Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
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Speaker 1: attendant toward check in. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick, and uh, I want to thank a musician
Speaker 1: or Raleigh Porter for that bit of music there. That's
Speaker 1: the lack xoo off his two thousand and eleven album Aftertime,
Speaker 1: released by Subtext Recording, and you'll find a link on
Speaker 1: the landing page for this episode to learn more about
Speaker 1: that work. But it's the title of this episode and
Speaker 1: our our intro narration um UH Presents. We were, of
Speaker 1: course talking about the Done universe in this week's episodes,
Speaker 1: so we've probably heard us talking about Dune on recent
Speaker 1: episodes of the show. I've mentioned several times that I've
Speaker 1: been reading it. I finally finished reading it. I loved
Speaker 1: this book. Yeah, I'm about halfway through my my reread
Speaker 1: of it, and this I think this will be the
Speaker 1: third time I've read it, and it's it's a book
Speaker 1: that has a special place in my heart as well.
Speaker 1: It's very straight inched to me that a book written
Speaker 1: fifty years ago. That's one of the reasons we're doing
Speaker 1: this is that this year in it's the fiftieth anniversary
Speaker 1: of the publication of Done. That a book this old
Speaker 1: can feel so fresh and imaginative. So much science fiction
Speaker 1: is disturbingly familiar when you when you go to it.
Speaker 1: I don't know. When I went into the world of Done,
Speaker 1: I was constantly surprised by what I encountered. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: so unlike, you know, anything that had come before it,
Speaker 1: and and and unlike. Even though it's it's had a
Speaker 1: huge impact on the genre. Um, there's nothing quite like
Speaker 1: it to this day. I mean, it's uh you have
Speaker 1: this space age feudalistic society and it's full of you know,
Speaker 1: you have profits, you have fabulous creatures, you have strange science,
Speaker 1: strange technology that's changing the shape of life. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: to describe the influencer in terms of the influenced, a
Speaker 1: young person approaching Done today might want to think of
Speaker 1: it as sort of like Game of Thrones in space.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of political intrigue, yeah, but also with
Speaker 1: with a lot of philosophical commentary. And I have to say,
Speaker 1: this is the most ecological novel I've ever read. I've
Speaker 1: never read anything as concerned with ecology and the conservation
Speaker 1: of resources. Yeah, A tremendous amount of thought went into
Speaker 1: the creation of this, this alien ecosystem, an alien ecosystem
Speaker 1: that is not only intrinsically interesting, but but plays an
Speaker 1: enormously important role in the plot. Right, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: do two episodes about the science of Dune, talking about
Speaker 1: the world imagined by Frank Herbert In in his novel
Speaker 1: Dune and in the larger Done universe, but then also
Speaker 1: real world parallels to this science and how doone has
Speaker 1: influenced science fiction. Yeah, So we're gonna be discussing some
Speaker 1: of the science fiction some of the actual science. But
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that they that the sci fi
Speaker 1: aspects of Frank Herbert's done, you know, continues to sate
Speaker 1: so well is, first of all, it's set a tremendously
Speaker 1: long period of time in the future, and he does
Speaker 1: a great job about giving you some details but leaving
Speaker 1: a lot of the details a bit ambiguous and unexplained,
Speaker 1: and you're just sort of left to fill in fill
Speaker 1: in the blanks in your own mind, right, and if
Speaker 1: you know how sci fi fans work, they will fill
Speaker 1: in those blanks. Yes. So two of our primary resources
Speaker 1: here um are, first of all, a fabulous new publication
Speaker 1: titled The Science of Doone, edited by Kevin R. Grazier
Speaker 1: ps PhD uh. It's an unauthorized exploration into the real
Speaker 1: science behind Frank Herbert's fictional universe. And it's a series
Speaker 1: of essays all you know, by experts in their in
Speaker 1: their field, planetologist, cosmologists, etcetera. It's a fabulous book. We'll
Speaker 1: have a link to where you can pick up a
Speaker 1: copy on the landing page. For this episode. We also
Speaker 1: dug in a little bit into the Dune Encyclopedia which
Speaker 1: came out in It's long out of print, but there
Speaker 1: are used copies out there available for purchase. And this
Speaker 1: was compiled by Dr Willis E. Nick Nelly and uh.
Speaker 1: This also involved a number of different freelance writers and
Speaker 1: and some scientists weighing in on not only the science
Speaker 1: potential science underlying the details of Herbert so a Universe,
Speaker 1: but also some of just the cultural aspect as well. Right,
Speaker 1: it's got recipes for frem and flatbread. Yes, I was.
Speaker 1: You pointed that out yesterday and I was very fascinated
Speaker 1: by the topic. They're also lyrics to songs. There's as
Speaker 1: well as some some some science into how say, you know,
Speaker 1: sandworms or faith dancers may have worked. You know, thinking
Speaker 1: about the recipe for frem and flatbread, I wonder why
Speaker 1: the fremen would cook anything, because cooking is almost always
Speaker 1: the cause of much evaporation and loss of moisture. Well,
Speaker 1: perhaps they have a special oven, like a still oven
Speaker 1: that cat captures all that moisture. Yes, so they seal
Speaker 1: off the kitchen and no moisture can escape and then
Speaker 1: you can cook. Yeah, indeed, that makes sense. Now, I
Speaker 1: also just wanna don't want to preface here too that
Speaker 1: they were dealing primarily with the nineteen novel Dune, with
Speaker 1: some discussion of details that may pop up in Frank
Speaker 1: Herbert's later novels. We don't really get into any of
Speaker 1: the more recent works by by Brian Herbert. Brian Herbert
Speaker 1: is of course the son of Frank Herbert, and he
Speaker 1: continued the saga, did some prequels and a number of
Speaker 1: legends of done books with with his collaborator. But I
Speaker 1: have personally not read them. I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people enjoy them, so um, yeah, we would love to
Speaker 1: hear from anyone who who has read those books, who
Speaker 1: has additional information they want to share based on their
Speaker 1: enjoyment of that sort of continued universe. Right, But these
Speaker 1: two episodes we're doing are going to be primarily the
Speaker 1: first novel, Dune, and then our wonderful supplementary materials. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff that I think, for the most part,
Speaker 1: people even who haven't read the book might be familiar
Speaker 1: with from either the of course, the Dave Lynch film adaptation,
Speaker 1: Oh and we got to talk about that. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the Sci Fi Channel mini series from several years back,
Speaker 1: or just sort of the general cultural residents of the series. Um,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna try and make sure it's not too deep.
Speaker 1: So if you have little or no understanding of the
Speaker 1: Dune Universe, we'll hold your hand through the stands. So
Speaker 1: we mentioned it's going to be a two part episode.
Speaker 1: This first episode today is going to be about primarily
Speaker 1: the technology of the Dune Universe, and then the next
Speaker 1: episode we do or we're going to try to focus
Speaker 1: on the organic components, the biology and the ecology of
Speaker 1: the Done universe. But before we get into the meat
Speaker 1: of today's episode, I think we we should just give
Speaker 1: a very very brief cursory plot synopsis to people who
Speaker 1: haven't read the book but want to be able to
Speaker 1: have a basic idea of what's going on. So what
Speaker 1: happens in the novel Dune, Well, essentially you have a
Speaker 1: space opera in which you have a galactic civilization spread
Speaker 1: across various planets right right, and there is one precious
Speaker 1: key resource in the universe that everybody wants and sort
Speaker 1: of controls all trade, and that resources the spice milange.
Speaker 1: It comes from one planet in the entire universe, and
Speaker 1: that planet is a racous also known as Doune Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the stuff that really makes uh, ultimately travel between
Speaker 1: planets possible. It makes the interplanetary economy possible. So everything
Speaker 1: is hinging on this one precious commodity. It's kind of
Speaker 1: the It's essentially the oil of the done universe, right,
Speaker 1: and you can't get it anywhere else. So the characters
Speaker 1: that come in on this story that there are two
Speaker 1: main houses in the story. There's House of Tradees and
Speaker 1: there's House Harconan. The Tradees are it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: manniche and I guess the the Tradees are the good
Speaker 1: guys and the Harconans are very very bad guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the Harconans are they're they're they're a product
Speaker 1: of the environment to to a certain extent, but yeah,
Speaker 1: they're they're pretty villainous. Yeah, and they are essentially competing
Speaker 1: for roll of the planet that produces spice. And there's
Speaker 1: a lot of warfare and backstabbing and treachery and double
Speaker 1: crossing and and tests of loyalty. But ultimately the main
Speaker 1: thrust of the story is the adventure of Paula Trades,
Speaker 1: the young son of House of Trades, and his mother Jessica.
