogram.
Antimatter would mean clean energy production, easy disposal of toxic waste, and cheap energy for trillions of years. The only downside is that in a world where antimatter grenades are easy to get a hold of, terrorists and other ner-do-wells also have easy access to such weapons as well.
Idea: Biologically embedded USB port
Taken from: XKCD
While when posed, this was not a serious suggestion, but instead the author's satire on the attitude Linux has about device drivers. Nonetheless, I love it.
If I were trying to interface myself with a computer, I would probably have an internal computer, with a USB or RJ-45 connector, and use that to interface with outside computers. The internal computer would be designed by a cybernetic expert, like Dr. Warwick. Computer-to-computer interaction is well understood, computer-to-brain might have some side effects. Also, I sincerely doubt I could structure my thoughts to match any USB protocol, even if I were reading the white paper at the time.
Idea: Gravity Mesh
Taken from: Real Life
In the strip Real Life, Tony the mad scientist has a space station. One with artificial gravity. As cool as floating in space would be, it could get old fast. Also, studies by NASA have revealed that we humans need gravity, and without it our bones turn to mush.
Aside from space travel, this would be handy in gyms. Double the gravity, double the intensity of the workout. It could also be useful to transportation, by reversing the gravity in storage, which would presumably make it way easier to haul.
Idea: Gender Change Liquid
Taken from: Narbonic
In the strip Narbonic, the main character's gerbil invents a drug that changes the user's gender. (The gerbil is intelligent, if not very dexterous. The main character is an insane biologist. Long story.) It's primarily used as a prank, again because everyone involved is a tad evil.
If I could synthesize such a thing for less than $10,000 per dose, I think I would retire a billionaire. There are a lot of transsexual people in the world, and they're limited to a surgical gender change that costs as much as the world's best sports cars, requires a lot of very invasive, painful surgery, and leaves them sterile because we can't synthesize certain parts of the reproductive system. The fictional drug converts them in 2 wet and uncomfortable minutes. (Fertility is not addressed, although it is implied, a male character converted to female is explicitly described as menstruating in one scene.)
However, I'm pretty sure this is impossible. On a genetic level, converting a female person to male is impossible. In us humans, we have two "sex" chromosomes. There are two extant models, "X" and "Y". The male pattern is "XY", the female pattern is "XX." The X chromosome explains how to build certain proteins required to live, the Y chromosome makes you male. You inherit one from each parent, and if you get "XX", you turn out female, if you get "XY" you turn out male. If you converted a female person into a male with the drug, where would they get their "Y" chromosome traits? Also, two minutes to absorb a complete reproductive tract and synthesize another one?
Idea: NanoRobots
Taken from: Schlock Mercenary
Robots, the size of molecules. This would revolutionize manufacturing, medicine, and engineering. In the strip, nanorobots, or nanites, can regenerate people from as little as a severed head, can construct all manner of goods, can repair damaged infrastructure, can give people superhuman powers by reengineering their body, and produces infrastructure that heals itself.
Since nanites are described as self-manufacturing (you make one, and it makes a gajillion more of itself), many experts worry about the "Grey goo" scenario in which one out of control nanite consumes the entire biosphere of the earth to make more of itself, until the entire planet consists of nothing but nanites. Somehow in the world of Schlock Mercenary, this hasn't happened, and people live on thousands of worlds, so the loss of one planet would be merely a tragic disaster, not the end of life as we know it.
A note that this contains major spoilers for those who have not read the series I discuss. If you hate spoilers, feel free to come back tomorrow.
Also, I'm going to try to limit this to Sci-Fi type strips. Fantasy strips with outright magic are awesome, but a bit too far from actual reality to have anything to do with this blog.
Idea: Dimensional Door
Taken from: Real Life
The Dimensional door is, in the comic, the invention of Tony, a mad scientist, who also makes various other impossible things, like a huge space station with artificial gravity, an instantaneous, conservation-of-matter-defying, cloner, and a trans-dimensional portal.
The dimensional door is wrapped around a regular door frame, after which it connects two very separate points in space as if they were together. This is Tony's favorite means of transportation, and he tends to show up frequently in places that he logically shouldn't be using this technique. He has, however, since the construction of his space station, cut down on this, citing security concerns. (He doesn't want government forces to just waltz into his space station and start telling him what to do.)
