Speaker 1: Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from my Heart Radio.
Speaker 1: Are there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Speaker 1: Jonathan Strictland. I'm an executive producer without Heart Radio. And
Speaker 1: how the tech are yet? Well, I'm wrapping up my
Speaker 1: vacation by the time you listen to this, which means
Speaker 1: that it is time for a rerun. This episode originally
Speaker 1: published on December twenty one. It is called Getting Around
Speaker 1: in Science Fiction. Hope you enjoy now. In the last episode,
Speaker 1: we started off talking about some various sci fi gadgets.
Speaker 1: You were telling us about their role within different science
Speaker 1: fiction or speculative fiction. I should say, because some of
Speaker 1: this stuff really falls into fantasy more than sci fi.
Speaker 1: But their role within speculative fiction, what purpose do they serve?
Speaker 1: And then I was the the bad guy with the
Speaker 1: pen popping all the balloons of possibility, saying how how
Speaker 1: this was truly fiction as opposed to reality. You crushed
Speaker 1: my spirit shot, as is my one Ariel. You've known
Speaker 1: me for for like I think about twenty years now,
Speaker 1: and so we're coming up on twenty years. I think
Speaker 1: will be twenty years since we first met, and so
Speaker 1: I think I first met and I knew each other's names.
Speaker 1: I think you might have seen me at the Renaissance
Speaker 1: Festival before you work there. Uh. But yeah, I have
Speaker 1: been crushing your dreams for twenty years, so I guess
Speaker 1: there should be no surprise at this point. Well, I
Speaker 1: want to I just want to stay as it's important
Speaker 1: for for people to remember that. At the end of
Speaker 1: the last episode, we had decided that Doctor Who has
Speaker 1: so far been the most accurate science fiction show, yes
Speaker 1: in their technology being all timey wymy whibbly wobbly, which
Speaker 1: I know I reverse that, but hey, I've watched like
Speaker 1: maybe three full seasons of Doctor Who. Total. Um, I
Speaker 1: am no expert on it. That's why I brought you on.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna pick up from where we left off,
Speaker 1: and we're going to talk about some more science fiction
Speaker 1: technologies and what if any corollary there are in the
Speaker 1: real world. And we're gonna go back to the Star
Speaker 1: Treks I think for our first one. Yes, we're gonna
Speaker 1: get back to Star Treks, specifically with tricorders. Uh. And
Speaker 1: this excites me because I know that a lot of
Speaker 1: Star Trek technology people have tried to make true. We
Speaker 1: talked about in the previous episodes. So tricorders are kind
Speaker 1: of this specialist. I find multi tool that do scanning, analysis,
Speaker 1: data recording, all of that. It can tell you the
Speaker 1: component makeup of being or an item. It can search
Speaker 1: for life, It can trace nady on particles, It can
Speaker 1: examine living organisms. It gives you lights and screens and
Speaker 1: detachable scanners to tell you what everything is doing, so
Speaker 1: that when crew member is in an alien environment, they
Speaker 1: can explore it, they can understand it, they can search
Speaker 1: for life, so on and so forth. This is something
Speaker 1: that people have been working on for a long time
Speaker 1: in real life, right, Jonathan, Well, they're definitely lots of
Speaker 1: components that have their real world counterparts, right. So, like
Speaker 1: the exploration of an alien planet and determining whether or not,
Speaker 1: for example, it might be safe to breathe in the atmosphere, Well,
Speaker 1: we do that through something called spectral analysis, which I
Speaker 1: am sad to say doesn't have anything to do with ghosts, um,
Speaker 1: it's not that kind of specter. Now we're talking about
Speaker 1: spectral as in a spectrum, and you know, you might
Speaker 1: be aware that you can analyze light and see which
Speaker 1: bands within the visible spectrum or even beyond the visible spectrum.
Speaker 1: That light falls right, you can see, oh, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of red um as opposed to not very much blue.
Speaker 1: And by analyzing light, we can determine things like the
Speaker 1: chemical uh, composition of various materials, and so we can
Speaker 1: use powerful telescopes, and we can analyze the light coming
Speaker 1: from various bodies, including light that's reflected off of bodies.
Speaker 1: So like a planet. Obviously a planet doesn't generate light.
Speaker 1: If it's generating light, something is really wrong on that planet. Uh,
Speaker 1: it is reflecting light from a nearby star. But that
Speaker 1: will tell us in general the sort of things we
Speaker 1: could expect within the atmosphere of that planet. Now, that
Speaker 1: wouldn't let us go so far as to draw an
Speaker 1: automatic conclusion that us safe, pop your helmet off and
Speaker 1: walk around, because there there could be there could be pathogens.
Speaker 1: There could be various components within either the atmosphere or
Speaker 1: other things that are on that planet that could be
Speaker 1: toxic to us. So it's not an automatic Oh we
Speaker 1: can go there and have a summer home, but we
Speaker 1: would have at least some information about what to expect
Speaker 1: on that planet. So that part it's kind of similar.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing about Star Trek is you often see
Speaker 1: them using this after they've already landed on the planet
Speaker 1: and they're like, oh good, we're not gonna die immediately. Guys.
Speaker 1: It's like, oh that that's that's a huge relief that
Speaker 1: we're not all currently dead. Uh. The other elements of
Speaker 1: the tri quarter that I find really interesting are the
Speaker 1: ones that involve analyzing a person. Let's say that a
Speaker 1: person has exhibited signs that they are unwell, and the
Speaker 1: doctor Bones, for example, in the original series, would use
Speaker 1: the tricorder to scan them to find out what the
Speaker 1: heck is going on. Um. And obviously we've got a
Speaker 1: lot of medical tools that are meant to do this,
Speaker 1: things like blood pressure cuffs and thermometers, and we have
Speaker 1: seen that technology advance. It's over time as well, to
Speaker 1: the point that now you can wear something like a
Speaker 1: smart watch that uses infrared light to shine light down
Speaker 1: into your skin, like the skin of your wrist, to
Speaker 1: reflect off of your blood vessels, and that a sensor
Speaker 1: inside that same smart watch can pick up this reflected
Speaker 1: light and make determinations of stuff like your blood oxygen level.
Speaker 1: So again, we're not at anything to the point where
Speaker 1: you point a little you know, do hicky medical tri
Speaker 1: tricord exactly at a person and go and then figure
Speaker 1: out that they got the sniffles. But we do have
Speaker 1: a lot of technologies that kind of go toward that way.
Speaker 1: And as you mentioned, there's been a lot of companies
Speaker 1: they've kind of taken the tricorder model and said, how
Speaker 1: can we make this more of a reality. Most of
Speaker 1: those efforts, uh, haven't been spectacularly successful, but it's an
Speaker 1: ongoing process as companies attempt to create more robust technologies
Speaker 1: that are able to do some of the things that
Speaker 1: we see in science fiction. Uh, but we can't really
Speaker 1: replicate it here on Earth currently, not in the not
Speaker 1: in the way that we see it in the shows.
Speaker 1: But I would say that this is one that we're
Speaker 1: starting to see more movement kind of toward. I think
Speaker 1: we might hit some fundamental physical limitations that don't allow
Speaker 1: us to ever have a a a technology just like
Speaker 1: the one on Star Trek, but I think we're going
Speaker 1: to get closer. The question will be how accurate and
Speaker 1: reliable are they because if they're not accurate or reliable,
Speaker 1: then it's just a well, at best, it's a distraction
Speaker 1: and at worst it could cause complications because you might
Speaker 1: rely on incorrect information very true, and as close as
Speaker 1: we might get to a medical scanner, I don't know
Speaker 1: if our real life tri quarters will ever also be
Speaker 1: able to release antiseptic spray, provide a shot, heal a
Speaker 1: bone you No, I will give it to star Trek.
Speaker 1: Those were very specific trickers. They were specifically medical, right
Speaker 1: right right. You might remember the little UM, the little
Speaker 1: the little device that was handheld that people would put
Speaker 1: up to the neck like bones, would put it up
Speaker 1: against someone's neck and you would hear a little sounding
Speaker 1: exactly and then they would be injected with something. There
Speaker 1: have been various companies that have come out with UM
Speaker 1: with syringes that are in that kind of mode. Uh.