Speaker 1: While they're learning how to live on the planet Dune
Speaker 1: and eventually participating in a journey of cosmic discovery and
Speaker 1: revenge and drugs. Like at the heart, it's such a quintessential,
Speaker 1: like nineties sixties product, right because it's about a young
Speaker 1: man who takes an allucinogen and then save the calaxies.
Speaker 1: You know, I never thought of it that way, but
Speaker 1: that's that's pretty much right. We'll get way more into
Speaker 1: the drugs in the second episode, but today we wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about the the technological theater of the Dune universe.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the coolest concept that's created
Speaker 1: in the book that that Frank Herbert comes up with
Speaker 1: is the idea that this is a future scenario without
Speaker 1: computers or robots. Right, yeah, it is a post but
Speaker 1: Laryan jihad world. Uh So, basically, imagine that the singularity
Speaker 1: has occurred. We have thinking machines everywhere that are caring
Speaker 1: for is looking after us more of I tend to
Speaker 1: interpret more it's like the beneficial aspects of of a
Speaker 1: post singularity world in which your computers are not like,
Speaker 1: you know, enslaving you and making you weren't work in
Speaker 1: their salt minds, but they've just become such a ubiquitous
Speaker 1: aspect of our lives, and eventually humans rebel against that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there is in the past of this universe a
Speaker 1: great war against the machines, and it's it's referred to,
Speaker 1: as you said, by the name the but Larry and
Speaker 1: Jihad from the name Butler, but Larry and Jihad. And
Speaker 1: I like the idea that it invokes the concept of jihad.
Speaker 1: So it's not just like in the Terminator movies where
Speaker 1: there is a war for survival against the machines, or
Speaker 1: maybe like you might find in the Matrix or something
Speaker 1: like that, the machines take over, they decide they want
Speaker 1: to kill us or enslave us, and we fight back.
Speaker 1: There is there is that element, I think, but there
Speaker 1: is also a deeper, more spiritual element, which is where
Speaker 1: the concept of the jihad comes in. It's a physical struggle,
Speaker 1: but it's also a spiritual struggle for the soul of humankind. Yeah. Indeed,
Speaker 1: like some of the Herbert Frank, Herbert himself didn't really
Speaker 1: give you a lot of details on you lift it.
Speaker 1: You know, like a lot of the details in the
Speaker 1: den univers little ambiguous, and you're helping You're left to
Speaker 1: sort of um, you know, dwell on the philosophical implications,
Speaker 1: but just a few quotes from the fictional tons, such
Speaker 1: as the Orange Catholic Bible that play a prominent role
Speaker 1: in the universe. Thou shalt not create a machine and
Speaker 1: the likeness of a human mind, thou shalt not disfigure
Speaker 1: the soul. And then this is a great line from
Speaker 1: some of the appendix material uh in the sixty novel.
Speaker 1: Then came the Butlerrian Jihad, two generations of chaos, the
Speaker 1: god of machine logic was overthrown among the masses, and
Speaker 1: a new concept sept raised man may not be replaced.
Speaker 1: I've been thinking a lot about this um just in
Speaker 1: my daily life, you know, about not even with like
Speaker 1: thinking machines, but just the use of Facebook in your
Speaker 1: daily life, you know, the the use of social media,
Speaker 1: the use of all these gadgets. And so for me,
Speaker 1: when I think of the Spottlerian Jihad, it's it seems
Speaker 1: as much rebellion against that as it is against you know,
Speaker 1: some robot with a with a laser gun. Sure, and
Speaker 1: it's not unusual for our technology to change us, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it doesn't just make our lives easier it
Speaker 1: changes the way we we prioritize things and the way
Speaker 1: we we go about our lives. One way of looking
Speaker 1: at this might be something like agriculture. I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a technology that I think a lot of people would
Speaker 1: argue fundamentally change the human animal Homo sapiens is not
Speaker 1: the same anymore or after we invented agriculture. And you
Speaker 1: could probably look at the rise of thinking machines of
Speaker 1: computers and perhaps the same way it is changing us
Speaker 1: in a very fundamental way. I mean, who knows what
Speaker 1: that look like ten thousand years in the future, as
Speaker 1: as the doone universe imagines, But it's doing something to
Speaker 1: our brains. When we can have vast computational power, vast
Speaker 1: power of storage of information, and as imagined by this
Speaker 1: sort of singularity, future decision making power that we can
Speaker 1: outsource two machines. Yeah, I just think of all the
Speaker 1: things we outsourced already, all the things we no longer
Speaker 1: bother to remember because the machine remembers it for us.
Speaker 1: So yeah, like you said, your your interpretation of this
Speaker 1: coming in, I agree with this about the butlery and jihad.
Speaker 1: It having something to do with the way humans are
Speaker 1: changed by our dependence on machines. So either way, we
Speaker 1: end up with a situation in these these books, in
Speaker 1: this world where we've kicked out the computers, which humans one,
Speaker 1: the humans one. But now the humans have to do
Speaker 1: all the things of the machines were doing beforehand. So
Speaker 1: what do you do when suddenly, uh, you know, just
Speaker 1: think about a business, so you can't depend on accounting
Speaker 1: software anymore, you need what do you do? You have
Speaker 1: to turn to the human mind to deal with all
Speaker 1: that accounting. What do you do when it comes to
Speaker 1: navigational concerns? I mean, even in our own lives will
Speaker 1: become dependent on these like things like Google maps and
Speaker 1: ways right to tell us how to get from point
Speaker 1: A to point B. If we throw that out the window,
Speaker 1: suddenly we have to look at maps. Suddenly we have
Speaker 1: to know which way is north and south. It falls
Speaker 1: to the human to know how to navigate. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it gets even tougher of course when you're in space.
Speaker 1: So without the aid of advanced computer computation, Um, they
Speaker 1: have to turn to human capabilities. Uh, and they have
Speaker 1: to essentially breed and train uh, special classes of humans
Speaker 1: to to to take on these varying taxing tasks, right,
Speaker 1: and so some of these classes that you encounter in
Speaker 1: the Dune universe, well, one of them, the most straightforward
Speaker 1: upgrading of the human mind to replace computers would be
Speaker 1: the mentats. There are several characters in the book who
Speaker 1: are explained to be mentats. And this is pretty straightforwardly
Speaker 1: a human computer. It's a person whose mind has been
Speaker 1: trained and I think in some ways stimulated by drugs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're constantly consuming some variation with some wine type like
Speaker 1: SA sort of supercharge them. It's kind of like a
Speaker 1: red bull. Yeah. It talks about their purple stained lips.
Speaker 1: And these mentats really do in some ways fulfill the
Speaker 1: function of computers. And otherwise they're sort of like advisors.
Speaker 1: They're they're sort of the perfect computer human hybrid. They
Speaker 1: can do computation, they can store vast amounts of information.
Speaker 1: They seem to pretty much remember everything like that. They
Speaker 1: do not ever forget any details, or at least as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell from the first novel um.