The main character, Greg, seems ignorant of the implications of this invention. Greg lives in a modest San Franciscan apartment. If I had access to dimensional doors, I would live in a glorious mansion, most of which would be in states with cheap land, and with a few tiny rooms in expensive places like San Francisco. I would utilize climate disparities to minimize heating and cooling expenses
Idea: Robots
Taken from: FreeFall
In Free Fall, set in the distant future on a far-away terraformed planet, robots outnumber humans and perform all the cheap labor. The robots are built with Isaac Azamov's three laws: Non-injury to humans, obedience to humans, and self preservation. I rather like the robot's personalities for the most part, who tend to be inquisitive, polite, even charming. And if one is a jerk, I can order him to pull his own head off.
However, it is cited that the robots are built cheaply, of cheap plastic, and are flimsier than humans on average (because they're made of low quality plastic), and some of their mental quirks sound a tad frustrating to deal with. For one, they have a conversation once about how it's more important to get the job done than to preserve their own lives. (I would argue that dying mid-job has a way of making it hard to get the job done.)
Idea: Terraport
Taken from: Schlock Mercenary
In the strip, the Terraport system is the big invention of one of the main characters. It teleports things up to 200 light years by sucking them through countless tiny wormholes, and powers the entire system by destroying a small amount of the item's mass. I image that this would cause injury to a person, but somehow it manages not to in the strip. (People are terraported all the time in the strip without injury.)
During the course of the strip, the system is refined four times, developing denial systems (that stop terraports from occurring,) authentication systems (to allow denial systems to decide to allow certain teleports, but not others), and a few other improvements.
Aside from the obvious things to do with teleportation, I think I could terraform Mars and Venus for cheap with something along these lines. Teleport airtight buildings to Mars, teleport Venereal atmosphere into them, and teleport plants into that. Periodically teleport over wearing a space suit and carrying a watering can, and water the plants. Buildings should be human-habitable within a year. From there, I can start importing water from outer-solar system ice, or Venereal sulpheric acid. I could teleport the Martian core around until I have a rotating molten one like the earth does. I could teleport Venus's atmosphere to where it would be the most useful, teleport asteroids into it until it spins fast enough for a 24 hour day, and teleport cities onto it's surface. The terraforming cost is reduced by a factor of at least a thousand. (Maybe even a million...) Governments could afford a billion dollars, and probably would be willing to pay to have it terraformed at that cost.
Idea: Death Ray
Taken from: Narbonic
Narbonic is a strip about a mad scientist. There is a death ray that kills things with a "ZOT" sound. Since everyone is involved is evil, it gets used on people.
I think I'd primarily use it on household pests (cockroaches, moths, wasps), although I imagine if I had one, defense contractors would be drooling down my neck for a copy.
Idea: Bowman's Animals
Taken from: FreeFall
Dr. Bowman is never directly shown in FreeFall, but one does get to meet one of his creations. The main character Florence is Dr. Bowman's modification of a red wolf, producing an anthropomorphic canine. Florence is trained as an engineer. She also has medical and biological knowledge, and is able to explain Dr. Bowman's modifications.
The modifications are described as a "sentient bolt on brain addition." That is, add it to any existing brain and one gets a self-aware person that "threads" from a basic survival brain. The resulting anthropomorphic being has instincts from the lower brain, but sophisticated thoughts from the upper one. It is later revealed that many robots have a Bowman brain, threaded onto a badly functioning neural net. (The initial neural nets were faulty, and Bowman's work was used to "fix" it, with strange results.)
Only Bowman's wolves are actually depicted, but a chimp variant is also discussed. The chimps have rather nasty personality defects, having a poor temper control and a tendency to have poop-flinging tantrums. (There's a one shot joke about them making excellent executives in spite of, or perhaps because of, these flaws.)
Bowman's animals do seem like reliable beings, for the most part, even if they are kludgy in nature (Modifications to their life-cycle to ensure that they live to human-length lifetimes has resulted in Florence growing winter fur every 5 years, instead of every year, which sounds inconvenient) and have mental "safeguards" that would drive almost anyone insane. I'd want to have a collection of certain animals just to see how their instincts and thoughts interact. (Would Bowman's cats be aloof loners, Bowman's cockatoos be emotionally needy dancers, and Bowman's budgies be perpetually happy playful people?)
