Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: The Vault is open and it is going to be
Speaker 1: part two of a two part Vault series. Now. Last Saturday,
Speaker 1: we ran part one of our Science of Dune episodes
Speaker 1: from we ran the Science of Dune Technology. Today it's
Speaker 1: going to be another foray into the planet Iraq as
Speaker 1: part two, the Science of Dune Biology, which originally aired
Speaker 1: on October one. Yeah, there's a lot of sand where
Speaker 1: I'm talking this episode, as we sort of pieced together
Speaker 1: the science that that Frank Herbert used to create the
Speaker 1: idea of the sand worm, as well as scientific interpretations
Speaker 1: by a couple of different commentators in the decades to follow. Now,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, Robert, we're going to be getting another
Speaker 1: Dune film, right, Yes, it's true. Bye bye Dnevillneuve. Yes,
Speaker 1: the director of, of course, the most recent blay Runner film,
Speaker 1: Blade Run, which I really enjoyed and it certainly is
Speaker 1: just full of visual flare like watching that and especially
Speaker 1: enjoy I especially enjoyed the slow pace of the film,
Speaker 1: like like Blade Runner is what three four hours long,
Speaker 1: it's about seven hours long, but it feels like it's
Speaker 1: just an hour and a half. It feels far shorter
Speaker 1: than any superhero movie I have ever seen. How long
Speaker 1: was Batman v. Superman Dawn of Justice? Is that about
Speaker 1: six and a half hours? I don't know. I only
Speaker 1: saw that over other people's shoulders on an airplane. I
Speaker 1: watched it on a flight and could not finish it
Speaker 1: on the flight. Like it. I started it at takeoff
Speaker 1: and we landed and the movie wasn't over. Yeah, superhero
Speaker 1: movies are not necessarily my thing these days, unless unless
Speaker 1: it has Wesley Snipes in it, and he's he's running vampires.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I am all in on another cinematic vision
Speaker 1: of Dune. I mean every element, all the old ones
Speaker 1: we talked about here, the sand warm terms. If we
Speaker 1: get to face dancers, I really want to see a
Speaker 1: nice cinematic vision of the face dancers as well. I
Speaker 1: think I might have said this in the original episode,
Speaker 1: so apologies if I repeat later in our rerun what
Speaker 1: I'm about to say now, But I think there should
Speaker 1: be an HBO series adaptation of the Done universe. Oh
Speaker 1: you think what HBO did with Game of Thrones. They
Speaker 1: should do with Done. Yeah, there's plenty of material. They're
Speaker 1: even just the first book. You could do a full blown,
Speaker 1: drawn out, you know, cinematic treatment of the thing. Like
Speaker 1: I'm currently watching the Netflix adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's
Speaker 1: Altered Carbon, which is a not that lengthy of a novel.
Speaker 1: It has a lot of ins and outs, and they've
Speaker 1: done a really great job of of giving it the
Speaker 1: multi episode treatment. Whereas I like watching their treatment of it,
Speaker 1: I can't imagine crushing it all down into even a
Speaker 1: lengthy film, so Done is perfect for that that sort
Speaker 1: of treatment. But I guess we're getting another movie. Hopefully
Speaker 1: it'll be four to five hours long. That's that's that's
Speaker 1: what I'm looking for. Hud percent agree, And I hope
Speaker 1: it has a little intermission break in it. It just
Speaker 1: runs for thirty seconds or so, but not a werewolf
Speaker 1: break because there are no there are no werewolves. That's
Speaker 1: a callback, folks, all right, with without further ado, let's
Speaker 1: enter the vault. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind
Speaker 1: from how Stuff Works dot Com. Disembarkation disembarkation notice to
Speaker 1: all passengers arriving on Station Aracus, the June Planetary Tourism
Speaker 1: Consortium funded by the great generosity of the most noble
Speaker 1: House Hardconed would like to welcome you to planet Aracus.