Speaker 1: But then also they are attuned to human nuance. It's
Speaker 1: something that's not true the computers today. They might be
Speaker 1: more replacement for the kind of you know, superhuman artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence that we imagine in the post singularity world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's interesting too that they have kind of an
Speaker 1: ethical guideline to them, and if you want one that's twisted,
Speaker 1: you have to essentially it's like a jail broken iPhone. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to order a sociopathic mentap. Yeah, in that case,
Speaker 1: you have to go to the Relaxa and they will
Speaker 1: provide you with one. And of course one of them
Speaker 1: is a is a major character in the early goings
Speaker 1: of the novel. Yeah, that's true. And then of course
Speaker 1: there's the Spacing Guild. These are the individuals who handle
Speaker 1: in your planetary travel, and this is a very complex,
Speaker 1: dangerous arrangement. So you have Guild navigators, individuals who have
Speaker 1: been specially bread trained and to varying degrees engineered to
Speaker 1: make the kind of advanced navigational computations necessary to get
Speaker 1: from planet A planet B without just popping out of existence. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: we mentioned that the mentats rely on some kind of
Speaker 1: drug that stains their lips purple. The Guilt Navigators definitely
Speaker 1: rely on a drug, and that drug is the drug
Speaker 1: we talked about of the opening spice, and that'll will
Speaker 1: go more into the spice and the effects of Spice
Speaker 1: in the second episode, but it's a key part of
Speaker 1: their outlook of their abilities is not just this computational power,
Speaker 1: but also sort of the ability to see the future,
Speaker 1: which Spice gives them. Yeah, at least a very limited amount,
Speaker 1: just so you can see where your various choices will
Speaker 1: take you, and you can, at least in the next
Speaker 1: few seconds, avoid the ones that will destroy you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and therefore sort of feel your way through the dark,
Speaker 1: uh safely from point A to point B. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: then there's a third group of these sort of advanced
Speaker 1: humans that I think is is maybe the most interesting
Speaker 1: of the three, and also the hardest to pin down
Speaker 1: and define. But they're the Binni jesster It. So, the
Speaker 1: main character of the novel Poul Traits. His mother is Jessica,
Speaker 1: and she's a Binny jesser At trained woman. The Benny
Speaker 1: jesser At are a female order of super smart, very perceptive,
Speaker 1: highly trained priestesses of some kind who haven't they haven't
Speaker 1: they have an aptitude for politics for one. Thing like that.
Speaker 1: They are tuned into all the finer points of human
Speaker 1: expression that we miss every day. There's sort of human
Speaker 1: lie detectors. They can tell what people are thinking and
Speaker 1: what they're gonna do by micro expressions on their faces,
Speaker 1: tonal shifts in their voices, and that they command a
Speaker 1: sort of supreme knowledge of the human animal and how
Speaker 1: it works. And they play a fascinating long game too,
Speaker 1: of manipulating mythology, um mnemonics and UH and culture to
Speaker 1: their benefit. Yeah. One of the most interesting examples of
Speaker 1: this that comes up in the novel is the of
Speaker 1: them is it the called the Missionary of Protectiva, which
Speaker 1: is this fascinating idea that the this order goes throughout
Speaker 1: the galaxy, seeding planets with mythology that later members of
Speaker 1: the order can rely upon if they're in a pinch.
Speaker 1: So it says, if you went to every city in
Speaker 1: the country you live in, spreading rumors about I don't know,
Speaker 1: prophecies about someone who would come to your community and
Speaker 1: save it from poverty and and and everything, and then
Speaker 1: you tell all your friends exactly what to do to
Speaker 1: fulfill those prophecies. Yeah. Yeah, So it's a FACTULSS fail safe.
Speaker 1: And also they were going laying the grounds for future
Speaker 1: manipulation uh. And of course at their heart they also
Speaker 1: have a breeding program, Yeah, which has some I think
Speaker 1: some creepy similarities to eugenics programs. Yeah, Andy, there's definitely
Speaker 1: a eugenic vibe to it. They're trying to breed a
Speaker 1: specific person what they call the quizstat's hat iraq um,
Speaker 1: a term signifying one who can be many places at once.
Speaker 1: I thought the translation of that term was the shortening
Speaker 1: of the way. Yes, that right, Yeah, I believe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is also invoked as well. But according to the
Speaker 1: Don Appendix, in simpler terms, what they saw it is
Speaker 1: quote a human with mental powers permitting him to understand
Speaker 1: and use higher order dimensions. So they're trying they're essentially
Speaker 1: trying to breed a superman tat, a human supercomputer with
Speaker 1: from some precientabilities found in the Guild Navigators, but without
Speaker 1: necessarily without the without necessarily having to imbue the spice. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So in a sense, they're trying to to get to
Speaker 1: that next phase of evolution. Uh, in terms of human thinking,
Speaker 1: the human thinking apparatus. I don't think you can make
Speaker 1: evolution happen, just got await on it. They're determined them.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, you have the beneath
Speaker 1: a Laxu who have continued to refine human form and function,
Speaker 1: often in ways that push the envelope of a sceptabilities though,
Speaker 1: and this you see that, you know, that post human conundrum,
Speaker 1: like how much can you change a human and it
Speaker 1: still be a human? Yeah? I love this aspect of
Speaker 1: the universe, that it's so fresh and interesting that they
Speaker 1: imagine a future without robots and computers, because robots and computers,
Speaker 1: of course are ubiquitous and uh in science fiction, and
Speaker 1: I think a lot of times with good reason, because
Speaker 1: that it certainly does seem to be the trend in
Speaker 1: human history is outsourcing all of our capabilities to machines
Speaker 1: that can do them better or at least do them cheaper,
Speaker 1: or I don't know, a greater scale. But here we
Speaker 1: have human technology. It is really the wet ware future
Speaker 1: universe where all of the things that computers used to do,
Speaker 1: or even that you know they can't do for us
Speaker 1: today but we only imagine they could do, are all
Speaker 1: replaced by human perfection. Yeah, you know, and it all
Speaker 1: makes me think two of our episodes in Techno Religion, right, so,
Speaker 1: particularly some of the can ndrums of how do I
Speaker 1: create a refrigerator that will operate in keeping with the
Speaker 1: laws of the status. Right, You're you're having to advance
Speaker 1: your technology, but do so within search certain religious frameworks
Speaker 1: and religious guidelines. Right. Oh, yeah, because we don't want
Speaker 1: to lose sight of that. It is dictated in the
Speaker 1: Orange Catholic Bible. And it's not just that people sort
Speaker 1: of frown on computers. The Bible says you shall not
Speaker 1: do it, right, It's it's blasphemy to do this sort
Speaker 1: of thing, so you have to you have to work
Speaker 1: around it. Yeah. So the sort of upgraded advanced human
Speaker 1: brain technology is a larger feature of the Dune universe,
Speaker 1: and if we want to try to relate that to
Speaker 1: real technology, I can't see that there's all that much
Speaker 1: we could say about it, except that, of course people
Speaker 1: can There are some people with exceptional mental abilities. People
Speaker 1: can hone their their skills in certain areas. But I
Speaker 1: don't know if there's a wine you can drink that
Speaker 1: will make you a ment at And I'm doubtful we
Speaker 1: will ever discover such a thing because I tend to
Speaker 1: assume that the human mind is already operating probably a
Speaker 1: pretty close to its capacity. I don't buy into this
Speaker 1: whole like, you know, we only use ten percent of
Speaker 1: our brains. No, yeah, yeah, that that tend to throw
Speaker 1: that out the window when you start and also when
Speaker 1: you start looking at like what makes an individual a genius?
Speaker 1: You know, it's not just in nature, but it's also
Speaker 1: in nurture. There are several different factors. And granted, I'm
Speaker 1: sure that the manipulations of the big Bennie Jessa it
Speaker 1: would involve both nature and nurture. But but still yeah.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, if we do want to
Speaker 1: isolate specific capabilities of these people, say the capability of
Speaker 1: the Beni Jessa to read micro expressions, I think that
Speaker 1: very well could be trained in a person. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then other things like the ability of a ment at
Speaker 1: to recall vast amounts of information beyond what would normally
Speaker 1: be accessible to the average humans memory. I think you
Speaker 1: could compare that to what the really good people, the
Speaker 1: memory athletes do, you know, like we talked about in
Speaker 1: the memory Palace episode of people make these memory palaces
Speaker 1: that like, how exactly does that work? Oh? That's of
Speaker 1: course just using a different type of memory and invoking
Speaker 1: spatial memory to to memorize say a list of terms
Speaker 1: or a you know, or a table of information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So if you have a list of five hundred numbers
Speaker 1: that you could never remember, well, what if you imagine
Speaker 1: those numbers as objects that are kind of strange oriented
Speaker 1: in a room that you're familiar with. Some people can
Speaker 1: use methods like this to recall things that we would
Speaker 1: never normally recall. Yeah, but anyway, that's sort of the
Speaker 1: the human technology and the broader universe of doing. I
Speaker 1: think we should now zero in on the planet Done itself,
Speaker 1: the planet Iracus, because the physical conditions on the surface
Speaker 1: of this planet constitute a huge part of the struggle
Speaker 1: of this book. A lot of the plot is just
Speaker 1: based around the fact that this is a desert planet.
Speaker 1: Water is extremely scares. People are constantly fighting to stay
Speaker 1: alive and preserve moisture in a place where every single
Speaker 1: drop of water wants to evaporate and disappear. Yeah. It's
Speaker 1: like an extremely harsh life and it requires some some
Speaker 1: rather ingenious, uh, cultural innovations, but also technological innovations. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I think one of the most interesting pieces of
Speaker 1: technology we encounter in the book Dune is the still suits.