Idea: Antimatter
Taken from: Schlock Mercenary
In the world of Schlock Mercenary, antimatter is used casually. Many systems are powered by matter-antimatter annihilation reactors, antimatter grenades are commonly carried as weapons, and it seems as easy to buy antimatter in that world as buying gum would be in this one. Since it's set at least a thousand years in the future, presumably some means has been discovered to produce antimatter at less than a trillion dollars per nanogram.
Antimatter would mean clean energy production, easy disposal of toxic waste, and cheap energy for trillions of years. The only downside is that in a world where antimatter grenades are easy to get a hold of, terrorists and other ner-do-wells also have easy access to such weapons as well.
Idea: Biologically embedded USB port
Taken from: XKCD
While when posed, this was not a serious suggestion, but instead the author's satire on the attitude Linux has about device drivers. Nonetheless, I love it.
If I were trying to interface myself with a computer, I would probably have an internal computer, with a USB or RJ-45 connector, and use that to interface with outside computers. The internal computer would be designed by a cybernetic expert, like Dr. Warwick. Computer-to-computer interaction is well understood, computer-to-brain might have some side effects. Also, I sincerely doubt I could structure my thoughts to match any USB protocol, even if I were reading the white paper at the time.
Idea: Gravity Mesh
Taken from: Real Life
In the strip Real Life, Tony the mad scientist has a space station. One with artificial gravity. As cool as floating in space would be, it could get old fast. Also, studies by NASA have revealed that we humans need gravity, and without it our bones turn to mush.
Aside from space travel, this would be handy in gyms. Double the gravity, double the intensity of the workout. It could also be useful to transportation, by reversing the gravity in storage, which would presumably make it way easier to haul.
Idea: Gender Change Liquid
Taken from: Narbonic
In the strip Narbonic, the main character's gerbil invents a drug that changes the user's gender. (The gerbil is intelligent, if not very dexterous. The main character is an insane biologist. Long story.) It's primarily used as a prank, again because everyone involved is a tad evil.
If I could synthesize such a thing for less than $10,000 per dose, I think I would retire a billionaire. There are a lot of transsexual people in the world, and they're limited to a surgical gender change that costs as much as the world's best sports cars, requires a lot of very invasive, painful surgery, and leaves them sterile because we can't synthesize certain parts of the reproductive system. The fictional drug converts them in 2 wet and uncomfortable minutes. (Fertility is not addressed, although it is implied, a male character converted to female is explicitly described as menstruating in one scene.)
However, I'm pretty sure this is impossible. On a genetic level, converting a female person to male is impossible. In us humans, we have two "sex" chromosomes. There are two extant models, "X" and "Y". The male pattern is "XY", the female pattern is "XX." The X chromosome explains how to build certain proteins required to live, the Y chromosome makes you male. You inherit one from each parent, and if you get "XX", you turn out female, if you get "XY" you turn out male. If you converted a female person into a male with the drug, where would they get their "Y" chromosome traits? Also, two minutes to absorb a complete reproductive tract and synthesize another one?
Idea: NanoRobots
Taken from: Schlock Mercenary
Robots, the size of molecules. This would revolutionize manufacturing, medicine, and engineering. In the strip, nanorobots, or nanites, can regenerate people from as little as a severed head, can construct all manner of goods, can repair damaged infrastructure, can give people superhuman powers by reengineering their body, and produces infrastructure that heals itself.
Since nanites are described as self-manufacturing (you make one, and it makes a gajillion more of itself), many experts worry about the "Grey goo" scenario in which one out of control nanite consumes the entire biosphere of the earth to make more of itself, until the entire planet consists of nothing but nanites. Somehow in the world of Schlock Mercenary, this hasn't happened, and people live on thousands of worlds, so the loss of one planet would be merely a tragic disaster, not the end of life as we know it.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Gravity Meshes are Impossible
One invention for the sake of making the filming easier in Sci-fi shows like Star Trek are gravity webs, meshes, or floors, that provide gravity in environments like space that shouldn't have any. This makes it easier to film, because the "space" environment can be shot in a basement in hollywood, instead of having to actually take the actors into low earth orbit, which would be significantly more expensive.
Such a device would have massive utility. Not only could you walk in space instead of float, and travel between the stars without your bones weakening into goo, but you could exercise with them (the gym has DOUBLE GRAVITY today), make transportation easier (the packages now weight NEGATIVE whatever because there's a reversed gravity mesh in the truck's ceiling), or just carnival style novelty (as in, hey, let's walk on the walls! Because we can!).