Speaker 1: Aracus is a dry place. Please remember to conserve water
Speaker 1: whenever possible. It is recommended that you do not venture
Speaker 1: outside without a properly fitted steel suit to recycle your sweat,
Speaker 1: urine and fecal moisture. When traveling beyond the shield ball,
Speaker 1: remember always to watchful worms. Signed by keeping in mind
Speaker 1: the three ages, hissing, heaving, and high energy discharge. A
Speaker 1: hissing sound in the sand, heaving up of displaced sediment,
Speaker 1: and high energy study discharge from the dunes may all
Speaker 1: indicate that the sand worm is near and the event
Speaker 1: of worm sign do not activate shields and proceed immediately
Speaker 1: to the nearest cave building or evacuation or in a
Speaker 1: thought or local vendors and kiosks gone throughout station. Iraqets
Speaker 1: are the best place to purchase steel suits, frim hits,
Speaker 1: and individually packaged worm thumbers and duty free prices. Please
Speaker 1: remember also the spice must blow. Anyone suspected of sabotaging, inhibiting,
Speaker 1: or interfering with spice production may be subject to penalties
Speaker 1: up to and including gladiatorial remuneration on gating prime or
Speaker 1: personal evaporation. Please enjoy your stay among the dunes. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is episode
Speaker 1: two in our exploration of the science of doone, the
Speaker 1: science of Frank Herbert's sci fi classic Dune, which is
Speaker 1: celebrating its fifty the anniversary this year. Yeah, so if
Speaker 1: you missed the first part, you should go back and
Speaker 1: listen to that first part one where we talk about
Speaker 1: the technology of doing and we we talked about some
Speaker 1: important sort of introductory materials to the universe of doone.
Speaker 1: If you're not familiar with it, we highly recommend that
Speaker 1: you check out that part first before you listen to
Speaker 1: this one. But if you just want to get thrown
Speaker 1: right into the middle, here we are. Yeah. Last time
Speaker 1: we talked about but Larry and Johad, we talked about
Speaker 1: still suits, We talked about orna thoptors, and a little
Speaker 1: bit about the Holtzman effect whatever that is. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this time we're going to talk more about the the
Speaker 1: living science of done, about the biology an ecology of
Speaker 1: the planet Iracus, and one of the coolest things about
Speaker 1: the Dune universe has got to be the sandworms. Yes,
Speaker 1: I imagine that is one of, if not the key
Speaker 1: aspects of the franchise that come to people's minds when
Speaker 1: they think of do Yeah. I So, I just finished
Speaker 1: reading this book a few weeks ago, and I loved it.
Speaker 1: I absolutely adored this book. As I said in the
Speaker 1: last podcast, it frequently struck me as just amazingly fresh
Speaker 1: for a fifty year old book. It's full of ideas
Speaker 1: that you don't encounter elsewhere. It just felt very original
Speaker 1: and unique and different. But the moment where the book
Speaker 1: really kicked into gear for me was the first sandworm attack.
Speaker 1: And this is when they're going out to observe spice harvests. Correct. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I want to kind of put you the listener
Speaker 1: into the moment of the sandworm attack. So imagine you're
Speaker 1: one of a group of twenty six spice sminers working
Speaker 1: on a patch of spice in the deep desert. So
Speaker 1: you're out there among the dunes. The heat is high,
Speaker 1: the sun's bearing down on you. You've got your protective
Speaker 1: still suit on, You're working the harvester machine trying desperately
Speaker 1: to get this spice going, and you've you've been at
Speaker 1: it for several minutes, and overhead there's this enormous cargo aircraft.
Speaker 1: I suppose it would be some type of ornithopter with
Speaker 1: flapping wings, which, as we discussed in the last last episode,
Speaker 1: doesn't make a lot of aerodynamic sense, but okay, uh,
Speaker 1: And it's called a carryall. It hovers nearby, waiting to
Speaker 1: lift you off at a moment's notice, and preferably at
Speaker 1: the last possible minute, to maximize the profits, because you've
Speaker 1: got to get as much spice as you can. The
Speaker 1: spice is important. The spice must flow, the universe needs it.
Speaker 1: But a worm will come. The worm always comes it.
Speaker 1: Here's the harvester. It knows where you are and the
Speaker 1: moment you start working, it's on its way now. With
Speaker 1: for precautions, you'll lift off at just the right moment,
Speaker 1: you'll get the maximum spice and you'll avoid the worm.
Speaker 1: But if you're not able to lift off in time,
Speaker 1: you may notice a hissing sound in the sand sliding.