Speaker 1: In fact, I remember my dad telling me about his
Speaker 1: experience with one and that it was about five times
Speaker 1: more painful than a standard syringe. So maybe not the
Speaker 1: best approach, um, But yeah, I for things like healing
Speaker 1: of bones and stuff. Uh, there are interesting approaches that
Speaker 1: use things like ultrasonic frequencies to try and help with
Speaker 1: to promote things like like bone healing. But the last
Speaker 1: time I looked into it, which granted was a while ago, uh,
Speaker 1: the research on it was not really conclusive about whether
Speaker 1: or not it genuinely was helpful, but it was something
Speaker 1: that various medical professionals were exploring the possibility of using
Speaker 1: an ultrasonic therapy to help with things like like healing
Speaker 1: a broken bone. I know that I know that some
Speaker 1: vets will use light therapy as well for healing of
Speaker 1: wounds with animals, for instance. So it's just similar in
Speaker 1: many Yeah, I mean we we's all just animals when
Speaker 1: you get down to it. So, yeah, it's this one,
Speaker 1: I think, is one where the seeds are there. And
Speaker 1: maybe we never see an implementation like we do in fiction.
Speaker 1: But but the the depiction that we see in fiction
Speaker 1: is not so far removed from reality, right, it doesn't.
Speaker 1: It doesn't feel like that would be truly impossible the
Speaker 1: way some of the others do. Yeah. Well, one that
Speaker 1: feels truly impossible to me as is stepping away from
Speaker 1: Star Trek before we step back into it is the neuralizer,
Speaker 1: and I suppose by relation the d neuralizer from Men
Speaker 1: in Black. Uh, funny you should say that this doesn't
Speaker 1: seem realistic, but go ahead, Well now, I'm afraid to
Speaker 1: Jonathan Well, tell everybody what these things do within men
Speaker 1: and black. All right, So the neuralizer Men in Black
Speaker 1: is a little like pen light pop up pen kind
Speaker 1: of like it looks like the ones that you get
Speaker 1: from the dollar store, where it's got the twelve cartridges
Speaker 1: of different colors of ink and you press one down
Speaker 1: all around, press down like five of them and drawn
Speaker 1: like eight colors or something. Yes, yes, yes, you take
Speaker 1: off the cap on the front of it so that
Speaker 1: you can write with all of them at once. Anyhow,
Speaker 1: that is not at all how this thing works. How
Speaker 1: this works is it flashes a bright light to erase
Speaker 1: your memory, and then a new memory can be put
Speaker 1: in place. And I know that you can affect people's memories.
Speaker 1: You can keep your memory from being affected by wearing
Speaker 1: ray bands probably special ray bands, probably put a lot
Speaker 1: of money. Yeah, that's that's the kind of special. So
Speaker 1: so yeah, so it's a little pen thing that allows
Speaker 1: you to wipe somebody's memory and put a new memory
Speaker 1: in its place. And then there's a d neuralizer that
Speaker 1: is much more complicated and was very difficult for me
Speaker 1: to find descriptions of how exactly it worked because within
Speaker 1: the Men in Black universe there were only a couple
Speaker 1: of them. And they were kind of if you on
Speaker 1: how they worked in the universe. But it's basically a
Speaker 1: way to restore of that person's original memories. And it's
Speaker 1: very involved, right, And in both cases the way it
Speaker 1: works wasn't really important for Men in Black, right, The
Speaker 1: the important thing in the plot was just you need
Speaker 1: to have some way to erase the perception and memory
Speaker 1: of an event among the population or else. The whole
Speaker 1: premise of Men and Black falls apart, which is the
Speaker 1: idea that they're aliens have secretly been visiting Earth for
Speaker 1: years and years and years, and there's this UH, this
Speaker 1: agency that is top secret that is in charge of
Speaker 1: dealing with alien human interactions, and part of the whole
Speaker 1: UH system is dependent upon the general population being ignorant
Speaker 1: of the aliens. So you've got to have something two
Speaker 1: wipe out people's memories or else you're going to be
Speaker 1: doing some pretty serious clean up work in like the
Speaker 1: darkest sense, like eliminating people were removing them from the
Speaker 1: populations so that they can't spill the beans. Um, well,
Speaker 1: arial here's the scary thing, UH neuralizer is not that,
Speaker 1: not that, not that preposterous as it turns out, So
Speaker 1: let me preface this by saying, I'm going to be
Speaker 1: talking about mice, not human beings, and with very few exceptions,
Speaker 1: mice and human beings are not the same thing. And
Speaker 1: uh so at M I t the researchers had been
Speaker 1: working with mice. And it also just warning in general
Speaker 1: for people who love animals, this is gonna be hard
Speaker 1: to hear. There's gonna be some hard stuff to hear
Speaker 1: in this one. They took mice and they implanted some
Speaker 1: fiber optic lines that went through the skull into the
Speaker 1: mouse brains, so they had a direct line, a fiber
Speaker 1: optic going into the little mouse brain. They then put
Speaker 1: the mice in what they called the red room, which
Speaker 1: was a little environment not not no, not the shining,
Speaker 1: but I appreciate your enthusiasm. No, the mice were told
Speaker 1: to explore. Told the mice were allowed to explore this
Speaker 1: red room. They talking to mice rarely doesn't much good.
Speaker 1: They were allowed to explore this red room. And then
Speaker 1: the floor of this little red room had electrodes in
Speaker 1: it through which the researchers could apply a mild electric
Speaker 1: shock to the little twid sees of the mice, which
Speaker 1: they it wasn't It wasn't enough to be harmful, but
Speaker 1: it was enough to be unpleasant. In other words, it
Speaker 1: was enough to hurt but not cause harm, right like
Speaker 1: getting a shock from something um At the same time,
Speaker 1: they would show a blue light through the fire her
Speaker 1: optic into the little mouse brain, so they're literally shining
Speaker 1: light onto the brains of the mice on a specific
Speaker 1: section of their brains. Then they took the mice. They
Speaker 1: put them into a different environment which the mice had
Speaker 1: no association with as far as shocks go. So in
Speaker 1: other words, this was this was new. It was not
Speaker 1: scary to them. It was just unusual and unknown, and
Speaker 1: the mice were allowed to explore again. Then the m
Speaker 1: I T researchers showed the blue light through the fiber
Speaker 1: optics to the mice brains. They did not shock the mice,
Speaker 1: They just did the blue light. But the blue light
Speaker 1: had been associated with the shocks, so even though the
Speaker 1: mice are not seeing the blue light, it's shining into
Speaker 1: their brains. It implanted a false memory that they had
Speaker 1: just been shocked, and they behaved as if the floor
Speaker 1: was covered in these electrodes, and they huddled in the
Speaker 1: corner and they hid because they to them in their
Speaker 1: brains they remembered getting shocked even though they had never
Speaker 1: been shocked. They were then put into a third environment
Speaker 1: and again showed no signs of having this this like.
Speaker 1: They didn't behave as if it was dangerous. Again. So
Speaker 1: the researchers had come up with this this hypothesis that
Speaker 1: it is possible to implant memory, false memories into a mouse,
Speaker 1: and that this could also potentially be reversible, where you
Speaker 1: could remove memories, You could remove the ability for a
Speaker 1: mouse to recall that it had a specific uh outcome
Speaker 1: from a particular situation, and thus it would not behave
Speaker 1: it wouldn't learn because it wouldn't have the memory to
Speaker 1: have built upon that. When I'm in this situation, bad
Speaker 1: things happen, that memory would be erased. So it's not
Speaker 1: a flashy red thing. It is incredibly invasive and it's
Speaker 1: for mice. But the science shows how memory is a
Speaker 1: tricky thing because it's all about the neurons in our
Speaker 1: brain firing in a specific way, and if you can
Speaker 1: disrupt that or change that, you change memory. That is
Speaker 1: very interesting and it's invasive, maybe not as cruel as
Speaker 1: you know clocking somebody upside the head all a Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers style to race memories, the old way of delivering
Speaker 1: amnesia through percussive maintenance, yes, yes, or the way of
Speaker 1: convincing somebody something's true by saying it so many times,
Speaker 1: which I guess that would be kinder brainwashing. So it's
Speaker 1: not an unknown thing. Just it's interesting that they're able
Speaker 1: to do it with light, Like you said, shining light
Speaker 1: on the branch, which goes back to the Men and
Speaker 1: Black stuff. Right, it's like using light now, granted the
Speaker 1: Men and Black thing, just the light itself somehow has
Speaker 1: this ability once you perceive it through your eyeballs, to
Speaker 1: erase your memory, whereas the M I. T. Researchers were
Speaker 1: literally associating light with a specific outcome, and that's how
Speaker 1: they were able to do it. So it's it's two
Speaker 1: different things. They're similar enough where you could say maybe
Speaker 1: the there was some inspiration in that research that went
Speaker 1: into the way Men and Black did it, or maybe
Speaker 1: it was just a convenient way to work around a
Speaker 1: plot necessity. So I think that that was a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting sci fi gadget to reality comparison. And we've got
Speaker 1: a lot more. But before we get to that, let's
Speaker 1: take a quick break, okay, Ariel, I understand, We're going
Speaker 1: to make another trip back over to the star treks, yes,
Speaker 1: this time with something not as sad as my myce
Speaker 1: brain play games. Well, you say that, but you don't
Speaker 1: know what I'm going to say after you're done. Joh,
Speaker 1: then my heart can't take it. No mouse abuse will
Speaker 1: happen in this particular section, which is good because I'm
Speaker 1: talking about communicators, which are devices that allow you to
Speaker 1: communicate faster than the speed of sound I guess, faster
Speaker 1: than the speed of light using subspace transmissions without satellites
Speaker 1: that can bypass electromagnetic fields, and basically it's instantaneous communication
Speaker 1: across great expanses. Because if you're let's say, on one
Speaker 1: side of the galaxy and you're getting attacked by Klingons
Speaker 1: and the rest of your backup fleet is on the
Speaker 1: other side of the galaxy, you don't want to wait
Speaker 1: years for them to get your message to come back
Speaker 1: and save you. I mean, we watch The Martian, the
Speaker 1: movie The Martian with Matt Damon, and even between Earth
Speaker 1: and Mars, which is not as nearly as far as
Speaker 1: the spaces that we often deal with. In Star Trek,
Speaker 1: it took many minutes for one message to get from
Speaker 1: Mars to Earth, and then many minutes for a message
Speaker 1: a response to get back from Earth to Mars. So
Speaker 1: it could take an hour to have a very short conversation.