However, it can't happen. The best way to prove to me that it can't happen is to build a perpetual motion machine with it, so I'm going to do exactly that. Please enjoy this flagrant violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
As you can see in the diagram, the very large ball falls onto the turning wheel, imparting the energy it got from gravity and thereby providing the extractable energy. It then falls to the lower ramp, moving to the other half of the device. At this place, gravity is reversed, so it "falls" to the top of the machine, where it hits the ramp that moves it back to the other side. Oh hey, gravity is reversed again due to the absence of the mesh in this part, so it falls again, back to the wheel. This would endlessly produce power, against all reason.
So obviously the gravity meshes either have to use more power to function than all the falling that happens in their area, or they just can't happen. In either case, Sci-Fi fans everywhere pout at this rude intrusion by reality. Then they go back to enjoying their fandom, because since when does television, movies, or books have to in any way correspond to reality? Wait up, guys.
Thanks to D. K. Wolfe for the illustration.
Such a device would have massive utility. Not only could you walk in space instead of float, and travel between the stars without your bones weakening into goo, but you could exercise with them (the gym has DOUBLE GRAVITY today), make transportation easier (the packages now weight NEGATIVE whatever because there's a reversed gravity mesh in the truck's ceiling), or just carnival style novelty (as in, hey, let's walk on the walls! Because we can!).
However, it can't happen. The best way to prove to me that it can't happen is to build a perpetual motion machine with it, so I'm going to do exactly that. Please enjoy this flagrant violation of the laws of thermodynamics.
As you can see in the diagram, the very large ball falls onto the turning wheel, imparting the energy it got from gravity and thereby providing the extractable energy. It then falls to the lower ramp, moving to the other half of the device. At this place, gravity is reversed, so it "falls" to the top of the machine, where it hits the ramp that moves it back to the other side. Oh hey, gravity is reversed again due to the absence of the mesh in this part, so it falls again, back to the wheel. This would endlessly produce power, against all reason.
So obviously the gravity meshes either have to use more power to function than all the falling that happens in their area, or they just can't happen. In either case, Sci-Fi fans everywhere pout at this rude intrusion by reality. Then they go back to enjoying their fandom, because since when does television, movies, or books have to in any way correspond to reality? Wait up, guys.
Thanks to D. K. Wolfe for the illustration.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
The Economics of Replicators
Everyone as nerdy as I am knows about the TV show Star Trek and its wondrous technology. For those of you that don't, it's a sci-fi series about the space-navy of the future. And on it goes from there.
Since it's set in the future, it has technology that makes nerds drool with envy. Faster-than-light travel. Energy weapons. Nanotechnology. Beam-medicine. Voice-operated computers. Teleportation. And the obvious spin-off of teleportation, the replicators, which teleport together pretty much anything you can request. Money doesn't exist in the world of Star Trek, because anything you need can be teleported together. People now work for prestige, self-improvement, and to brag about how awesome they are.
Now, teleporters and replicators can't happen in the real world. Heisenberg's uncertainty principles makes the necessary information discovery impossible. So the writers have a part for these machines called the "Heisenberg Compensator," as an acknowledgment of this. Asked how it works, they respond "Very well, thank you." And smile sarcastically as the geekoid who asked them stares daggers.
But let's say that somehow Replicators did get invented, Heisenberg compensator and all. How would this change the economic layout of our world? I'm going to make certain assumptions about this. One of which is that the show's internal explanation of the materials being produced from raw energy being wrong, as this would involve more than the entire energy output of the earth for even small objects. (remember my antimatter article where I showed current energy use to be about a gram per year?) I instead assume that it teleports a stash of pre-collected atoms from an internal storage, and can refill this by recycling other things.
Humor magazine Cracked correctly predicts that this would lead to the abolition of almost all jobs, and money. Where this goes from there depends on the ideology of the person who gets the first one.
In the most dystopian scenario, Replicators are the rare toys of immensely rich people, who nonetheless have abolished all non-service jobs. Most other people do their menial labor, which mostly involves shoving things in and out of replicators. You could use money, certainly, but it's only really good for replicator time anyway. Rich people's expenses are electricity, materials, labor, and Veblen-good-design. Now if you'll excuse me, my boss wants me to bring him another tray of martinis and depleted uranium bullets, as he and his moron friends want to go drunk-shooting again. And when I'm done, he has another toxic waste disposal contract that will involve my personal shoveling. Into the replicator for recycling. At least it's not polluting the environment anymore.