Speaker 1: You know, it's sand sliding against sand. In the background,
Speaker 1: you might see a static discharge in the air and
Speaker 1: Eventually you're gonna notice an upheaval of sand as the
Speaker 1: worm rises to the shallows of the desert. And then
Speaker 1: finally you see, and it's probably the last thing you see,
Speaker 1: a great gaping circular mouth, maybe up to eighty meters wide,
Speaker 1: emerging from the dunes, spreading open, closing over you, and
Speaker 1: swallowing you and your friends and your mining vehicle all
Speaker 1: in one bite. It's quite a site. And as far
Speaker 1: as sound goes, we do want to give a quick
Speaker 1: thanks to Chris Knife double O seven. Uh. He's on
Speaker 1: band camp as Cheesy Nervosa. Will include a link to
Speaker 1: his account on the landing bait for this episode. But
Speaker 1: he does a lot of cool and it tracks where
Speaker 1: he gets the the ambience from from various sci fi properties.
Speaker 1: And so this was the track that we used to
Speaker 1: was Dune Sandworm Ride. Yeah, so I love the sandworms.
Speaker 1: I love the sandworms scenes in the book. When we
Speaker 1: first encounter sandworms in the book, it's there merely as
Speaker 1: a threat. You know, this this huge, terrifying beast that
Speaker 1: lives in the desert. It's you know, it's a gigantic
Speaker 1: snake eel worm type creature that it's sort of like
Speaker 1: the monsters and tremors. You know, it lays under Yeah,
Speaker 1: it lives under the ground. It can hear where you are.
Speaker 1: You know, it might be hundreds of meters long. They're
Speaker 1: so huge you can't fight them off. There's no way
Speaker 1: to avoid them except to run. Yeah, and I've I've
Speaker 1: seen it describe that that the Frank Herbert sandworms are
Speaker 1: are kind of like dragons, and but but not merely
Speaker 1: in just the threat aspect. Not just a monstrous dragon,
Speaker 1: but a celestial dragon, because there ultimately the gateway to wisdom. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true, because I do want to spoil too much.
Speaker 1: But then later on in the book, we learned that
Speaker 1: the desert dwellers of the planet Iraq is the Fremen,
Speaker 1: have a more complex relationship with the sand worms. It's
Speaker 1: not just you know, here's this huge, threatening creature that
Speaker 1: we have to avoid. They have a sort of a
Speaker 1: bit of a back and forth. I don't want to
Speaker 1: say too much more, but it's really interesting, and so
Speaker 1: I thought we should talk about the sand worm. What
Speaker 1: is this organism as it's imagined in the Dune universe,
Speaker 1: and how has this changed the way we think about
Speaker 1: aliens and science fiction? And what what analogies can we
Speaker 1: make to real world life forms? Yeah, and for starters,
Speaker 1: let's just go ahead and roll through what we know
Speaker 1: from from Frank Herbert's books. And again it's one of
Speaker 1: those cases where Herbert, there's a lot of information at
Speaker 1: you about how sand worms work, but then when you
Speaker 1: add it all up right, you realize you don't know
Speaker 1: key things. Um, here's what we know. The sand worm
Speaker 1: or shy hallud I believe that is the fremin term
Speaker 1: a creature. Again, you utterly unique to iraq Us, totally
Speaker 1: tied to a complex life cycle on the desert planet.
Speaker 1: Links exceed four hundred meters width of a hundred meters
Speaker 1: at the thickest point, perhaps as long as the thousand meters.
Speaker 1: In the deep isolated parts of the desert mouth, diameter
Speaker 1: is probably about eighty meters, so when it's open and
Speaker 1: lined with a thousand or more cargo silica crystal teeth um.
Speaker 1: A typical worm consists of one to four hundred segments,
Speaker 1: and each segment possessed its own nervous system. Something to
Speaker 1: keep in mind for later. Now, what Herbert didn't tell us.
Speaker 1: He didn't tell us whether sand Mouran's lay eggs. They
Speaker 1: He didn't tell us if they're male and female, how
Speaker 1: reproduction occurs at all. He didn't tell us if it's
Speaker 1: a definitively if it's a vertebrate or an invertebrate. He
Speaker 1: didn't explain the physics of how it moves, and he
Speaker 1: didn't tell us what it eats. I would be surprised
Speaker 1: if it's vertebrate, simply because I think of vertebrate as
Speaker 1: a category belonging to Earth life. I mean, I think
Speaker 1: it might have some kind of internal, you know, rigid structure.