Speaker 1: So what are the still suits? All? Right? So still
Speaker 1: suit and this is something I imagine people are definitely
Speaker 1: familiar with from the movies and and and again may
Speaker 1: just be familiar with outside of having ever seen or
Speaker 1: read anything doing related. But it's a second skin worn
Speaker 1: by the deserted inhabiting Fremen of Iracus, and it traps
Speaker 1: body moisture and recycles it through tubes, cooling the wear
Speaker 1: and also preventing water loss. So they collect your sweat,
Speaker 1: your urine moisture from your fecal matter, and then coils
Speaker 1: it around you, cools you down a bit, and then
Speaker 1: you drink it out of a little a little straw
Speaker 1: in your mouthpiece. Yeah. So, if you've seen pictures of
Speaker 1: kar McLaughlin with little things dangling out of his nose
Speaker 1: in the desert, that's probably from the movie Dune. Unless
Speaker 1: he did in another movie with stuff hanging out of
Speaker 1: his nose in the desert, that's from the movie Dune.
Speaker 1: And he's wearing the at least the David Lynch version
Speaker 1: of what the still suit looks like. The fremen you
Speaker 1: mentioned or these are sort of the native inhabitants of
Speaker 1: the planet Iraqus. These are the people who are perfectly
Speaker 1: adapted over many generations to life in this extremely harsh
Speaker 1: desert condition. Yeah, and the Fremen they take their still
Speaker 1: suit disciplined very seriously. They don't waste any water. They
Speaker 1: keep their still suits on unless they're in a sealed
Speaker 1: off place that can retain moisture. And it sounds like
Speaker 1: a rough life, but it's also very interesting is described
Speaker 1: in the novel because of course, what happens to you
Speaker 1: in the desert without a still suit, well, you die.
Speaker 1: And uh, it's we're told that if you're out there
Speaker 1: unprotected in the desert, you can't last a full day
Speaker 1: unless you have just a massive amount of water on hand.
Speaker 1: It just burns you right out right. But if you
Speaker 1: have the Fremen still suit, a proper frem And still suit,
Speaker 1: not one of those city models, you can you can
Speaker 1: actually limit your water loss to fifteen mili leaders a day.
Speaker 1: And so so yeah, it's an invention of of necessity
Speaker 1: by these uh, these Fremen who were former nomads that
Speaker 1: you know says they were in sunny noahs, in sunny
Speaker 1: nomads who popped around from planet to planet, evidently picking
Speaker 1: up different technologies and uh and you know, material technology
Speaker 1: along the way, which they then implement in designing the suit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and So there's a scientist character in the novel Dune
Speaker 1: named Kinds lye at Kinds, who explains how the still
Speaker 1: suits work. Yeah, and most and again this is another
Speaker 1: example of Herbert giving us some details, perhaps in this
Speaker 1: case a few too many details. This we'll get into,
Speaker 1: but leaving a lot of the the the nitty gritty
Speaker 1: stuff to the reader to to figure out. So Kins
Speaker 1: tells us that is still suit as a micro sandwich quote,
Speaker 1: a high efficiency filter and heat exchange system. So you
Speaker 1: have a layer that touches the skin that's porous, and
Speaker 1: perspiration passes through it, and it cools the body in
Speaker 1: a manner to maintains the existing cooling process of the bodies,
Speaker 1: which we'll get into that's key and problematic. And then
Speaker 1: you have two additional layers on the suit that include
Speaker 1: heat exchange filaments and salt precipitators. Uh, the ladder of
Speaker 1: which is used to reclaim salt. Now why do we
Speaker 1: call it a still suit? H? What does that mean?
Speaker 1: It's just like a moonshine still distillery. Yeah, you're separating,
Speaker 1: which is you know, all about separating different liquids. The
Speaker 1: still up in the Appalachian mountains. Uh, that's all about
Speaker 1: separating alcohol. But with the still suit, it's about separating
Speaker 1: potable water from salt, h and other waste materials in
Speaker 1: a wear's excretions. Now, what I immediately wonder when I
Speaker 1: encountered this concept is, Okay, that sounds very interesting. I
Speaker 1: under if something like that could be done in real life.
Speaker 1: But one of the main questions is where does it
Speaker 1: get its energy from? Like how how is this distillation
Speaker 1: process powered? Because if you think of a still you've
Speaker 1: got to boil things. You've got to be feeding energy
Speaker 1: into the system to power the distillation process. What's going
Speaker 1: on in the still suit? Well, according to two kinds
Speaker 1: and ultimately according to front of carbon here, uh, it's
Speaker 1: all due to body movement, especially breathing, and in this
Speaker 1: and some ausomatic action, it's providing the pumping force for
Speaker 1: all of this water. Uh. And again, as we'll get
Speaker 1: into that that there are a lot of questions surrounding
Speaker 1: how that would actually work. But then, of course, once
Speaker 1: the water gets distilled, it gets filtered into these things
Speaker 1: that they talked about in the novel called catch pockets,
Speaker 1: which is great because then you just got a little
Speaker 1: straw and you can just suck the water straight out
Speaker 1: of your suit when you're thirsty. Yeah. Yeah, and um
Speaker 1: used to be your p Now it's tasty desert water. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And it and urine and feces are processed in your
Speaker 1: thigh pads, which is a detail remember kind of sticking
Speaker 1: on when I read this for the first time, like
Speaker 1: back in junior higher high school. Yeah, they just mentioned
Speaker 1: that so briefly. Yeah, because it also it makes it
Speaker 1: makes you feel like you're you're probably constantly aware of
Speaker 1: the like the poop cakes that are stored in your
Speaker 1: in the thighs of your your pants. I'm like, Frank,
Speaker 1: tell me more about the feces. I've got to know,
Speaker 1: Like does it We were talking about this the other day,
Speaker 1: Like does it? Like I was kind of imagining it's
Speaker 1: it's kind of cleaning out of the filter on your dryer,
Speaker 1: except every so often a freman has to stop and
Speaker 1: remove this this flat cake of like super dry poop. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I imagine it, for some reason as a powder. Okay,
Speaker 1: I think that would make sense to Yeah, if you
Speaker 1: if you've removed all of the liquid from it, I
Speaker 1: guess it could pretty easily be disintegrated into a powder.
Speaker 1: You can just sort of dust out the back of
Speaker 1: your suit. Yeah, I can see that working. You just
Speaker 1: drop your poop powder. And then again, if it's a powder,
Speaker 1: you might be that you might easily inhale it. I
Speaker 1: don't know. Speaking of breathing, that's another way your body
Speaker 1: loses moisture. Right, every time you exhale your you're wasting
Speaker 1: some precious water vapors going straight out your nose, that's right.
Speaker 1: And that's why on the still suit you breathe in
Speaker 1: through a mouth filter and you breathe out through the nose,
Speaker 1: and then you have that little nostril too. That's supposedly
Speaker 1: reclaiming moisture. From your explanation, and that's pretty much it, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, Herbert doesn't give us all that much detail
Speaker 1: and exactly how the still suit works, despite how important
Speaker 1: it is in the novel, that's right. So it we
Speaker 1: have to turn to uh two expert commentators to figure
Speaker 1: out exactly how it might work and how it maybe
Speaker 1: doesn't work based on our current technological understanding. Okay, is there? Uh?
Speaker 1: Should we should we go first to the dune Encyclopedia
Speaker 1: or the science of dune. Um? I think we're gonna
Speaker 1: go to science of Dune first, because I think this
Speaker 1: has the most robust explanation, and then the and then
Speaker 1: the doing encyclopedia potentially fills in some some gaps. So
Speaker 1: the still suit article wasn't by the editor Grazier, but
Speaker 1: was by a different guy. Yes, NASA engineer John C.
Speaker 1: Smith wrote this one. UH. The top tackles the topic
Speaker 1: at some length in the piece still suit UH. He
Speaker 1: points out that we've seen a lot of still suit
Speaker 1: patents over the decades since the release of doone, but
Speaker 1: they all kind of muck up the thermodynamics, and the
Speaker 1: thermodynamics are really one of the sticking points here, um
Speaker 1: he made. Ultimately, he maintains that if you take a
Speaker 1: strict literal interpretation of Herberge writing the still suit quote
Speaker 1: probably would not work and most likely would cook the
Speaker 1: wear like a croc pile. Yeah, that's awesome, you know.