Speaker 1: That just doesn't do when the Klingons are attacking you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and those pesky clingons, man, they'll they'll pounce on any
Speaker 1: any opportunity. You know. Also also, I'm sure Romulans and
Speaker 1: Kardassians almost said Kardashians. The Kardashians also will pounce on
Speaker 1: any opportunity. They've proven that on social media time and again. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So you point out like this is this is one
Speaker 1: of those issues that writers had to deal with when
Speaker 1: they're talking about the premise of a federation that's capable
Speaker 1: of doing deep space exploration. I mean, the whole purpose
Speaker 1: of Star Trek is to explore that. That's part of
Speaker 1: the preamble to every episode. And uh, the challenges how
Speaker 1: do you deal with two things? And we'll we'll touch
Speaker 1: on the other one later. I think one is how
Speaker 1: do you get from point A to point B in
Speaker 1: a reasonable amount of times so that you're dealing with
Speaker 1: the same characters in the middle of the episode that
Speaker 1: you had in the beginning, because otherwise you would have
Speaker 1: to have generations of characters, right, And the other one
Speaker 1: being how do you deal with that occasionally in a storyline? Well, sure,
Speaker 1: but yeah, that's always the exception, not the rule. And
Speaker 1: then the ability to communicate back to either another ship
Speaker 1: or home base without any delay, and uh, we get
Speaker 1: to a fundamental limit of the universe, which is the
Speaker 1: speed of light. The speed limit for the universe. Nothing
Speaker 1: goes faster than light. The few times where people thought
Speaker 1: that maybe they had picked up on something that was
Speaker 1: faster than the speed of light, it turned out upon
Speaker 1: further study that they were wrong. So light is the
Speaker 1: fastest anything can go. And if you are a light
Speaker 1: year away from something, that means it's going to take
Speaker 1: a full year for light to get from that thing
Speaker 1: to you. So you're literally looking at the thing from
Speaker 1: a year ago. So if we're looking at a planet
Speaker 1: that's ten light years away, we're actually looking into that
Speaker 1: planet's past. Right, We're seeing the planet from ten years ago,
Speaker 1: just very wibbly wobbly. Yes, it's cool stuff, but it
Speaker 1: does show that there's this huge challenge in storytelling, and
Speaker 1: subspace was kind of a cheat to get around that
Speaker 1: because without it, there is no way to have real
Speaker 1: time communication between two points that are of significant distance
Speaker 1: apart from each other. As you were pointing out arial
Speaker 1: in the Martian there was that delay that was depicted
Speaker 1: within the story. In real world where we were landing
Speaker 1: things like the Curiosity Rover on Mars, that all had
Speaker 1: to be done through automated systems because there was no
Speaker 1: way to control the spacecraft in real time. There was
Speaker 1: at least an eight minute delay between when something would
Speaker 1: happen and when we would know about it, which meant
Speaker 1: that the Curiosity Rover was on the surface of Mars
Speaker 1: for more than ten minutes before we were sure it
Speaker 1: had worked, and admit that the whole process had to
Speaker 1: be done through automation. So this is something we can't
Speaker 1: easily get around. There is no such thing as subspace communication,
Speaker 1: at least nothing that we have created, and it's very
Speaker 1: difficult to understand how you would even make it happen.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, maybe you argue that you somehow tapped
Speaker 1: into an extra dimensional channel, but that is again kind
Speaker 1: of a get out of jail free card, because even
Speaker 1: in the mathematic models of the universe where we talk
Speaker 1: about additional dimensions on top of the ones that we
Speaker 1: can perceive, there's still no way for us to access
Speaker 1: those dimensions. They are they work because the math works right,
Speaker 1: so mathematically they seem to be there, but that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean we can do anything or interact with them in
Speaker 1: any way that we could perceive or or take advantage of.
Speaker 1: So that is kind of a fundamental flaw in these films,
Speaker 1: and and it shows an issue we're going to have
Speaker 1: should we ever get to a point where we can
Speaker 1: do colonization on other planets or deep space exploration, we're
Speaker 1: going to have these issues where communication is going to
Speaker 1: have this massive lag in it. One other thing that
Speaker 1: communicators have in Star Trek that we kind of sort
Speaker 1: of have in real life, uh is the universal translator.
Speaker 1: Although we don't have a universal translator, we have we
Speaker 1: have very good algorithms that can do pretty decent translations
Speaker 1: for different languages here on Earth because spoiler alert, we
Speaker 1: haven't encountered an ext or terrestrial language as of yet,
Speaker 1: so that we know of that we know of fair enough.
Speaker 1: French sometimes seems to be out of this world. So
Speaker 1: but no, the I mean that's where the cone heads
Speaker 1: were from, right from France. Uh, the the Yeah. But
Speaker 1: with the translators here, obviously, they work on a totally
Speaker 1: different principle than again, the universal translator, which was another
Speaker 1: plot necessity in Star Trek, which is that here we
Speaker 1: have mapped languages against each other so that we can
Speaker 1: make an approximate interpretation from one language to another. Um.
Speaker 1: Direct translations don't always work because of things like idioms
Speaker 1: and sayings and one language just don't don't translate to another,
Speaker 1: so you often have to take interpretation into account. But
Speaker 1: in universal translators they work on this magical principle that
Speaker 1: if you just analyze enough of a language on its own,
Speaker 1: a computer system will will suss out what sounds mean
Speaker 1: and then in real time translate that into whatever language
Speaker 1: is spoken by the person who's hearing it, to the
Speaker 1: point where the mouths of the person doing the speaking
Speaker 1: seemed to be speaking perfect English. Uh, that's weird. It
Speaker 1: should look like it should look like one of those
Speaker 1: badly dubbed Kung fu films. Yeah, yeah, I mean I've
Speaker 1: watched Arrival, and that's a linguistics expert trying to decipher
Speaker 1: a a alien language, and it's not as easy as
Speaker 1: just listening to a little bit, because that's if you
Speaker 1: just listen to a little bit, I'm guessing you assume
Speaker 1: that they're using human structure and rules and things like that.
Speaker 1: From what I understand, Arrival was actually took a lot
Speaker 1: of of real life language deciphering into account in its storytelling. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I know, a lot of linguists had had high praise,
Speaker 1: a lot of fans of hard science fiction having a
Speaker 1: lot of high praise for Our Arrival because it seemed
Speaker 1: to have a much more uh, much more realistic approach
Speaker 1: to what it would take two interpret an alien presence
Speaker 1: on Earth as opposed to the Will Smith Welcome to Earth,
Speaker 1: punch in the face, a punch of Independence day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: you mentioned when you were talking about communicators get out
Speaker 1: of jail free cards, and I feel like all throughout fantasy,
Speaker 1: sci fi, and and comic books we have that many
Speaker 1: times it comes in the form of the tools, or
Speaker 1: rather the materials they use to build the science fiction tools.