Speaker 1: But it's weird to think about those, you know, those
Speaker 1: peculiarities of evolution that seems so ubiquitous on Earth. We
Speaker 1: just assume their natural categories. But I mean, who knows
Speaker 1: if a alien life form is likely to have a backbone, right,
Speaker 1: And I think that ultimately, the like the segmented nature
Speaker 1: and the independence of the segments tends to imply something
Speaker 1: that is inherently invertebrate. But but again, he doesn't draw
Speaker 1: a distinct line in the sand. Well, then to learn
Speaker 1: more about the sand worm, I think we're gonna have
Speaker 1: to turn back to our old friends that we mentioned
Speaker 1: in the last episode. A couple of books that we
Speaker 1: used as resources. So one of these is going to
Speaker 1: be The Science of Dune, edited by Kevin R. Grazier,
Speaker 1: and then the other one is the Dune Encyclopedia right right.
Speaker 1: That one's compiled by Dr Willis E. McNelly, and that
Speaker 1: came out in eighty five. It's out of print, but
Speaker 1: you can still find used copies in various places. Uh
Speaker 1: I got mine online for like, you know, fifteen or
Speaker 1: twenty bucks, so it's it's still out there and it's
Speaker 1: not like an out of your reach collector's item. In
Speaker 1: particular that the explanations for sandworms from these two books.
Speaker 1: From Doune Encyclopedia, we have an explanation by marine a shifflet,
Speaker 1: and in the Science of Doune we have a sybil
Speaker 1: hetchel pH D's explanation from her piece the Biology of
Speaker 1: the sand Worm. Now I'm actually gonna start with the
Speaker 1: Doune Encyclopedia explanation from Marine shifflet. Um shifflet goes ahead
Speaker 1: and defines both male and female sandworms, the ladder somewhat
Speaker 1: smaller than the males, with the secondary segment um of
Speaker 1: each worm containing its reproductive system, and she posits that
Speaker 1: at age one thousand, because these are long living creatures,
Speaker 1: the female develops an egg sact in her reproductive system,
Speaker 1: constructs a deep, massive nest, and then a tracts a
Speaker 1: male with rhythmic thumping. Now this is key because in
Speaker 1: the in doone we see people attracting or distracting a
Speaker 1: worm by using a mechanical thumper. Right, yeah, that's one
Speaker 1: of the technologies we could have talked about in the
Speaker 1: last episode, but I guess we just didn't have time.
Speaker 1: The thumper is a sort of you might think of
Speaker 1: it as a defensive decoy mechanism out in the desert
Speaker 1: where if you want to draw off a sandworm, or
Speaker 1: perhaps even attract a sandworm, you put this thing down
Speaker 1: in the ground and it starts beating on the sand
Speaker 1: to say come on over, Yeah, with a rhythmic pattern,
Speaker 1: because if you you know, there's like this thing, if
Speaker 1: you you got to walk without rhythm, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: unless you want to attract the worm. So yeah, one
Speaker 1: of the things that's frequently mentioned in the book is
Speaker 1: that if you want to walk across the sand and
Speaker 1: not attract the worm, you have to walk without rhythm.
Speaker 1: You have to walk without any kind of uh cadence
Speaker 1: to your walk. And I love how they bring up
Speaker 1: the fact that this is so much harder to do
Speaker 1: than it sounds like, like the characters are just exhausted
Speaker 1: from trying to walk without maintaining a rhythm of their gait. Right.
Speaker 1: And so she ties this into the into the life
Speaker 1: cycle the worm by saying that it's that kind of
Speaker 1: rhythmic um thumping that not only indicates something unnatural on
Speaker 1: the desert surface, but perhaps the mating cry, the mating
Speaker 1: call of the female worm. So she says that then
Speaker 1: the male would arrive, consumes the smaller female, just straight
Speaker 1: up eats the female and then goes into a dormant state.
Speaker 1: And it's during the state that the heavy duty spice
Speaker 1: fiber egg sac remains intact and it's fertilized by the
Speaker 1: male's reproductive system. And then when he wakes up, he's
Speaker 1: gonna spit that fertilized egg sac out. What yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I've heard of reproductive cannibalism, but what yeah, this is
Speaker 1: it's an interesting uh uh. And again this is you know,
Speaker 1: her taking Herbert's world and extrapolating on it and trying
Speaker 1: to come with a scientific explanation for how it might work.