Speaker 1: And yet we can we can certainly envision technological advancements
Speaker 1: that would make a still suit possible in the future.
Speaker 1: And and since we're talking about a sci fi realm
Speaker 1: thirteen thousand years in the future, that's certainly time enough
Speaker 1: for various UH technologies and especially meta materials to come online.
Speaker 1: To enable it. Right. Well, okay, well maybe we should
Speaker 1: look at this one energy loss source at a time.
Speaker 1: So let's think about sweat first. Sow does something really important.
Speaker 1: It cools you. And this might not always be the
Speaker 1: case if you live in a very moist environment where
Speaker 1: it's hard for the sweat to evaporate. But if you're
Speaker 1: in a place like Aracus, if you're in a desert
Speaker 1: environment and dry environment and you're sweating, that evaporation is
Speaker 1: bringing your temperature down right, I mean it's even taking
Speaker 1: place on just a you know, a very ambient level um.
Speaker 1: Failure to sweat leads to heat stroke in death and
Speaker 1: h It's Smith points out in his in his piece
Speaker 1: here the Golden Gal and gold Finger, he might remember
Speaker 1: she's painted gold and then she dies. Uh. It's often uh,
Speaker 1: you know they're saying, oh, she's suffocated, but in reality,
Speaker 1: she would he says, she would probably die from heat stroke.
Speaker 1: I feel like I've heard a lot of disputes about
Speaker 1: whether that person who's got the full body paint job
Speaker 1: would survive or not. I think I've read people saying
Speaker 1: that that wouldn't actually kill you. Yeah, I think I've
Speaker 1: seen people go back and forth on that as well,
Speaker 1: all of us missing probably the point that they just
Speaker 1: wanted to put up dead naked golden lady on the
Speaker 1: screen there. But but either way, if you enclose the
Speaker 1: entire body in a sealed suit like us, you're courting
Speaker 1: death in the form of heat stroke. And that's one
Speaker 1: of the primary design flaws with a still suit. Even
Speaker 1: when inactive, the body has to dissipate about ninety wots
Speaker 1: of heat just to balance out the heat of your metabolism.
Speaker 1: So even if you're not who I'm sweaty, sweat is
Speaker 1: still an important process. Most of the most of the
Speaker 1: body heat arises from the liver, the brain, heart, and muscles,
Speaker 1: and uh it's dissipated through blood circulation at the skin
Speaker 1: level along with the primary method of sweating. So even
Speaker 1: when passes sweat glands excrete excrete point six ms of
Speaker 1: perspiration per day, maximum rate one point five liters per hour.
Speaker 1: And it's also worth noting you see images of people
Speaker 1: throwing the hood back on that that's still superfood is essential. Yeah,
Speaker 1: in the movie, the hood is essential because your ekron
Speaker 1: sweat glands are all over the body, but they have
Speaker 1: the highest concentration in the forehead and the ecron sweat glands.
Speaker 1: Those are the ones that are tied, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: exclusively to cooling, not to be confused with any that
Speaker 1: have hormonal issues. Yeah, so you said that. John C.
Speaker 1: Smith mentions that there are patents out for still suits.
Speaker 1: I tried to find an example of a still suit
Speaker 1: in the wild. I was looking around on the internet
Speaker 1: to see if anybody had made one. I didn't find one.
Speaker 1: I did find a Gizmodo article from July proclaiming in
Speaker 1: the headline quote the sweat to water purifier real life
Speaker 1: dune still suit will save lives. Unfortunately, this was interesting
Speaker 1: but turned out to be kind of an exaggeration, so
Speaker 1: it referred back to a BBC article about this inventor
Speaker 1: named Andreas Hammer who he invented a device called the
Speaker 1: sweat machine, which was designed to reclaim and distill water
Speaker 1: from sweaty clothing through a process known as membrane distillation,
Speaker 1: and essentially the machine spins clothing in a centrifuge to
Speaker 1: pull all the liquids out. So if you have a
Speaker 1: high efficiency washing machine, uh that it does the same thing,
Speaker 1: though maybe not to the same level of extraction as
Speaker 1: the centerfuge. But the idea is that I have ficiency
Speaker 1: washing machine spins the wet clothes really fast to drain
Speaker 1: out all of the moisture, and then the clothes spend
Speaker 1: less time in the energy gobbling dryer, but in the
Speaker 1: sweat machine instead of the washer water, it's pulling out
Speaker 1: some salty, nasty sweat and then it distills that liquid
Speaker 1: by heating it and then circulating it between two membranes.
Speaker 1: And basically the way the membranes work is that the
Speaker 1: membranes are hot on the sweaty side and cool on
Speaker 1: the other side, and this creates a vapor pressure differential
Speaker 1: that pulls water and only water, so not all of
Speaker 1: the other molecules, just the H two O molecules through
Speaker 1: the membrane and leaves all the other stuff on the
Speaker 1: other side. So they say that one sweaty T shirt
Speaker 1: typically contains roughly ten million leaders are about point three ounces,
Speaker 1: which is about a mouthful of water. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is your sweaty T shirt is a sip Okay, So
Speaker 1: it's a it's a a body water reclamation technology, but
Speaker 1: not something that you could actually using a suit, no, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: so you can drink it they say it's cleaner than
Speaker 1: tap water, and they even they cited one example of
Speaker 1: when they served the product of this machine to a
Speaker 1: bunch of people in the public at this event called
Speaker 1: the Gothia Cup in Gothenburg, Sweden. I looked it up.
Speaker 1: That's like a football slash soccer tournament. Uh, And it's interesting.
Speaker 1: But looking at the setup of the machine, I can't
Speaker 1: really see how this could be incorporated into a feasible
Speaker 1: body suit. It's pretty big, especially given the necessity of
Speaker 1: the center fugere process to extract the liquid in the beginning. Like,
Speaker 1: you couldn't have the machine be part of a suit
Speaker 1: if it needs to extract the liquid from the suit.
Speaker 1: So I don't really begrudge them a cool headline referring
Speaker 1: to a still suit, but the comparison doesn't really seem
Speaker 1: app to me. But it is an interesting invention nonetheless,
Speaker 1: And of course sweat is not the only way the
Speaker 1: body wastes precious moisture. As if H two O, we're
Speaker 1: just cheap and abundance. As we mentioned already, you got
Speaker 1: to take into account of urine. It's water. The rest
Speaker 1: is metabolic waste, salts, organic materials. You can drink a
Speaker 1: little lot of it and feel okay, and some people
Speaker 1: even claim therapeutic benefits. But it's ultimately like cutting your
Speaker 1: kidneys out of the waste removal process if you just
Speaker 1: keep guzzling urine. Uh. So you have to take the
Speaker 1: waste out. And of course this is also a very
Speaker 1: real area of of waste processing technology. Sure. Yeah, reclaiming
Speaker 1: water from urine is something that happens in space all
Speaker 1: the time, for example, so shipping water to space is
Speaker 1: really expensive. We talked about the costs of of getting
Speaker 1: cargo into orbit before. Uh it's hard to put an
Speaker 1: exact figure on the cost per pound to lower th
Speaker 1: orbit today, but traditionally around estimate they used to give
Speaker 1: was ten dollars per pound. We don't know how much
Speaker 1: it costs today, but it's expensive. Um And you know
Speaker 1: that great feeling you get when you've just been doing
Speaker 1: strenuous exercise and then you sit down and drink a
Speaker 1: whole glass of water at once. Astronauts the I s
Speaker 1: s have to exercise all the time to mitigate the
Speaker 1: effects of bone and muscle density loss that you experience
Speaker 1: in microgravity. UM. So, without reclamation efforts, that refreshing glass
Speaker 1: of water you get right after an hour on the
Speaker 1: treadmill is gonna you know, that might be a ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollar glass of water. Who knows. Uh. So instead
Speaker 1: of constantly shipping up new water, the crew members on
Speaker 1: the I S S rely on in UH. It's called
Speaker 1: the Environmental Control and Life Support System, or the e
Speaker 1: c l s S, and that has within it water
Speaker 1: reclamation system. So when the astronauts exhale some hot moist
Speaker 1: breath on each other, the habitat can recycle and reclaim it.