Speaker 1: So let's do a little quick fire of some minerals
Speaker 1: and and items such as that that exist in the
Speaker 1: sci fi fantasy world and whether we actually have real
Speaker 1: life counterparts. So let's start with adamantium, which is a
Speaker 1: Marvel thing. It's virtually indestructible bowl. It's a man made
Speaker 1: it's a steel alloy. It's what Captain America's shield is
Speaker 1: made out of. So it's just like extra super super
Speaker 1: super super strong steel. It's also the stuff that Wolverine's
Speaker 1: skeleton is made out of, yes, or coded in. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Coded in. His skeleton is still made out
Speaker 1: of bone. It was it was coated in adamantium um.
Speaker 1: And also, uh well, at least I think in the
Speaker 1: Marvel Cinematic universe, I think Captain America's shield might be
Speaker 1: made out of vibranium um, not adamantium, because because it
Speaker 1: disperses sound. But we'll talk about vibranium in a second.
Speaker 1: Yeah I can't. But I can't tell you how they
Speaker 1: made adamantium because it's a government secret. Yeah yeah, well
Speaker 1: this kind of so you Aerial also are a fan
Speaker 1: of HP Lovecraft horror type stuff, right, um, and Lovecraft
Speaker 1: Lovecraft put a lot of the onus of his work
Speaker 1: on the Reader because he would say that a monster
Speaker 1: was so reprehensibly horrible and awful that you the human
Speaker 1: brain can't can't process it and you go crazy looking
Speaker 1: at it, which is a great way to get around
Speaker 1: the problem of having to describe what your monster looks like. Well,
Speaker 1: in the same sort of way, saying that the process
Speaker 1: of making this is so top secret that it's never
Speaker 1: been shared is a great way to get around the
Speaker 1: fact that you can't do this. Um. Yeah, So adamantium
Speaker 1: is being a steel alloy. That's totally realistic. We have alloys.
Speaker 1: I mean, steel itself is an alloy, and an alloy
Speaker 1: is a metal and either another metal or sometimes a mineral,
Speaker 1: that are mixed together in order to create a a
Speaker 1: different version of what you were working with. So steel
Speaker 1: is an alloy of iron and carbon, primarily iron by itself,
Speaker 1: very useful stuff, but it has limitations. Uh, it gets
Speaker 1: a little bindy, windy, and it can be a little
Speaker 1: brittle whittle as well. And by putting a little carbon
Speaker 1: into a little iron and doing a very very involved
Speaker 1: process of smelting, you can create a steel and that
Speaker 1: ends up being harder, being able to hold an edge better, um,
Speaker 1: being less brittle, at least in certain circumstances. Depending on
Speaker 1: how much carbon is in the iron, and it means
Speaker 1: that you can do other stuff with it. So adamantium
Speaker 1: not realistic alloys totally a thing, all right? Well, and
Speaker 1: I'm actually gonna switch up the order we have these
Speaker 1: in a little bit. Mithral then, which is silver that
Speaker 1: has tripled the strength of steel, seems to me be
Speaker 1: another alloy. Is possible to make silver that strong? No? Um,
Speaker 1: So myth roll comes from the Token universe, although it's
Speaker 1: been used in fantasy ever since. Like, there's so many
Speaker 1: different fantasies stories that if they don't call it myth role,
Speaker 1: it's essentially myth role. I think Dudgeons and Dragons just
Speaker 1: lifted it. But I kind of like that because it
Speaker 1: makes it feel like all these science fiction and fantasy
Speaker 1: universes all come from some sort of truth. I know
Speaker 1: they don't, but the fact that they all vaguely connect
Speaker 1: and intertwined is interesting to me. Anyhow, go on, Well,
Speaker 1: myth role being made of silver, So there are a
Speaker 1: couple of interesting things about silver that they don't relate
Speaker 1: back to myth roll, but they do make silver very special.
Speaker 1: One of those things is that silver has antimicrobial properties,
Speaker 1: like silver kills microbes, so for that purpose. You will
Speaker 1: often find things like wound dressings that have nanoparticles of
Speaker 1: silver worked into the dressing because it it fights off infection,
Speaker 1: It fights off the possibility of getting an infected wound.
Speaker 1: It's not a guarantee, but it definitely helps. So we
Speaker 1: actually do see that silver has these kind of almost
Speaker 1: magical properties because you know, it's it's hard for us
Speaker 1: to imagine how on a macro scale this works. But
Speaker 1: when you start looking at a nano scale, and a
Speaker 1: nanometer is one billionth of a meter. When you're looking
Speaker 1: at that tiny of a scale, physics operate very differently
Speaker 1: than they do on our level. And so there are
Speaker 1: certain things about silver that do make it special uh
Speaker 1: And and there are alloys of steel, and there are
Speaker 1: other um uh materials that we make that are lighter
Speaker 1: and stronger than steel. Stronger, depending upon your definition, is
Speaker 1: strong like carbon fiber. So I would argue that carbon fiber,
Speaker 1: which is an artificial thing that we work with, is
Speaker 1: kind of similar to myth. Although myth role was was
Speaker 1: naturally occurring. It was something that the dwarves would mine
Speaker 1: in in the Tolkien universe. And uh uh. With carbon fiber,
Speaker 1: you can get something that has that's lighter than steal,
Speaker 1: but much stronger. But as I said, strong depends on
Speaker 1: your definition because there are different types of material strength.
Speaker 1: There's tent sile strength, which is the resistance to being
Speaker 1: pulled apart from deforming and breaking from a pulling uh
Speaker 1: kind of stress. Then there's a hardness, which is more
Speaker 1: like if you impact it, how does it hold up
Speaker 1: against that? Does it hold its shape or does it
Speaker 1: deform or dent. So there are different ways to think
Speaker 1: about how strong is something or is it brittle? This
Speaker 1: is something that it's hard, but if you strike it,
Speaker 1: it breaks apart. So when we say that something is stronger,
Speaker 1: we have to define that further. We can't just say
Speaker 1: yes or no it maybe oh, this thing has got
Speaker 1: amazing tent stile strength, like like there could be some
Speaker 1: some carbon uh uh fiber stuff or some approach of
Speaker 1: of carbon nanotube type stuff that you could say, oh,
Speaker 1: this has got such tin style strength. We could use
Speaker 1: it to build a space elevator. But then if you said, yeah,
Speaker 1: but if anything hits it, it'll break right apart because
Speaker 1: it has terrible strength on that On that side, like
Speaker 1: it's great tin sill strength, but an impact is terrible,
Speaker 1: then you are back to the drawing board. So long
Speaker 1: story short, mythral not real, but there are some real
Speaker 1: world uh materials that we have that that do fall
Speaker 1: into that lighter than steel but stronger than steel category.
Speaker 1: That makes me feel like Uru metal is not so
Speaker 1: much of a far fetch either then, because uru metal
Speaker 1: is what Doris hammer Milner was made out of, which
Speaker 1: is uh the first moon stone from the first moon
Speaker 1: with metallic properties that can store magic and and energy,
Speaker 1: and its resistant to damage and super durable. It feels
Speaker 1: like everything you just talked about. But if you didn't
Speaker 1: have to have one or together. Well. Also, I didn't
Speaker 1: mention that we don't have materials that can store electricity
Speaker 1: or like energy and magic. Um, but you did say
Speaker 1: silver was kind of magical and it's micropial. You're turning
Speaker 1: my own words against me. Oh meumu oh meumw came
Speaker 1: back to haunt me, just like when thora throws it. Okay,
Speaker 1: So um yeah. When I used the word kind of magical,
Speaker 1: I mean in the sense that we is difficult for
Speaker 1: us to understand on a on a on a common
Speaker 1: sense level. Um. So, all the all the ideas of
Speaker 1: being able to store energy. There's there's at least some
Speaker 1: it's not storing, but there is some component to that
Speaker 1: that we can look at in real world effects. So, Ariel,
Speaker 1: have you ever heard of something called it the piezo
Speaker 1: electric or sometimes people say piezo electric effect. I have,
Speaker 1: but explained it for everybody who has not. That's fair
Speaker 1: areal So, so piezo electric is the way I say it,
Speaker 1: But I have heard p a zo electric as well.
Speaker 1: It's p i e z o. Uh. This is an
Speaker 1: interesting um feature that some materials have. Quartz as an example,
Speaker 1: and it's a material that if you were to apply
Speaker 1: a mechanical stress to the material, in other words, if
Speaker 1: you were to squeeze it or or hit it or whatever,
Speaker 1: it would cause a voltage difference to occur within the
Speaker 1: material itself, so it could actually emit an electric charge. Likewise,
Speaker 1: if you subject one of these materials to an electric charge,
Speaker 1: it will experience a mechanical internal stress, so in other words,
Speaker 1: it will vibrate. So if you zap a piece of quartz,
Speaker 1: it will vibrate. As a result, if you strike a
Speaker 1: piece of quartz, it will generate an electric charge. And
Speaker 1: this is why watches use use tiny quartz crystals to
Speaker 1: keep time. Because it's a very specific reaction, it's always
Speaker 1: going to be the same. If you apply the exact
Speaker 1: same electric charge, you're gonna get the exact same amount
Speaker 1: of vibration every single time, and vice versa. So it's
Speaker 1: because it's so repeatable and so dependable that ends up
Speaker 1: being an important element in timekeeping. So at least there
Speaker 1: are materials that can convert one form of energy into another.