In the most utopian scenario, the original owner has a noblesse oblige (or similar) ideology, and the first thing he or she replicates is a kit to make more replicators. Non-Service Jobs disappear as in the above scenarios, but replicators are easy to come by and practically everyone has one. Those that don't are generally given one by those that do, just for asking. Service jobs still exist, and money is now mostly for buying energy, raw materials, and new object design. There are still rich and poor people, but the only real difference is that "poor" people's things are mass designed and "rich" people's things are designed just for them. "Poor" people often raid garbage dumps for raw materials, which the dump owners encourage because it frees up the space. (New garbage presumably comes from people who don't want to bother recycling it.)
The Free Software Foundation (or someone like them) now has GPL'd plans for food, computers, clothing, transportation devices like bicycles, and pretty much everything that people need, and more stuff that people want is released every day.
Jobs may be rare, but they are largely unnecessary. It is an age of hobby, where people largely do what they feel like after a quick foraging. Or perhaps a quick shift at a fast food restaurant, whose non-labor costs are stripped ridiculously low. Burger costs $0.02 at most. The restaurant could pay in hydrocarbons, metals, and energy coupons.
I imagine that blogs, webcomics, and fanfiction would all be really really common in this era, since people have lots of free time and material prosperity. It would also be wise to work on colonizing other planets to increase the available supply of materials. It would be easy with replicator technology to build yourself a bubble-city, especially with NASA's guidance. If they demand something in return, it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve. (Sample the rocks? Photograph surroundings? Chemical test that they can presumably walk me through?)
The biggest problem that occurs in this is rent. How will people determine where they can live? If I rent an apartment, how would I pay the landlord, who has anything they want anyway? (Perhaps landlords would require as rent a newly designed object, so such a position would accumulate useful inventions for you.) If I want land, how would I pay for it? Energy coupons? Or perhaps this will be the primary drive for space exploration -- earthly land is just too expensive.
Since it's set in the future, it has technology that makes nerds drool with envy. Faster-than-light travel. Energy weapons. Nanotechnology. Beam-medicine. Voice-operated computers. Teleportation. And the obvious spin-off of teleportation, the replicators, which teleport together pretty much anything you can request. Money doesn't exist in the world of Star Trek, because anything you need can be teleported together. People now work for prestige, self-improvement, and to brag about how awesome they are.
Now, teleporters and replicators can't happen in the real world. Heisenberg's uncertainty principles makes the necessary information discovery impossible. So the writers have a part for these machines called the "Heisenberg Compensator," as an acknowledgment of this. Asked how it works, they respond "Very well, thank you." And smile sarcastically as the geekoid who asked them stares daggers.
But let's say that somehow Replicators did get invented, Heisenberg compensator and all. How would this change the economic layout of our world? I'm going to make certain assumptions about this. One of which is that the show's internal explanation of the materials being produced from raw energy being wrong, as this would involve more than the entire energy output of the earth for even small objects. (remember my antimatter article where I showed current energy use to be about a gram per year?) I instead assume that it teleports a stash of pre-collected atoms from an internal storage, and can refill this by recycling other things.
Humor magazine Cracked correctly predicts that this would lead to the abolition of almost all jobs, and money. Where this goes from there depends on the ideology of the person who gets the first one.
In the most dystopian scenario, Replicators are the rare toys of immensely rich people, who nonetheless have abolished all non-service jobs. Most other people do their menial labor, which mostly involves shoving things in and out of replicators. You could use money, certainly, but it's only really good for replicator time anyway. Rich people's expenses are electricity, materials, labor, and Veblen-good-design. Now if you'll excuse me, my boss wants me to bring him another tray of martinis and depleted uranium bullets, as he and his moron friends want to go drunk-shooting again. And when I'm done, he has another toxic waste disposal contract that will involve my personal shoveling. Into the replicator for recycling. At least it's not polluting the environment anymore.
In the most utopian scenario, the original owner has a noblesse oblige (or similar) ideology, and the first thing he or she replicates is a kit to make more replicators. Non-Service Jobs disappear as in the above scenarios, but replicators are easy to come by and practically everyone has one. Those that don't are generally given one by those that do, just for asking. Service jobs still exist, and money is now mostly for buying energy, raw materials, and new object design. There are still rich and poor people, but the only real difference is that "poor" people's things are mass designed and "rich" people's things are designed just for them. "Poor" people often raid garbage dumps for raw materials, which the dump owners encourage because it frees up the space. (New garbage presumably comes from people who don't want to bother recycling it.)