Speaker 1: When the astronauts p or spit in the sink during
Speaker 1: oral hygiene routines, the station can capture that water. In
Speaker 1: a space dot Com article I read about this, the
Speaker 1: author Denise Chow said that without the recycling system UH,
Speaker 1: an average of roughly ten thousand pounds of water per
Speaker 1: crew member would be quired from Earth each year to
Speaker 1: keep the station properly functioning. So it's it's kind of
Speaker 1: being in space is kind of like being on Iraqus.
Speaker 1: Like you know, it's it's very it's mighty precious. You've
Speaker 1: got to hang onto it. And so there have been
Speaker 1: a lot of efforts at research for reclaiming water for
Speaker 1: space missions. Early space missions like the Apollo missions came
Speaker 1: up with solutions like electrolytics, silver ion generators, and apparently
Speaker 1: these could disinfect drinking water. They would like remove bacteria
Speaker 1: from the water without having to dump a bunch of
Speaker 1: bleach or other chemicals in there. Uh. And then today
Speaker 1: the I s S uses a more complex filtration system
Speaker 1: that's got three steps. It's basically got a a filter
Speaker 1: step that gets out particles and junk from the liquid,
Speaker 1: and then they push it through a semi permeable membrane
Speaker 1: that has these substances and in it that that pull
Speaker 1: out organic materials. And then finally they have a catalytic
Speaker 1: oxidation reactor and that kills bacteria and it takes all
Speaker 1: the other organic compounds out of it. But of course
Speaker 1: that's at the space station level. Is still not a suit.
Speaker 1: Could you shrink it down to the individual level? Sort of,
Speaker 1: but not exactly so uh. NASA scientists have equipped at
Speaker 1: least some astronauts headed for the is S with test
Speaker 1: demonstrations of personal sized water purification bags that don't drain
Speaker 1: energy like the large scale recycling systems, but instead depend
Speaker 1: on this process known as forward osmosis. Generally, this concept
Speaker 1: is called the forward osmosis bag or fob FLb. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so forward osmosis takes place when you've got two
Speaker 1: liquid solutions separated by another one of these semi permeable membranes.
Speaker 1: One of the liquid solutions is a lower concentration that
Speaker 1: this is probably gonna be your dirty water, and then
Speaker 1: one has a higher concentration, and that's this electrolyte filled solution,
Speaker 1: which I think is like gatorade or or something pretty
Speaker 1: much along those lines. And then the water flows now
Speaker 1: truly from the lower concentration solution to the higher and
Speaker 1: the semi permeability of the membrane means that it allows
Speaker 1: water molecules to pass through, but not larger molecules or
Speaker 1: objects like bacteria and proteins. From what I can tell,
Speaker 1: NASA is still investigating how well and under what conditions
Speaker 1: these devices work. I read a Wired report in that
Speaker 1: said that they hadn't been able at that time to
Speaker 1: prevent urrea, which is a waste product that you find
Speaker 1: in urine, from getting through in the osmosis bag. But
Speaker 1: apparently a Japanese TV crew member decided to try some
Speaker 1: of the product of the forward osmosis bag. Despite the
Speaker 1: despite that warning, and he said it tasted like capri son.
Speaker 1: So there's your your free ad for capri Son. A
Speaker 1: more recent work I found on the it's a NASA
Speaker 1: research report from that mentioned the fact that these osmosis
Speaker 1: powered devices works slower in microgravity, and they're testing ways
Speaker 1: of solving that problem. But okay, so sweat you're in
Speaker 1: kind of gross but at least basically liquid. Are we
Speaker 1: ready to talk about feces? Uh? Well, we are in
Speaker 1: the podcast. With the larger concern is that we're really
Speaker 1: not as a civilization. UM. Feces is of course water.
Speaker 1: The rest is undigested food bacteria. But but there's water
Speaker 1: in there, water that is ideally worth reclaiming. But we've
Speaker 1: actually seen far fewer studies regarding fecal water reclamation. Though.
Speaker 1: The thing is, of course this takes place as does
Speaker 1: urine water reclamations, sweat, recular reclamation, whatever, via the natural
Speaker 1: water cycle on our on the planet itself. Now. In
Speaker 1: his um say, Smith points to a University of Colorado
Speaker 1: study on water recycling for a MARS mission that found
Speaker 1: that reclaim water would be minimal from from specs uh,
Speaker 1: and that they'd also have to factory in quote psychological
Speaker 1: concerns unquote for the crew and so in in this yeah,
Speaker 1: and this we get back to the psychological contagion inherent
Speaker 1: in any water reclamation effort. And uh, I mean, I've
Speaker 1: I've blogged about this in the past. You have to
Speaker 1: be able to wrap your mind around the the fact
Speaker 1: that the water you're drinking used to be urine or
Speaker 1: used to be part of poop when really, I mean
Speaker 1: you can essentially say any water you drink was you
Speaker 1: may have been poop at some point in the past,
Speaker 1: may have been dying almost certainly, right. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: you have to deal with you know, how is the
Speaker 1: how is the user in that experience working out? And
Speaker 1: it's uh, it's it's interesting because it could be done. Uh,
Speaker 1: and we we just haven't faced to die or enough
Speaker 1: circumstance despite the fact that we're talking about a trip
Speaker 1: to Mars here um. Interestingly enough, in the book Packing
Speaker 1: for Mars by Mary Roach, she mentions that NASA scientists
Speaker 1: at one point we are actually pondered recycling fecal matter
Speaker 1: into food, but they never pursued it at all, just
Speaker 1: because of that ig factor. And part of this Sushi
Speaker 1: lays out it. You have at the time, you know,
Speaker 1: or especially early on in the space program, you have
Speaker 1: the very sort of cowboy mentality of the you know,
Speaker 1: the x uh uh test pilots who are becoming astronauts,
Speaker 1: the explorers, and then you have the scientists, and the
Speaker 1: scientists are are are more inclined to to present some
Speaker 1: out there notions such as what if you could eat
Speaker 1: portions of the spaceship. That was another idea that came
Speaker 1: on eating What if the like the insulation itself was food,
Speaker 1: or you know, making small cakes out of out of poop,
Speaker 1: and of course the astronauts themselves we're not going to
Speaker 1: go for that idea on any level again, due to
Speaker 1: the psychological contagion inherent in fecal water reclamation. That's so gross,
Speaker 1: I gotta admit. I mean, it's one of those things
Speaker 1: where I wonder if there's an equivalent to the mentor
Speaker 1: the Benny jesserat the Guild navigator, the person who has
Speaker 1: upgraded their mental faculties to escape the factor it's an
Speaker 1: iculis human the person who eats poop with no qualms. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, I guess again it just comes
Speaker 1: down to are you in a dire enough condition and
Speaker 1: aracous is that is that environment? Now Smith coming back
Speaker 1: to sweating itself though, uh Smith has a real problem
Speaker 1: with the idea that the suit would allow your normal
Speaker 1: sweat process to to carry on um because because as
Speaker 1: we'll discuss, it's not just a matter of water leaving
Speaker 1: your body and now you're cool um. You need an
Speaker 1: evaporation to take place, and he doubts that quote near
Speaker 1: normal evaporation process would even be possible in a still
Speaker 1: suit for UH. For organic cooling to take place, sweat
Speaker 1: must go through a phase change from a liquid to
Speaker 1: vapor in order to remove heat and cool the skin.
Speaker 1: So it's an endothermic process, and moving sweat away just
Speaker 1: whisk wicking it away, as with specially designed workout garments,
Speaker 1: that just merely makes your skin dryer, not cooler. That's
Speaker 1: why so called wicking fabric u which use a passive
Speaker 1: capillary action to move sweat from your skin to the
Speaker 1: outer surface of your workout garment. They help you stay
Speaker 1: warm during cold weather workouts. You're interfering in the natural
Speaker 1: cooling process, not not level because it's not skin tight,
Speaker 1: not completely, but it's still preventing sweat from doing what
Speaker 1: it does. And I think anybody who's ever worn a
Speaker 1: scuba suit outside of the water in the sun for
Speaker 1: an amount of time can probably attest to that. You
Speaker 1: can you can overheat really quickly in that environment because
Speaker 1: it's making such close contact with the skin. When I
Speaker 1: was watching the David Lynch Dune movie, I was looking
Speaker 1: at those actors and thinking like, wow, that looks really hot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean apparently these were these were thin latex body suits,
Speaker 1: and of course they were not functional still suits, so
Speaker 1: they were having to deal with without with overheating, you know,
Speaker 1: falling out from the heat. Uh. And interestingly enough, Patrick
Speaker 1: Stewart has apparently gone on records saying it's the the
Speaker 1: us comfortable thing he ever wore for for any kind
Speaker 1: of a film or TV project. And this is from
Speaker 1: the guy who you know who had to wear that
Speaker 1: awful Starfleet uniform. Um. I was not aware of this,
Speaker 1: but apparently they call it the the Picard maneuver. If
Speaker 1: you watch it enough, you'll see that he's always tugging
Speaker 1: down on the garment to keep it from riding up.