Speaker 1: It's not the same as storing it. That's that's a
Speaker 1: different thing. But there's at least some component to that.
Speaker 1: Other than that, I can't think of any way to
Speaker 1: make uru realistic. I mean, there are some materials that
Speaker 1: are harder than others or else. We everything we might
Speaker 1: as well be made all the same stuff or or anything.
Speaker 1: But that's just not the case. So there is that.
Speaker 1: But uh, the other thing we have to remember is
Speaker 1: that at least for no true occurring stuff, the odds
Speaker 1: of us encountering something that is completely unheard of in
Speaker 1: science are are low. Um in that the universe is
Speaker 1: pretty much all made out of the same sort of stuff.
Speaker 1: We might find different concentrations of it depending on the
Speaker 1: specific uh, you know, systems we're looking at, but we're
Speaker 1: not likely to encounter. Oh, here's this new metal that
Speaker 1: it's it's a naturally forming metal. It's not like it's
Speaker 1: an alloy that has all these amazing properties. Were not
Speaker 1: likely to encounter that. You mentioned that Courts will vibrate
Speaker 1: or omit energy, which sounds like vibranium. All the vibranium
Speaker 1: is a metal in Courts is a mineral. Uh I
Speaker 1: guess are those the same thing? No, they are not, okay,
Speaker 1: so I'm not okay. So, of course is a mineral.
Speaker 1: Vibranium is a metal. Vibranium is the most versatile metal
Speaker 1: in the Marvel world. I was about to say the world.
Speaker 1: It manipulates energy and vibrations. It can as there are
Speaker 1: actually multiple kinds of vibratium, So some does absorb sound,
Speaker 1: some kind of shoots it out like a kinetic energy.
Speaker 1: There's even some is toxic and radioactive and and can
Speaker 1: liquefy nearby metals because of the way it affects vibration.
Speaker 1: It manipulates vibrations. And then there's one sentient one that
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not going to touch. But so it
Speaker 1: sounds like Courts is pretty close to fibratium. I wouldn't
Speaker 1: go that far, but but I mean, like, obviously there
Speaker 1: are different materials that are uh that are better at
Speaker 1: transmitting vibrations than others. So vibration, when you think about it,
Speaker 1: I like to think of it as think of that.
Speaker 1: Think of it that you're in a room with it's
Speaker 1: a big room. Let's say that you're in a giant
Speaker 1: conference room at Dragon con Aerial. Let's say that there
Speaker 1: are only two other people in that room with you,
Speaker 1: and they're on opposite corners of the room from where
Speaker 1: you're at. You're not really able to interact with them
Speaker 1: in a physical sense, like you can't push them or
Speaker 1: anything because they're too far away. Right. Well, if you
Speaker 1: are a material that has uh it's molecular structure in
Speaker 1: such a way that the molecules can't interact with each
Speaker 1: other easily, then it's very hard for vibration to pass
Speaker 1: through it. But let's say that you're in that same
Speaker 1: conference room and there's about to be about Star Galactica panel,
Speaker 1: so there's like a billion people in there. Well, now,
Speaker 1: because there's so many people in there, you can't even
Speaker 1: you can't even move to the left or right without
Speaker 1: bumping into somebody, which means that if you aerial for
Speaker 1: some reason, decided to bring the wrath of security down
Speaker 1: upon you, and you pushed someone next to you as
Speaker 1: hard as you could, that would spread out through the
Speaker 1: rest of the room as that person would collect with
Speaker 1: other people, and you know it would dissiplate over distance,
Speaker 1: but it would spread the same thing with vibrations, right,
Speaker 1: So if your molecular structure is packed tightly, then vibrations
Speaker 1: can pass more easily through the material. And this explains
Speaker 1: why the speed of sound is dependent upon whatever it's
Speaker 1: traveling through. We usually think of the speed of sound
Speaker 1: is traveling just through the air, but sound will travel
Speaker 1: through other stuff as well, and depending on how tightly
Speaker 1: packed those molecules are and how well they can move
Speaker 1: against each other, that will determine how far the sound
Speaker 1: can travel and uh and how how well how cohesive
Speaker 1: it will remain. So there are those elements, but there's
Speaker 1: nothing that I know of that is so effective at
Speaker 1: absorbing vibration and then furthermore releasing it in some controlled
Speaker 1: way that it would work the way vibranium does. In
Speaker 1: the Marvel comics. We should also mentioned that at least
Speaker 1: in most versions of the Marvel Universe. The largest concentration
Speaker 1: of vibranium is found, of course in Wakonda, Wakonda Forever,
Speaker 1: Wakonda forever. All Right, So I can't find any way
Speaker 1: to make a good segree to this next one. What
Speaker 1: about autumtanum in the Avatar world, which is a room
Speaker 1: temperature superconductor for energy. It's toxic and it has a
Speaker 1: magnetic field, So there are there are things that have
Speaker 1: magnetic fields we call the magnets um, so that's that's realistic.
Speaker 1: There's stuff that's toxic, so that's realistic. Super Conducting at
Speaker 1: room temperature is where we have the big issue because
Speaker 1: on Earth, if we want to make something a superconductor,
Speaker 1: we have to cool it way way way down, and
Speaker 1: we're talking about using liquid nitrogen and sometimes liquid helium
Speaker 1: to get a substance cold enough so it can become
Speaker 1: a super conductor. And a superconductor is really interesting. I
Speaker 1: was gonna say really cool, but it has to be um.
Speaker 1: It's really interesting because, as the name suggests, it conducts electricity.
Speaker 1: But the super part is that there's no electrical resistance.
Speaker 1: With most conductors, there is an element of resistance, meaning
Speaker 1: that the amount of electricity you're putting in at point
Speaker 1: A is not going to be the same as what
Speaker 1: you get out at point B because some of the
Speaker 1: energy is going to be lost along the way as heat.
Speaker 1: It will convert into heat, and the wire connecting point
Speaker 1: A to point B will heat up over time and um.
Speaker 1: And so you you have some efficiency issues, right, and
Speaker 1: you work with that doing different things like if you
Speaker 1: have a bigger uh cable as opposed to a narrow one,
Speaker 1: then you reduce the amount of electrical resistance. Um. If
Speaker 1: you have a shorter one, you reduce the amount of
Speaker 1: electrical resistance. But with superconductors, you have no electrical resistance
Speaker 1: once you get out at point B is what you
Speaker 1: put in at point A, and you don't lose anything
Speaker 1: in heat, which is super interesting and it has incredible
Speaker 1: uses in technology. The large hadron collider, which I like
Speaker 1: to think of as having stolen the name from us
Speaker 1: with a large ner drown collider. Yeah, not the case. No,
Speaker 1: there's totally the other way around. The large hadron collider
Speaker 1: uses superconductors to create these these very powerful magnetic fields
Speaker 1: that propel the particle beams that are used in their experiments.
Speaker 1: So superconductors are a real thing, but room temperature ones
Speaker 1: are not. You can almost think of this as the
Speaker 1: flip of fusion. You know, in our last episode we
Speaker 1: talked about fusion a little bit. Now, fusion is a
Speaker 1: very very hot process. There have been claims about cold fusion,
Speaker 1: but they haven't really withstood scientific scrutiny over time. The
Speaker 1: idea of cold fusion being that you're able to create
Speaker 1: a fusion reaction at essentially room temperature. So this is
Speaker 1: kind of the flip side of that, the superconductor at
Speaker 1: room temperature. Nothing that we have encountered or created so
Speaker 1: far has really held up to either of those applications. Uh,
Speaker 1: if we were able to do one or both of
Speaker 1: those things, we could have incredible, incredible advancements in technology.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying that it's impossible. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that so far we haven't made it work. Well, it's
Speaker 1: such a great discovery of in the sci fi world
Speaker 1: of a a material that I guess that's why we're
Speaker 1: having so many Avatar sequels. Yes, which is a matter
Speaker 1: for a different show, that one being largely drunk Collider ariel.