The Free Software Foundation (or someone like them) now has GPL'd plans for food, computers, clothing, transportation devices like bicycles, and pretty much everything that people need, and more stuff that people want is released every day.
Jobs may be rare, but they are largely unnecessary. It is an age of hobby, where people largely do what they feel like after a quick foraging. Or perhaps a quick shift at a fast food restaurant, whose non-labor costs are stripped ridiculously low. Burger costs $0.02 at most. The restaurant could pay in hydrocarbons, metals, and energy coupons.
I imagine that blogs, webcomics, and fanfiction would all be really really common in this era, since people have lots of free time and material prosperity. It would also be wise to work on colonizing other planets to increase the available supply of materials. It would be easy with replicator technology to build yourself a bubble-city, especially with NASA's guidance. If they demand something in return, it shouldn't be too difficult to achieve. (Sample the rocks? Photograph surroundings? Chemical test that they can presumably walk me through?)
The biggest problem that occurs in this is rent. How will people determine where they can live? If I rent an apartment, how would I pay the landlord, who has anything they want anyway? (Perhaps landlords would require as rent a newly designed object, so such a position would accumulate useful inventions for you.) If I want land, how would I pay for it? Energy coupons? Or perhaps this will be the primary drive for space exploration -- earthly land is just too expensive.
Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Sci-Fi fails science forever
Since I've been too busy this month to come up with any whacky machines or deranged schemes, I've instead decided to tell you about how fiction depicts science badly in ways that inevitably lead to my friends asking me stupid questions. Note that things required to the plot are acceptable breaks from reality, because a space opera that has 450 year breaks in the action would be unwatchably boring.
My list:
* Beings "Made of energy."
Energy is not a thing. Energy is a trait that things have. A "collection of energy" would not be able to have the required structure to maintain life. While this error is popular because energy is "intangible," leaving your heroes with the frightening prospect of an opponent able to walk through walls and such, it is unspeakably stupid. Also the usual solution of stuffing them into a battery or otherwise utilizing their component energy to destroy them demonstrates a certain lack of respect for...fact.
Or on the flip side of this, matter is interchangeable for energy, so I am "Made of pure energy" too, as are you. Therefore making this idea equally stupid.
* Being from "the beginning of time" and "the end of time."
While this came up to make the monster-of-the-week sound more fearsome, the truth is the opposite. A being from the beginning of time would lack complexity, due to a lack of available materials. There's not much you can do with just hydrogen. A being from "The end of time," which I take to mean the heat death of the universe, would have little energy available to it, and therefore would have to be geared more towards conserving this energy than intelligence, combat initiative, or whatever else the writer seemed to think it would develop. Superhuman intelligence and combat reflexes aren't going to do you much good if you starve to death, ya know?
* Aliens that are preoccupied with humans
This just smacks of collective egotism. If an alien did encounter the Earth, there's no reason why it would find us special automatically. In fact, an alien finding the earth might easily get distracted by the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet, conclude that the earth was a dull ocean world, and leave.
* Nuclear = OMG DANGEROUS
If nuclear, "atomic", or radioactive substances appear in the show, they will almost always be dealt with in a hysterical manner, assuming that all of these substances are made of pure evil and will cause anyone that so much as looks at them to die.
Likewise, assuming something is dangerous because it is "atomic." Everything that can be handled has atoms. They are not dangerous.
Radiation is a danger, because it burns biological life, the same way a hot stove does. But if you're afraid of your hot stove, there is something wrong with you. Radiation can be dealt with, there are engineering things that can be done to lessen or eliminate the dangers.
This was more common in productions made in the 1950s, and is mostly giving way to:
* Genetic Engineering = Evil
A genetically engineered or cloned organism is almost always depicted as being an uncontrollable monster that hungers for human flesh. Likewise, humans who are genetically engineered or cloned are unemotional, perfectly willing to follow orders, and evil.
Genes do not do this. Genes determine how an organism will produce proteins, which in turn determine the organism's shape and physical traits. There are genes for blue eyes, there is no gene for "evil."