Speaker 1: So anyway, the bottom line here, um, is that the
Speaker 1: skin level layer of the steel suit would need to
Speaker 1: be a highly thermally conductive layer that allowed evaporated cooling
Speaker 1: to take place um again, perhaps via some as yet
Speaker 1: uninvented meta material. And yet even then, the humidity in
Speaker 1: the skin level porous layer would need to be high humidity,
Speaker 1: which could in theory, merely just escalate the whole situation
Speaker 1: more perspiration, more heat, and according to John C. Smith,
Speaker 1: the suit would have to self dehumidify as well. So
Speaker 1: and in order for all that water vapor to become
Speaker 1: liquid again so that you could drink it, you'd have
Speaker 1: to have condens fation occur. And for this phase change
Speaker 1: to happen, which is an exothermic process, you need to
Speaker 1: have a cool layer such as you know, a cold
Speaker 1: glass on a hot day and you see that, you know,
Speaker 1: the moisture form on it, and there's no mention of
Speaker 1: refrigeration in the suit, but it would be necessary as
Speaker 1: far as we understand the process for that phase shift
Speaker 1: to happen. Man, that just sounds like a mess. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing. It seems like it would be af
Speaker 1: You don't have a clear understanding of how sweat works
Speaker 1: and how how how cooling works, and indeed how cooling
Speaker 1: systems work. It seems like it would be a simpler mechanism,
Speaker 1: but it's not. Yeah, and now, of course refrigeration does exist.
Speaker 1: So perhaps it's just a question of how much bulk
Speaker 1: do you want to incorporate into your suit? Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: can you fit some manner of heat pumping there a
Speaker 1: free youngcompressor? Um. You know we have we have firefighters
Speaker 1: to use like blue ice packs near the skin to
Speaker 1: keep their body from overheating. But would that make sense
Speaker 1: at all in a water scarce environment? And then uh,
Speaker 1: and then you also have to any of these system
Speaker 1: would also involve more power. Uh. And all we have
Speaker 1: to go on is that it's powered by motions of
Speaker 1: the body, especially breathing, and according to to Smith here,
Speaker 1: that would not be sufficient to power the suit given
Speaker 1: our current progress on motion generated power, even if we
Speaker 1: augmented it with solar power, which again, as if he
Speaker 1: because you want to travel by night on aracus um,
Speaker 1: we you just end up again not being able to
Speaker 1: keep up with with the energy requirements for the suit.
Speaker 1: So that's what Smith has to say more recent commentary.
Speaker 1: But if we look to the Dune Encyclopedia and the
Speaker 1: entry written by Christine Watson. She stresses the use of
Speaker 1: still cloth based on the principles of cryogenics of a
Speaker 1: cryogenics separator that she says used on a number of
Speaker 1: worlds to draw oxygen and other gases from the planet's
Speaker 1: happmos here. So here we see a you know, a
Speaker 1: futuristic meta material explanation. And as for cooling, she says
Speaker 1: that the tubes contained air. At the beginning of the
Speaker 1: suit cycle, the air pressure built up by the pumping
Speaker 1: action of the wearer's breathing and by heel pumps. At
Speaker 1: a preset pressure, the air was released into a holding
Speaker 1: chamber in the suit's hood. This sudden release cool the
Speaker 1: air by the Jewel Thompson effect, and the cool air
Speaker 1: was drawn back into the system and again through the suit,
Speaker 1: dropping the temperature of the separating layers. And that Jewel
Speaker 1: Thompson effect, by the way, that's the temperature exchange of
Speaker 1: a gas or liquid when it is forced through a
Speaker 1: valve or porous plug while kept insulated so that no
Speaker 1: heat is exchanged with the environment. I gotta be honest,
Speaker 1: I didn't follow that. I mean I had I had
Speaker 1: to go at it a couple of times. So Basically
Speaker 1: it comes down to the fact that the hood would
Speaker 1: be kind of a an essential air bladder for the
Speaker 1: suits cooling system. So imagine the steel suit. Imagine com
Speaker 1: mc laughlin in the steel suit, but with kind of
Speaker 1: a balloon hood portion. Man that makes mud deep a
Speaker 1: little less a little less cool looking if he's got
Speaker 1: a balloon head. Yeah, I would think so. So again,
Speaker 1: you have to kind of talk it up to say,
Speaker 1: however the steel suit works. It evidently involves some materials
Speaker 1: and technologies that we haven't quite figured out in this
Speaker 1: ancient day and age. Now, another interesting technology do you
Speaker 1: see on Iraqis and also elsewhere in the worlds of
Speaker 1: done the use of ornithopters of aircraft that fly via
Speaker 1: flapping wings. Yeah. So we are told that the power
Speaker 1: of house tradees on their home planet of Caladan before
Speaker 1: they move to the desert planet of Irakus is air power.
Speaker 1: They're an air force power, kind of like you might
Speaker 1: think of the United States on the sort of military
Speaker 1: geopolitical world stage, that the power is concentrated in the
Speaker 1: ability to strike from above. But their way of striking
Speaker 1: from above is not much like anything we would commonly
Speaker 1: use on Earth technology today. It is like something we
Speaker 1: would commonly see in the biological world. So of course
Speaker 1: birds fly by flapping wings, insects fly by flapping their wings.
Speaker 1: It seems like a perfectly normal way to get around.
Speaker 1: But there's a reason our airplanes don't do this. Ornithopters
Speaker 1: can be built, you can make a machine that stays
Speaker 1: in the air by flapping wings, but it is not
Speaker 1: a very practical way to move heavy cargo or passengers.
Speaker 1: That's right, and and certainly that's what you see utilized
Speaker 1: in the dune universe, like sweeping down, swooping down to
Speaker 1: pick up you know, mobile spice factory off of the
Speaker 1: sands before a worm can get to it. According to
Speaker 1: Dr James Usherwood of the University of London's RVC Structure
Speaker 1: and Motion Laboratory, uh, this is one area of design,
Speaker 1: you know, where nature doesn't quite nail it. And this
Speaker 1: is kind of ironic because in the field of biomimicry,
Speaker 1: we see in a lot of cases we can turn
Speaker 1: to nature and say, well, how did nature evolve to
Speaker 1: solve this design problem? And oftentimes there they have a
Speaker 1: really elegant Nature has a really elegant solution. I'd say
Speaker 1: that's especially true on the very small scale. Biomimicry becomes
Speaker 1: more and more powerful the smaller you go. In uh
Speaker 1: In an essay titled a Flying and Walking Learning from
Speaker 1: Nature and this was published in the book seventy Great
Speaker 1: Mysteries of the Natural World, which I highly recommend. Um
Speaker 1: Usherwood points out that a slow flying pigeon requires up
Speaker 1: to four times the power an equivalent helicopter would need,
Speaker 1: and hovering is even worse, resolving in pitiful amounts of
Speaker 1: lift for the amount of energy exerted, each pump of
Speaker 1: the wings requires yet another burst of energy, and it
Speaker 1: all adds up pretty quickly. That's why hummingbirds have the
Speaker 1: highest energy expenditure of any warm blooded animal, ten times
Speaker 1: that of a human. There perpetually on the verge of starvation.
Speaker 1: Uh and and and sometimes I have to actually go
Speaker 1: into kind of suspended animation to deal with these these
Speaker 1: energy costs. H and all the time, you know, consuming
Speaker 1: colossal amounts of nectar to keep up their little sugar
Speaker 1: water vampires that cannot be sated. Yeah, so you know,
Speaker 1: we you know, looking back, you see early aviation pioneers
Speaker 1: who toyed around with flapping wings, generally with the disaster's results.