Speaker 1: I know you've got a couple more. You want to
Speaker 1: talk about about kind of getting around in the outer
Speaker 1: space places. But before we do that, let's take another
Speaker 1: quick break. All right. So that was a quick break,
Speaker 1: but not the because we're flying it faster than light
Speaker 1: through it. Oh that was horrible of me. I'm so sorry,
Speaker 1: but he had to listen to that. All right, So
Speaker 1: it's okay, sci fi vehicles, I guess the first thing
Speaker 1: we should start with is flying in space in general. Yeah,
Speaker 1: star Wars. I'm gonna I'm just gonna stick with Star Wars.
Speaker 1: This is such a big topic. When you watch Star Wars.
Speaker 1: Vehicles they start, they stop in space, they bank in turn,
Speaker 1: and we know that in real life you have to
Speaker 1: have something to push off of and then something to
Speaker 1: stop you in space. It's not Yeah, it's not just
Speaker 1: like putting on the brakes you've got. It's when you
Speaker 1: you're in a car and you put on brakes. It's
Speaker 1: that friction that stops you. Right. Um. So in Star Wars,
Speaker 1: they've got all of these special ways that that space
Speaker 1: vehicles travel so much so that they need to account
Speaker 1: for when they're traveling in in planet atmospheres with things
Speaker 1: like repulsor lifts that are anti gravity technology that keep
Speaker 1: them from just smashing to the ground, yeah, or destroying
Speaker 1: the planet as they lift off. And then when they're
Speaker 1: in space, they use all kinds of inertial compensators I suppose,
Speaker 1: because they use bursts of energy from This is how
Speaker 1: they explained it, at least because they had to explain it. Uh.
Speaker 1: They basically use thrusters and bursts of energy from different
Speaker 1: angles of a ship that depending on where the where
Speaker 1: the center of gravity of the ship is in relation
Speaker 1: to where that thruster is, will push that ship in
Speaker 1: a certain area. But because it's space, especially if you
Speaker 1: like you're going to hyper space travel or super fast travel,
Speaker 1: it'll like liquefy you. So you have to have all
Speaker 1: these inertial compensators in your craft for acceleration, deceleration, drive,
Speaker 1: in equalization to make sure that you don't turn into
Speaker 1: driver's seat paste. Uh. That would be great if we
Speaker 1: could put all of this into actual space travel. So
Speaker 1: how likely is that not at all? Um? Yeah? So
Speaker 1: let's be fair here because one, as we mentioned in
Speaker 1: our last episode, Star Wars is science fiction adjacent, it's
Speaker 1: not really science fiction because the science part is not
Speaker 1: really that important. It's it's a component that is a setting,
Speaker 1: a window dressing for the story. The story itself is
Speaker 1: a fantasy story more than a science fiction story. Um.
Speaker 1: And we also have to remember where the inspiration came
Speaker 1: from for George Lucas when he was making Star Wars,
Speaker 1: because he wasn't trying to make a hard science fiction story.
Speaker 1: He was emulating certain things that he loved about cinema.
Speaker 1: And one of the things he loved were they really
Speaker 1: exciting dog fight sequences and movies that were that in
Speaker 1: World War Two where you would have these and in fact,
Speaker 1: there are there there side by side comparisons of scenes
Speaker 1: from older World War Two setting movies and say the
Speaker 1: X Wing attack on the Death Star, where you can
Speaker 1: see the influences side by side and say you're like,
Speaker 1: oh wow, they almost recreated this older World War Two
Speaker 1: movie shot for shot, but they used the Star Wars
Speaker 1: stuff instead. It's not quite that level, bit's close. And
Speaker 1: so because of that, because the exciting ways that planes
Speaker 1: can move in the atmosphere, that's how the the vehicles
Speaker 1: move in Star Wars. So it was more to evoke
Speaker 1: a feeling in the audience that was never meant to
Speaker 1: be this is the way that stuff actually works in space, right,
Speaker 1: so we should be fair about that, although the whole
Speaker 1: par sex thing is still a huge problem. So there
Speaker 1: so so keeping that in mind when you do move
Speaker 1: to space, because as you say, aerial, there's no atmosphere there.
Speaker 1: You can't bank off of things. You can't have these
Speaker 1: swooping motions. And when you're using thrusters, the center of
Speaker 1: gravity and pivot points do matter. You can do stuff.
Speaker 1: You can have vehicles change their orientation in space, but
Speaker 1: it takes time to do it. Uh. You don't necessarily
Speaker 1: even have to use thrusters to do it. You can
Speaker 1: use what you're called fly wheels. So if you just
Speaker 1: think of it as literally a wheel that's mounted onto
Speaker 1: a rotating motor, and the wheel is weighted a little
Speaker 1: bit and you rotate that wheel, you can create uh,
Speaker 1: the motion necessary to alter the orientation of the spacecraft
Speaker 1: within space. They've done this with things like satellites like
Speaker 1: the Hubble telescope, because obviously otherwise the only option is
Speaker 1: to load down the satellite was so much fuel that
Speaker 1: will be able to continually operate and then use the
Speaker 1: fuel to to do thruster adjustments. Right, that's not realistic.
Speaker 1: So the flywheels do work, but it's not You're not
Speaker 1: going to get that smooth and more importantly fast change
Speaker 1: of direction and ability to maneuver in space the way
Speaker 1: we see in Star Wars. That's just that's just not
Speaker 1: going to happen. Um. It would be really cool if
Speaker 1: it could. But yeah, it's a completely unrealistic depiction of
Speaker 1: how spacecraft would travel in space. Well, it's also there's
Speaker 1: a lot of unrealistic depiction of how fast spacecraft travel
Speaker 1: in space. So let's and and each. There are lots
Speaker 1: of different terms for that as well in science fiction.
Speaker 1: So let's start with light speed because I feel this
Speaker 1: makes me really sad. We have light speed, hyperspace, and
Speaker 1: warp speed that we want to talk about, and light
Speaker 1: speed is the most realistic. We've almost reached it at points.
Speaker 1: And the one that uses light speed and science fiction
Speaker 1: is spaceballs. Well, there's a lot of other things that
Speaker 1: use light speed, we chose we chose spaceball because they
Speaker 1: they've gone to plaid um spaceballs. Yeah, so, so faster
Speaker 1: than light. Um, it's completely unrealistic to ever have faster
Speaker 1: than light travel, as in you you just have some
Speaker 1: means of pushing your vehicle faster than light itself can travel. Like,
Speaker 1: you're not talking about any other tricks. You're just talking
Speaker 1: about somehow speeding up beyond the speed of light. And um,
Speaker 1: the way you can think about this is that anything
Speaker 1: that has mass, from the millennium falcon to an electron,
Speaker 1: anything that has mass cannot travel at the speed of light. Uh.
Speaker 1: The only reason photons can travel at the speed of
Speaker 1: light is that they have no actual mass. They have
Speaker 1: relativistic mass, but that's different and outside the the needs
Speaker 1: for us to have a discussion here. But they don't
Speaker 1: have any real actual mass, so they can they can
Speaker 1: do this. They in fact, they have to. They have
Speaker 1: no option. They travel the speed of light. That's what
Speaker 1: it is. But but anything that has mass cannot. As
Speaker 1: you get closer to the speed of light, you get heavier,
Speaker 1: is a good way of putting it. You get your
Speaker 1: your your your weight, your mass really increases and it's
Speaker 1: kind of like imagine you're in a hallway and there's
Speaker 1: a door at the end of the hallway aerial, and
Speaker 1: you're allowed to start walking towards that door. But I've
Speaker 1: given you an a small requirement which is that each
Speaker 1: step you take has to be half as long as
Speaker 1: the last step you took. So let's say you take
Speaker 1: a normal step, Well, your next step needs to be
Speaker 1: half that, and your next step has to be half that,
Speaker 1: and then half that. Because of that having you're never
Speaker 1: going to reach the door at the end of the
Speaker 1: hallway because you're you're constantly moving forward, but at increase
Speaker 1: incrementally smaller distances. Same thing happens when you try and
Speaker 1: get closer to the speed of light. You can start
Speaker 1: to approach it, but you're never gonna hit it, which
Speaker 1: means you you can't go past it. Right if you're
Speaker 1: never even gonna achieve the speed of light. If you
Speaker 1: have mass, you cannot possibly go faster. Also, the thing
Speaker 1: we have to keep in mind, this is something that
Speaker 1: science fiction largely does away with in most cases, hard
Speaker 1: science fiction not so much, but like casual entertainment, is
Speaker 1: that as you get faster, time relative to somebody else
Speaker 1: appears to be passing at a different rate. So if
Speaker 1: I were staying here on Earth because I'm boring, but
Speaker 1: you aerial, we're jumping in your space hot rod to
Speaker 1: go light speed to someplace and then come back like
Speaker 1: you do. When you come back to me, it would
Speaker 1: seem as though time had barely passed at all for you,
Speaker 1: that that you were you were, you know, remarkably young,
Speaker 1: and to you it would seem as though time had
Speaker 1: traveled very fast for me and that I had aged
Speaker 1: quite a bit. For both of us, in our individual experiences,
Speaker 1: time would pass exactly the same as it always would.