Speaker 1: It's not. This is not cannon by any means, but
Speaker 1: it is interesting because we don't see sexual cannibalism occur
Speaker 1: in nature that I can think of where the male
Speaker 1: eats the female, because generally the female is the species
Speaker 1: and she may or may not eat the male after
Speaker 1: he's served his purpose. But here we have the male
Speaker 1: consuming the female. Yeah, okay, I mean that just makes
Speaker 1: me wonder if this almost would start to play with
Speaker 1: the definitions of what counts as male and what counts
Speaker 1: as female in a species. Yeah, I would. I feel
Speaker 1: like I would feel more comfortable with this example if
Speaker 1: the genders were reversed and the primary primarily the sandworms
Speaker 1: are are female. But but you know, either way, the
Speaker 1: the best example that comes to mind of something close
Speaker 1: to this in the natural world would be um anglerfish,
Speaker 1: where you have, oh those great things, so you've probably
Speaker 1: seen pictures of this from the deep ocean. They look
Speaker 1: like movie monsters. Uh, they've got the crazy faces and
Speaker 1: that they've got a little a little lit up fishing pole, right,
Speaker 1: And those are the females. The females are the ones
Speaker 1: we see pictures of the males. Um are essentially a tiny,
Speaker 1: heat seeking sexual missile equipped with gigantic nostrils. Uh. All
Speaker 1: they do is they swim out in search of a
Speaker 1: female and if he's lucky, and most are not, they
Speaker 1: find one and they bite onto her abdomen and hang on. Again.
Speaker 1: These are the angler fish, real world organisms, nothing from
Speaker 1: sci fi. And then there I'm looking. I just sorry,
Speaker 1: I looked. I just googled pictures of the male angler
Speaker 1: fish attaching to the female angler fish. And it's pathetic.
Speaker 1: It's could go with that interpretation because what happens is
Speaker 1: not only does he bite on and hold on, but
Speaker 1: their flesh grows together, their blood vessels connect, and the
Speaker 1: male becomes a mere part of the female's body, sustained
Speaker 1: by her systems. His eyes, fins, and some internal organs
Speaker 1: all atrophy h and just leave him as just this
Speaker 1: fat flap of skin, this just mindless thing on the female.
Speaker 1: And this way, the male and his reproductive systems are
Speaker 1: always there when she needs them, which is a necessary
Speaker 1: adaptation in the a dark, lonely world of the deep ocean.
Speaker 1: That's fascinating. I've never read about this before. I was
Speaker 1: really I ran across in the past year or two
Speaker 1: and was pretty amazed by it. But that's certainly it's
Speaker 1: the case where the male and female fuse into one.
Speaker 1: And I guess you could interpret this consumption of the
Speaker 1: of the female sand worm is more of emerging than
Speaker 1: a consumption, since there's not, according to her model anyway,
Speaker 1: there's not really any nourishment to be gained from the
Speaker 1: worm eating the other worm. So this is where we
Speaker 1: start getting into a more complex life cycle. So bear
Speaker 1: with me, everyone, Um, when the male sum so, the
Speaker 1: male sandword comes to vomits up that egg case, and
Speaker 1: he takes off the egg case. Eventually hatch catches into
Speaker 1: a legion of sand trout sand trout sand trout. Yes,
Speaker 1: and now these these this is where we're getting back
Speaker 1: into um, into the actual canon of of of Frank
Speaker 1: Herbert's sandworm biology, because these are very much a part
Speaker 1: of the series. Yeah, there are sequences in Dune where character, well,
Speaker 1: at least one character I can think of, the planetary
Speaker 1: scientist kinds Uh. There may be other characters, but not
Speaker 1: that I recall. At least Kinds thinks about down under
Speaker 1: the the dunes of sand there are these massive patches
Speaker 1: of life. Then there's moisture down there too, which is
Speaker 1: sort of hidden from the surface, which is I guess
Speaker 1: being trapped or used by these unicellular life forms. And
Speaker 1: in this case we're talking twenty by six centimeter unicellular organisms.
Speaker 1: But that's a big cell. You know, Alien world, different laws, right, um.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, their water scavengers. So the idea here
Speaker 1: is that they're traveling out, they're collecting water, they're bringing
Speaker 1: them back, according to um to this model, anyway, to
Speaker 1: the nest site and there sequestering the water. And here
Speaker 1: the water mixes with excretions from the pre spice mass. Uh.