Speaker 1: But you do see scientists that have been looking into
Speaker 1: it's used for micro air vehicles or m a v s,
Speaker 1: and these are tiny robotic aircraft that depend on biomechanical
Speaker 1: flight designs. Uh. And the funding typically comes into play,
Speaker 1: you know, for obvious surveillance purposes. Right, some sort of
Speaker 1: tiny robot with buzzing, flapping wings that you can use
Speaker 1: to spy on somebody. Now, what is the appeal of
Speaker 1: that over just like a tiny quad rotor drone or
Speaker 1: something like that. Is it just that it would look
Speaker 1: like an insect? I think so? And I think also
Speaker 1: there is that that biomimicry attractions saying if it's if
Speaker 1: it's flight at a small scale, then perhaps, uh, perhaps
Speaker 1: there is an advantage in drawing on real world comparisons.
Speaker 1: But overall we are not going to see passenger planes
Speaker 1: with flapping wings. And uh. I was looking at a U. S.
Speaker 1: Army Research Office report from two thousand five, UH that
Speaker 1: ALT was weighing in and saying that when it comes
Speaker 1: to m a v s, you're looking at enormous manufacturing challenges,
Speaker 1: inefficient energy usage, and dependence on less under good understood
Speaker 1: small scale physics. So at this point in time, even
Speaker 1: small ornithopters seem out of reach. Yeah. Now, if you
Speaker 1: want to just cheat and invoke some science fiction magic,
Speaker 1: you might say that the ornithopters have something to do
Speaker 1: with other technology present in the Doune universe, like like suspensers.
Speaker 1: I noticed you putting a note here, right, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And this draws us right into another important technology they
Speaker 1: were going to spend less time on because there's there
Speaker 1: are fewer answers, and that is the Holtzman effect that
Speaker 1: enables faster than light travel, It enables personal shields, and
Speaker 1: enables just ubiquitous use of anti gravity suspensers that I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the main character of one of the main characters,
Speaker 1: Vladimir Harconin, uses it to float around and suspend his bulk.
Speaker 1: But you also see mentions of just you know, here's
Speaker 1: a suspenser enabled chair in a room. If you watch
Speaker 1: any scene from the movie and not the whole moving
Speaker 1: not the whole David Lynch movie, go watch the scene
Speaker 1: where where Vladimir harcon And floats up in the screams,
Speaker 1: I will have the spice. That's pretty good. But anyway,
Speaker 1: I thought this is also a really cool technology as
Speaker 1: imagined in the books, specifically with application to the shields. Now,
Speaker 1: there are personal energy shields imagined in the Dune universe,
Speaker 1: and you've probably seen all kinds of science fiction that
Speaker 1: has shields, you know, like a shields up, you know,
Speaker 1: you put them up around the spaceship and they deflect
Speaker 1: incoming weaponry, projectiles, energy beams. But these are personal shields
Speaker 1: that are often imagined. Well, actually they're There are large
Speaker 1: scale shields, and there are personal shields. But you might
Speaker 1: like click a button on your belt and suddenly a
Speaker 1: shield comes up around your body. Somebody tries to run
Speaker 1: and stab you with a knife, they will be deflected
Speaker 1: by the shield. And so the solution to this creates
Speaker 1: a very interesting combat dynamic that people talk about in
Speaker 1: the book, where people engaging in knife fight with shields
Speaker 1: activated have to come up with ways of trying to
Speaker 1: move their knife very slowly towards the enemy because a
Speaker 1: quickly incoming knife will be deflected by the shield. But
Speaker 1: if you can stab ever so slowly, you can go
Speaker 1: through the shield gently, and then you can you can
Speaker 1: penetrate the person's skin and make them bleed. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: the defensive technology requires an entirely well, not entirely, but
Speaker 1: a different style of martial arts. So we we don't
Speaker 1: know a lot about the Holtzman effect. In the books UH,
Speaker 1: it's described as the negative repelling effect of a shield
Speaker 1: generator UH and a suspenser is the secondary low drain
Speaker 1: phase of the Haltzmann field generator, and it nullifies gravity.
Speaker 1: It nullifies gravity within certain limits prescribed by relative mass
Speaker 1: and energy consumption. So in this we we have no
Speaker 1: choice but to turn to the Science of doone and
Speaker 1: the writings there of planetary scientist Kevin R. Grazier, who
Speaker 1: also edited and along he also worked with physicist Diggests
Speaker 1: Seeger on some of this and UH. As they point out,
Speaker 1: much of the whole Holtzman situation is unexplained. In the
Speaker 1: later books, we do learn that that guild highliners, the
Speaker 1: big spaceships travel the stars by the quote compression or
Speaker 1: warping of space time in conjunction with mass neutralization. And
Speaker 1: as a planetary scientist again Kevin R. Grazier points out
Speaker 1: UH in cosmic oregonomy, that's the piece in the science
Speaker 1: of DONE UH. If the mass of a spaceship could
Speaker 1: be nullified, then the relativistic effects of high speed space
Speaker 1: travel could be reduced. So essentially it's talking about all right,
Speaker 1: if you could turn, if you could simply dampen or
Speaker 1: nullify the mass of an object, then that would enable
Speaker 1: you to to cheat in various respects in terms of
Speaker 1: acceleration in spacetime. Uh also Grazier and Uh and Seeger
Speaker 1: opposit that the Holtzman field is an energy s meaning shield.
Speaker 1: Perhaps it screens the mass of an object from the
Speaker 1: rest of the universe. Lowering the mass of an object
Speaker 1: would also lower the force of gravity on it. Lowered
Speaker 1: enough and you just float around up in the air.
Speaker 1: And as for space travel, theory and observations of general
Speaker 1: relativity indicate that spacetime can be curved and warped, and
Speaker 1: perhaps it can even be folded and compressed. So again
Speaker 1: the classic examples, you have a map, right, and you
Speaker 1: fold the map, and then you just poke a hole
Speaker 1: through point A and point B, and now you have
Speaker 1: the whole right, the tessaract testsaract example, the event arise
Speaker 1: an example. UM, do you thus shorten the distance between
Speaker 1: two points, meaning that faster than light acceleration and all
Speaker 1: the problems they're in might not even be necessary. In
Speaker 1: the Dune books. We don't know much more beyond that,
Speaker 1: other than the process is dangerous and costly. You really
Speaker 1: need a number crunching power of an advanced computer to
Speaker 1: handle it all. But in the Dune universe it all
Speaker 1: falls to human minds enhanced by spice, all right, So
Speaker 1: that's pretty out there science fiction. I think I'd have
Speaker 1: to say the same thing about the energy shields as
Speaker 1: that relates to the whole Simon effect. I I can't
Speaker 1: think of any example, uh, And I wasn't able to
Speaker 1: find any example of a real energy shield in the
Speaker 1: world that would successfully deflect incoming matter like that, especially
Speaker 1: not without harming the person who was wearing it. I mean,
Speaker 1: you can imagine wearing a huge magnet of some kind that,
Speaker 1: you know, if somebody tries to shoot a bullet at
Speaker 1: you or something like that, might be able to deflect
Speaker 1: it if it's powerful enough. But I mean, at certain
Speaker 1: points you're getting into levels of energy that make the
Speaker 1: proposition ridiculous. And so if you're imagining an energy shield
Speaker 1: like they have, maybe the closest thing I've seen would
Speaker 1: be propositions of energy shields like ion shields around spaceships
Speaker 1: to prevent incoming radiation, but I don't even know if
Speaker 1: that's really viable. Yeah, it's definitely less down to Earth
Speaker 1: compared to the still state. So there you have it,
Speaker 1: some of the techno alogy to do, not all of
Speaker 1: it by any means. We just decided to draw in
Speaker 1: a few examples that we could discuss here in the podcast. Uh.
Speaker 1: And again, we're gonna do a second episode and we'll
Speaker 1: get into the biology of doing a bit where we're
Speaker 1: definitely going to discuss sandworms in detail. So UH, as
Speaker 1: we lead out here, we're gonna enjoy another track from
Speaker 1: Raleigh Porter. This is X again off the two thousand
Speaker 1: eleven album Aftertime, released by Subtext Recordings. There's a link
Speaker 1: on the landing page, but you can learn more about
Speaker 1: his work at Raleigh Porter dot com. Uh. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
Speaker 1: is the mothership. That's where you will find all of
Speaker 1: our podcast videos and blog posts, as well as the
Speaker 1: links out to our social media accounts. And if you
Speaker 1: want to get in touch with us about your favorite
Speaker 1: fact about the June Universe or any feedback about these episodes,
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com For more on this and thousands
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