Speaker 1: If we were each wearing a watch. The seconds would
Speaker 1: be taking away exactly the way they would if we
Speaker 1: were standing next to each other. It's only through our
Speaker 1: relative perspectives that we perceive a difference in the passage
Speaker 1: of time. That would also be an issue if you
Speaker 1: were to travel faster than light. If you were able
Speaker 1: to do that, you would technically be traveling faster than
Speaker 1: how things happen, so you'd be traveling back in time.
Speaker 1: Because imagine that you turn on a flashlight and then
Speaker 1: you travel in the same direction as where you were
Speaker 1: pointing the flashlight, but you go faster than light. You
Speaker 1: would get to your destination before the light could get
Speaker 1: to you, uh from when you turned it on when
Speaker 1: you were back on earth, which means that when you
Speaker 1: did see the light, you would be looking into the
Speaker 1: past of Earth and see the moment where you had
Speaker 1: done something before you did it, and you start to
Speaker 1: get in some really difficult causal paradoxes as well. So
Speaker 1: faster than light travel physically impossible as far as we
Speaker 1: understand physics, and would also have to require some really
Speaker 1: timey whiney stuff if we were. That's a lot faster
Speaker 1: than back to the future, says with our anyhow, you
Speaker 1: know you say that. But Star Wars and Star Trek
Speaker 1: both kind of when they travel faster than light, they
Speaker 1: aren't accounting for just traveling in space. There either breaking
Speaker 1: a hole through space. It's hyper space and hyper drive,
Speaker 1: which is just basically creating a forced dimension and going
Speaker 1: in one place and coming out another to the point
Speaker 1: that the actual objects around you, the stars, eaters, things
Speaker 1: like that, aren't there. There are shadows there, which is
Speaker 1: great because you don't want to come out in the
Speaker 1: middle of a meteor. But but so to me, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like a wormhole. They're not They're not saying
Speaker 1: I'm traveling through space faster than like. They're saying I'm
Speaker 1: traveling so fast that I'm breaking through space to the
Speaker 1: other side, break right onto the other side. Both of
Speaker 1: these are interesting, right, And Star Trek, it's not that
Speaker 1: they're breaking from one side of space to the other.
Speaker 1: So they're going into one of those different dimensions which
Speaker 1: you talked about. We we they theoretically exist, but we
Speaker 1: can't do anything with them with them. But in Star Trek,
Speaker 1: you know, they aren't breaking through like in Star Wars.
Speaker 1: They're going into subspace through covered in a warp bubble
Speaker 1: and coming back out the other side. So which is similar?
Speaker 1: I guess they're similar. They're similar, So let's let's think
Speaker 1: about these interns. So hyperspace means generally that you're you're
Speaker 1: opening up some sort of interdimensional portal and passing through
Speaker 1: it and then coming out of an interdimensional portal on
Speaker 1: the other side that is located in a different point
Speaker 1: within space, and you still have to travel in between
Speaker 1: the two, and there's no guarantee that the two portals
Speaker 1: are going to be super close together. So you go
Speaker 1: into hyperspace, you might be in hyperspace for a while
Speaker 1: as you travel through this enter dimension or this other dimension,
Speaker 1: and then you come out the other interdimensional portal to
Speaker 1: your destination. Um Hyperspace has its problems, largely also because
Speaker 1: of episode eight of Star Wars, it totally messes with
Speaker 1: the way hyperspace works in Star Wars because spoiler alert
Speaker 1: if you haven't seen episode eight, but a character named
Speaker 1: Whole No she she she has the ultimate sacrifice by
Speaker 1: taking a rebellionship or actually a republic ship I guess,
Speaker 1: and making it jump into hyperspace right into a star
Speaker 1: destroyer in order to ram it essentially do a hyperspace ram.
Speaker 1: But uh, that kind of ignores the lore of how
Speaker 1: hyperspace works from previous Star Wars entries where you're going
Speaker 1: into this extra dimension where you wouldn't really pass through
Speaker 1: an object physically in our dimension that way. However, you
Speaker 1: emerged from hyperspace within one of those things, then uh,
Speaker 1: that would be bad. You would die, right like if
Speaker 1: you were to emerge in the middle of a supernova,
Speaker 1: your ship would be consumed. So either that maneuver shouldn't
Speaker 1: have worked at all because she would have just jumped
Speaker 1: through that ship in the other dimension and nothing would
Speaker 1: have happened. Um or if it did work, why the
Speaker 1: heck wasn't anyone using just just mass just ships with
Speaker 1: a hyper drive no one on board, and use those
Speaker 1: like torpedoes like you could literally just you can plot
Speaker 1: a course. They always use a computer to plot the
Speaker 1: course because without it, there's no guarantee that you wouldn't
Speaker 1: emerge in the middle of an asteroid belt, for example,
Speaker 1: So they use computers to plot their course. Why not
Speaker 1: just plot your course get off the ship. You don't
Speaker 1: have to sacrifice yourself. You can still have that happen.
Speaker 1: And then that would also mean if you work backward. Well,
Speaker 1: if that's possible, then why not just use that for
Speaker 1: the original death start for example? Why have this very
Speaker 1: risky run on the death Star. So they kind of
Speaker 1: wrote themselves into a plot hole corner there with that
Speaker 1: one um with the warp drive. The interesting thing there
Speaker 1: areal is that the concept is kind of cool. Think
Speaker 1: of think of having a map, right and you know
Speaker 1: where Atlanta is and you know where Los Angeles is.
Speaker 1: Those are not close together right at all. It would
Speaker 1: be a very long drive from Atlanta to Los Angeles
Speaker 1: couple of days. What if you were able to fold
Speaker 1: the map so that Los Angeles and Atlanta right next
Speaker 1: to each other, and it's a half hour drive between
Speaker 1: the two, and it's just because you get to skip
Speaker 1: all the middle part. But then I wouldn't see the
Speaker 1: world's biggest ball as they are. And if you're going
Speaker 1: up to Minnesota so that you can go to Los Angeles,
Speaker 1: you have got crazy route planning skills. Um, yeah, so
Speaker 1: if you. But but you get my point, the idea
Speaker 1: being that instead of the Star Trek gets around the
Speaker 1: idea faster than light by saying we're not really traveling
Speaker 1: faster than light. What we're doing is we're warping space
Speaker 1: time around the ship. We're using this warp bubble to
Speaker 1: pass through time and space, uh at a rate that
Speaker 1: would be faster than light if we were traveling a
Speaker 1: straight line. But we're not traveling a straight line. We're
Speaker 1: folding space in on itself so that we're getting so
Speaker 1: that there's less distance between point A and point B.
Speaker 1: And when we say go warp four or warp five
Speaker 1: or warp six, that's describing the extent to which we
Speaker 1: are warping space in order for us to do this,
Speaker 1: which would leave to one of the dumbest episodes of
Speaker 1: Star Trek the Next Generation, where they would have to
Speaker 1: come up with a universal warp speed limit because they
Speaker 1: were ripping spacetime apart um so that in theory is possible.
Speaker 1: It's it's something that people have actually worked on as
Speaker 1: a possibility of the idea of warping spacetime in order
Speaker 1: to travel faster. Now, I say in theory, because in
Speaker 1: reality to do it, you would need so much energy
Speaker 1: that it's the equivalent of, say the mass of an
Speaker 1: entire galaxy. So remember that the relationship between mass and
Speaker 1: energy is E equals mc squared. Energy equals mass times
Speaker 1: the speed of light multiplied by itself. That's an enormous number.
Speaker 1: So if you're looking even if you're looking at like
Speaker 1: a son's mass of energy, that is a pun intended
Speaker 1: and astronomical number, and that means that it is not
Speaker 1: likely to ever happen because it just requires way too
Speaker 1: much energy. And then you would have to continue to
Speaker 1: operate it. That would just be to start it. So
Speaker 1: to actually travel anywhere doing that, you would have to overcome,
Speaker 1: at least, based on our understanding right now, you would
Speaker 1: have to overcome energy requirements that are far beyond anything
Speaker 1: we can even conceive right now, Like we're we're still
Speaker 1: struggling here on Earth to meet our own energy demands
Speaker 1: without destroying the planet's ecosystem through the burning of fossil fuels.