The biggest real threat in genetic engineering is allergies. For instance, some tomatoes are genetically engineered with fish genes to make them ripen sooner. People that are allergic to fish are also allergic to these tomatoes, because the proteins resemble the fish proteins that their bodies are oversensitive to.
Another worry is that genetically engineered plants will cross pollinate natural plants. This would not be a big deal, except that A) the genetic engineering companies regard this as copyright violation and sue, and B) the genetic engineering companies often insert genes into the organisms they make to make them sterile. Large swaths of plants going sterile, and the farmers who grow them abruptly getting nonsensical lawsuits is a big problem.
* Outright unit errors
Watts is energy over time, or "power" as physicists understand the term. Volts measure electrical force. Ohms measure resistance. Light years are distance. Amps are number of electrons.
Even George Lucas messed this up and had to severely retcon himself. ("I did the Kessel Run in 6 parsecs." He then had to make up a story about the Kessel Run involving many black holes to cover up the fact that he thought Parsec was a unit of time, when it is actually distance.)
* Silly rules
The reactor only works when operated by a Hindu born in Mumbai. This is not explained away with a security based explanation, (which might actually make sense if the station was built by Mumbaians who wanted to thumb their nose at everyone else, and had some way of actually detecting the religion of the person operating it,) but with techno babble. Again, a blatant "this group is special" effect appears, stinking up the whole script.
* Likewise, biology non-sequiturs
Vitalism is false, but I can't tell you how often I've seen a script where getting a resource cruelly from a biological source oddly counts more than from mechanical ones. For instance, a sugar reactor magically (and illogically) getting more energy out of blood than from bags of sucrose, despite blood containing less than 1% sugar by volume.
* Destroy the Earth
"You can't spray that can, it'll destroy the earth!" Usually, they mean destroy all life on earth, which is much easier to do. Actually destroying the earth is very very very difficult.
A meteor that would destroy all life on earth would be about 3 miles wide. A meteor that would destroy the earth would be larger than the moon.
* Robots
Holy cheese, there's more wrong with fictional robots than I have space in one entry for, so I'm breaking it up
* Robots hate Biological Beings
For some reason, all Robots, Computers, AIs, and other technology-based entities are depicted with a deranged hatred of any human, animal, or other biological based being. Who the hell programmed them that way? Since computers are programmed and follow their programming literally, this leads to the ridiculous conclusion that all the available programmers were severe nihilists who both wanted to commit suicide and take all biological life with them.
* Illogical instructions equals explosion
Because clearly surge protectors don't exist. A computer confronted with invalid instructions tends to lock up, crash, or reboot, not explode.
* That is illogical
Robots in fiction seem to have this supernatural ability to grasp the truth of the matter and scorn any attempts to deceive.
The truth of the matter is, as computer science majors say, "Garbage in, Garbage Out." If you tell a computer that Pi is 5, it will blithely run with it, producing all kinds of odd, illogical results. If you tell it that you are 600 feet tall, and ask it your weight, it will probably give an answer around 1900 - 2200 pounds.
For all my hatred of these, I see them constantly. They grate me the way that spelling, pronunciation, or grammar errors would grate an English major. Argh.
My list:
* Beings "Made of energy."
Energy is not a thing. Energy is a trait that things have. A "collection of energy" would not be able to have the required structure to maintain life. While this error is popular because energy is "intangible," leaving your heroes with the frightening prospect of an opponent able to walk through walls and such, it is unspeakably stupid. Also the usual solution of stuffing them into a battery or otherwise utilizing their component energy to destroy them demonstrates a certain lack of respect for...fact.
Or on the flip side of this, matter is interchangeable for energy, so I am "Made of pure energy" too, as are you. Therefore making this idea equally stupid.
* Being from "the beginning of time" and "the end of time."
While this came up to make the monster-of-the-week sound more fearsome, the truth is the opposite. A being from the beginning of time would lack complexity, due to a lack of available materials. There's not much you can do with just hydrogen. A being from "The end of time," which I take to mean the heat death of the universe, would have little energy available to it, and therefore would have to be geared more towards conserving this energy than intelligence, combat initiative, or whatever else the writer seemed to think it would develop. Superhuman intelligence and combat reflexes aren't going to do you much good if you starve to death, ya know?