Speaker 1: We are well beyond the ability to create a warp
Speaker 1: drive based on those energy needs. Well, you're you're right,
Speaker 1: You're very right. Uh, but there's at least some sci
Speaker 1: fi travel that we're not well beyond our capabilities to create,
Speaker 1: like hovercraft. Ok Okay, you say hovercraft, what do you
Speaker 1: mean by that? Well, it kind of flying cars, which
Speaker 1: we have some prototypes. They don't exactly work like they
Speaker 1: do in the sci fi world. But okay, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna bring it down to the simplest, the little hovercraft,
Speaker 1: skateboard and back to the future. Okay, okay, all right,
Speaker 1: well I'll say it this way. Under very restrictive circumstances,
Speaker 1: we can do something that would look similar to what
Speaker 1: we see in Back to the Future with hovering skateboards,
Speaker 1: except that you wouldn't be able to like actually use
Speaker 1: them as a skateboard, which would be kind of a bummer. Okay,
Speaker 1: so let's talk. Because you just don't have that much
Speaker 1: magnetic track to push yourself along. Well, not not that,
Speaker 1: but that your weight would push it down, like you
Speaker 1: would be too heavy for it to support. So um
Speaker 1: not you specifically areal I mean any person. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: wasn't a that wasn't a dig. So using magnets to hover,
Speaker 1: that's totally possible. Like we can we can do a
Speaker 1: just with regular permanent magnets. Like you probably have seen
Speaker 1: little toys where you've got like a pedestal and a
Speaker 1: stick and you put a little disc magnet down on
Speaker 1: the stick and it floats above the pedestal. That's because
Speaker 1: the magnetic fields are are they have the same magnetic
Speaker 1: pole facing one another because like, uh, like repulses. Like so,
Speaker 1: if you have the north pole of one magnet pointing
Speaker 1: towards the north pole of a second magnet, you can
Speaker 1: feel them pushing against each other. I'm sure anyone who's
Speaker 1: played with magnets has experienced this. If you flip one
Speaker 1: of those around so that the north pole of one
Speaker 1: in the south pole the other are facing each other,
Speaker 1: they attract and they'll stick together. So if you did
Speaker 1: have a magnetic surface, um, and let's say it's the
Speaker 1: north pole of that magnetic surfaces pointing up whether it's
Speaker 1: an electro magnet or a permanent magnet or whatever, and
Speaker 1: you had another set of permanent magnets or electro magnets.
Speaker 1: Also with the same pole facing down, you can in
Speaker 1: fact levitate above them. That's how maglev trains work. They
Speaker 1: either use permanent magnets or they use electro magnets, or
Speaker 1: a combination of the two, and they create this levitation
Speaker 1: through those opposed wealth the same poles facing one another essentially,
Speaker 1: so it does work. But of course the ground is
Speaker 1: not magically all magnetically oriented the same way, so we
Speaker 1: can't we can't have yeah, yeah, boy, we can dream,
Speaker 1: but you know, you can't have like a just a
Speaker 1: board that hovers over this. One thing that also I
Speaker 1: wanted to mention though, is that we were talking about
Speaker 1: super conductors earlier. If you get a super conductive material
Speaker 1: and you you really get it super cold, and you
Speaker 1: get magnets set up. Uh. One of the interesting things
Speaker 1: about about getting the temperature of a material that cold,
Speaker 1: a super conductive material that cold, is that you get
Speaker 1: was called like a quantum lock, a magnetic lock on
Speaker 1: that it locks out fields magnetic fields from the substance,
Speaker 1: but as long as the substance has some imperfections in it,
Speaker 1: some magnetic fields will get through. This means that if
Speaker 1: you have let's let's say as you've got a bed
Speaker 1: of magnets just in a in a strip from one
Speaker 1: to the other, and they're all connected to each other
Speaker 1: because you have north pole to south Pole to north
Speaker 1: Pole to south pole to north Pole to south pole.
Speaker 1: So you've got a chain of these magnets. You put
Speaker 1: the super cool material over this chain of magnets, it
Speaker 1: will lock into place, uh, with its orientation with regard
Speaker 1: to those magnets, and you could just give it a
Speaker 1: little tap and it'll just float right over those magnets
Speaker 1: or right under the magnets. Like it'll just magically seem
Speaker 1: to to lock into place at whatever distance you've put it.
Speaker 1: As long as you're within the magnetic field of those magnets,
Speaker 1: it will stay in that place. If you tilt it
Speaker 1: a certain way, it will maintain that same tilt as
Speaker 1: it floats over or under the path of magnets. The
Speaker 1: first time I ever saw this on YouTube, it blew
Speaker 1: my mind. I was I was like, this is trippy,
Speaker 1: and uh, it is an incredible thing, but again not
Speaker 1: something we could do in our day to day world,
Speaker 1: in our real lives. There are other methods like the
Speaker 1: flying cars you mentioned, where you can use things like propellers,
Speaker 1: jet engines, that kind of stuff, but you're not using
Speaker 1: magnetic levitation. There's also other types of levitation. There's acoustic levitation,
Speaker 1: where you're using sound waves, but again not something that
Speaker 1: you could easily do with a vehicle. So there are
Speaker 1: ways we can make flying vehicles, and there are ways
Speaker 1: that we can make cool experiments with hovering materials, but
Speaker 1: not at the level that we see in science fiction. Sadly,
Speaker 1: I remember even when Back to the Future two came
Speaker 1: out and they actually perpetuated the rumor that there were
Speaker 1: in fact those real skateboards, but mauntel uh uh did
Speaker 1: would they withdrew all of them from the market for
Speaker 1: fear of lawsuits, but that they really did exist, and
Speaker 1: that was all just a publicity stunt. And I think
Speaker 1: I think with that, while we still have other things
Speaker 1: we could talk about Ariel, because we didn't even touch
Speaker 1: on teleportation or any of that other stuff, But then
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna have to call it quits because
Speaker 1: this has already been a second epic long episode of
Speaker 1: tech stuff and if I go any longer, tari will
Speaker 1: kill me. And we don't want that. No, because we
Speaker 1: needed to continue to edit and produce Large Nerdrun Collider, which, again,
Speaker 1: for you out there who aren't familiar, Ariel and I
Speaker 1: have a new show on I Heart Radio called The
Speaker 1: Large Nerdrun Collider, which is actually version two point oh
Speaker 1: of that show. The show existed several years ago, where
Speaker 1: we talk about pop culture news. We do deep dives
Speaker 1: into topics that are important in the Gecko sphere, and
Speaker 1: we also mash up different properties and different concepts within
Speaker 1: speculative fiction and pop culture to find out what happens
Speaker 1: when people stop being polite and start getting real. I
Speaker 1: don't know if any of my listeners even recognize that reference.
Speaker 1: If if you're of the MTV generation and you understood
Speaker 1: what I was just referring to, give me a tweet
Speaker 1: tech stuff h s W, I'm curious here or Ellen
Speaker 1: c Underscore podcast that's the other Twitter feed and and
Speaker 1: I think you'll really enjoy those. One of the nice
Speaker 1: things about the l NC episodes is that Ariel gets
Speaker 1: to talk a lot more that on tech stuff. I mean,
Speaker 1: I could talk more, but you're the expert on these things,
Speaker 1: so yeah, experts of the experts, weighty words, but I'll
Speaker 1: take it you're less ignorant on some of how these
Speaker 1: things actually work. So fair enough, I'm happy to let
Speaker 1: you talk and learn some things in the process, and
Speaker 1: it's been a lot of fun. Thanks for having me absolutely,
Speaker 1: thank you for joining us. And and guys, make sure
Speaker 1: you go and check out the large Nerdron Collider. We've
Speaker 1: got some great episodes already in the can. They are
Speaker 1: live right now. You can use whatever pod catching app
Speaker 1: you like to subscribe to it and you'll be able
Speaker 1: to hear our thoughts about, you know, important stuff that's
Speaker 1: going on in the world's of geek culture and pop culture,
Speaker 1: and also our our flights of fancy, which are a
Speaker 1: lot of fun for us to do. There's been some
Speaker 1: very creative uh mash ups already. I'm so happy about them. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're pretty entertaining, if I do say so myself.
Speaker 1: I hope you liked that classic episode. I guess it's
Speaker 1: not classic two year old episode of tech Stuff. And
Speaker 1: if you have suggestions, remember reach out to me on Twitter.
Speaker 1: The handle for the show is tech Stuff hs w
Speaker 1: all one word and I'll be on the lookout for it.
Speaker 1: I'm eager to see your suggestions for topics and guests
Speaker 1: I should have on the show, and I'll talk to
Speaker 1: you again really soon. Y Text Stuff is an I
Speaker 1: heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.