* Aliens that are preoccupied with humans
This just smacks of collective egotism. If an alien did encounter the Earth, there's no reason why it would find us special automatically. In fact, an alien finding the earth might easily get distracted by the oceans, which cover 70% of the planet, conclude that the earth was a dull ocean world, and leave.
* Nuclear = OMG DANGEROUS
If nuclear, "atomic", or radioactive substances appear in the show, they will almost always be dealt with in a hysterical manner, assuming that all of these substances are made of pure evil and will cause anyone that so much as looks at them to die.
Likewise, assuming something is dangerous because it is "atomic." Everything that can be handled has atoms. They are not dangerous.
Radiation is a danger, because it burns biological life, the same way a hot stove does. But if you're afraid of your hot stove, there is something wrong with you. Radiation can be dealt with, there are engineering things that can be done to lessen or eliminate the dangers.
This was more common in productions made in the 1950s, and is mostly giving way to:
* Genetic Engineering = Evil
A genetically engineered or cloned organism is almost always depicted as being an uncontrollable monster that hungers for human flesh. Likewise, humans who are genetically engineered or cloned are unemotional, perfectly willing to follow orders, and evil.
Genes do not do this. Genes determine how an organism will produce proteins, which in turn determine the organism's shape and physical traits. There are genes for blue eyes, there is no gene for "evil."
The biggest real threat in genetic engineering is allergies. For instance, some tomatoes are genetically engineered with fish genes to make them ripen sooner. People that are allergic to fish are also allergic to these tomatoes, because the proteins resemble the fish proteins that their bodies are oversensitive to.
Another worry is that genetically engineered plants will cross pollinate natural plants. This would not be a big deal, except that A) the genetic engineering companies regard this as copyright violation and sue, and B) the genetic engineering companies often insert genes into the organisms they make to make them sterile. Large swaths of plants going sterile, and the farmers who grow them abruptly getting nonsensical lawsuits is a big problem.
* Outright unit errors
Watts is energy over time, or "power" as physicists understand the term. Volts measure electrical force. Ohms measure resistance. Light years are distance. Amps are number of electrons.
Even George Lucas messed this up and had to severely retcon himself. ("I did the Kessel Run in 6 parsecs." He then had to make up a story about the Kessel Run involving many black holes to cover up the fact that he thought Parsec was a unit of time, when it is actually distance.)
* Silly rules
The reactor only works when operated by a Hindu born in Mumbai. This is not explained away with a security based explanation, (which might actually make sense if the station was built by Mumbaians who wanted to thumb their nose at everyone else, and had some way of actually detecting the religion of the person operating it,) but with techno babble. Again, a blatant "this group is special" effect appears, stinking up the whole script.
* Likewise, biology non-sequiturs
Vitalism is false, but I can't tell you how often I've seen a script where getting a resource cruelly from a biological source oddly counts more than from mechanical ones. For instance, a sugar reactor magically (and illogically) getting more energy out of blood than from bags of sucrose, despite blood containing less than 1% sugar by volume.
* Destroy the Earth
"You can't spray that can, it'll destroy the earth!" Usually, they mean destroy all life on earth, which is much easier to do. Actually destroying the earth is very very very difficult.
A meteor that would destroy all life on earth would be about 3 miles wide. A meteor that would destroy the earth would be larger than the moon.
* Robots
Holy cheese, there's more wrong with fictional robots than I have space in one entry for, so I'm breaking it up
* Robots hate Biological Beings
For some reason, all Robots, Computers, AIs, and other technology-based entities are depicted with a deranged hatred of any human, animal, or other biological based being. Who the hell programmed them that way? Since computers are programmed and follow their programming literally, this leads to the ridiculous conclusion that all the available programmers were severe nihilists who both wanted to commit suicide and take all biological life with them.
* Illogical instructions equals explosion
Because clearly surge protectors don't exist. A computer confronted with invalid instructions tends to lock up, crash, or reboot, not explode.
* That is illogical
Robots in fiction seem to have this supernatural ability to grasp the truth of the matter and scorn any attempts to deceive.
The truth of the matter is, as computer science majors say, "Garbage in, Garbage Out." If you tell a computer that Pi is 5, it will blithely run with it, producing all kinds of odd, illogical results. If you tell it that you are 600 feet tall, and ask it your weight, it will probably give an answer around 1900 - 2200 pounds.
For all my hatred of these, I see them constantly. They grate me the way that spelling, pronunciation, or grammar errors would grate an English major. Argh.
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