Speaker 1: And here the c t U c O two builds
Speaker 1: up as a byproduct, and this eventually results in a
Speaker 1: spice blow explosion. And this is very much a part
Speaker 1: of the books, where eventually the pressure builds up and
Speaker 1: it blasts that precious spice melange that's produced uh somehow
Speaker 1: by this sand trout nesting water sequestering action blows it
Speaker 1: up to the surface where people can say, hey, there's
Speaker 1: some spice there, let's go get it, all right, all right,
Speaker 1: So but it's not only people that want to come
Speaker 1: and get the spice that also attracts the sand worms,
Speaker 1: which we'll get into. Um. And at this point, according
Speaker 1: to Schifflet, the sand worms enter a pre metamorphic stage
Speaker 1: during which surviving sand trout joined bodies, and as metamorphosis
Speaker 1: sets in properly, each sand trout also known as a
Speaker 1: little maker among the fremen, becomes a segment of a
Speaker 1: conjoined body that becomes a small sandworm. So again we
Speaker 1: see conjoined bodies coming into play. Uh. And this is
Speaker 1: this is certainly part of of Herbert's original model for
Speaker 1: the sand worm. So this is fascinating because the sand
Speaker 1: worm and that sense it's is sort of a composite organism. Yes,
Speaker 1: very much so. Um and this this play I don't
Speaker 1: want to give any spoilers, but this also plays out
Speaker 1: and rather unique and mind blowing ways in the sequels. Okay,
Speaker 1: so how long does it take for little sand trout
Speaker 1: joining together to become the gigantic shihlud like we see
Speaker 1: in the book? You know, before they're they're a big
Speaker 1: sandworm out in the desert over over a thousand years,
Speaker 1: because it's going to take that long, corner and Chifflet
Speaker 1: here to segment for the segments to take on. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, the different properties such as the tooth head,
Speaker 1: the reproductive system. If you're going by her model and
Speaker 1: h during this time of environmental conditions are not met,
Speaker 1: then the underdifferentiated segments can revert to sand trout. So
Speaker 1: it's kind of like those jellyfish that can that can
Speaker 1: reverse age, right, they can revert to the earlier life
Speaker 1: form stage if things aren't going well. Yeah, I like
Speaker 1: that detail. If she throws in and finally the a
Speaker 1: sexual juvenile warm develops and it's twenty to thirty long,
Speaker 1: and this is the form that fremen eventually capture and
Speaker 1: drown to produce spice essence. More about spice in this
Speaker 1: episode later that's coming up. Uh, most juveniles, according to Shifflet,
Speaker 1: would become females, but it's possible that it's possible that
Speaker 1: the environmental absence of a male is what results in
Speaker 1: male development. In the book itself, we're told that each
Speaker 1: male has a three four hundred kilometer territory that it
Speaker 1: defends against other worms, and she has a really interesting
Speaker 1: bit about how that combat would work. Yeah, how do
Speaker 1: the worms fight each other if they're just they're huge
Speaker 1: worms with big circular mouths. Well, she draws on a
Speaker 1: on a on a detail that will discuss in a minute.
Speaker 1: Um or I guess, let's go ahead and hit it.
Speaker 1: How does someone ride a sandworm? Ah, yes, well this
Speaker 1: is something we learned about later in the book and
Speaker 1: it's very interesting. So the sandworm, like the sandworms like
Speaker 1: we mentioned, have these segments on their bodies. They have
Speaker 1: sort of scales that protects their soft, fleshy inner tissues
Speaker 1: from the you know, the harsh exterior realities of Aracus
Speaker 1: and all the sand. So a coman who is who
Speaker 1: is hopped up on spice and ready to ride, will
Speaker 1: go out into the desert with some hooks and attract
Speaker 1: a sandworm using a thumper, and if the sand worm
Speaker 1: comes by at the right time, the fremen rider can
Speaker 1: get the hooks under one of the sandworms outer plates
Speaker 1: or these scales segments, whatever you wants, yeah, and then
Speaker 1: pull it back. And what that does is exposed the
Speaker 1: sandworms inner tissues to the external elements. Obviously, the sandworm
Speaker 1: does not like this and says, oh no, and it
Speaker 1: rolls over to protect the exposed part of its body
Speaker 1: from the sand, and in doing so can lift the
Speaker 1: rider up onto its back. And then once you're going
Speaker 1: like that, the sandworm refuses, It doesn't re submerge into
Speaker 1: the ground while it's got a part of its body
Speaker 1: exposed like that, because it doesn't want sand to get
Speaker 1: in there and hurt it. So you can essentially ride
Speaker 1: this sandworm around as long as you want until it's
Speaker 1: just exhausted and collapses, as long as you've got the
Speaker 1: hooks pulling back the plate. Right, did I describe that
Speaker 1: about right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's that's perfect. And and
Speaker 1: so in shifflet, trying to understand like what its teeth
Speaker 1: are for, she draws on this detail and says, well, uh,
Speaker 1: what happens when two males are are getting into combat
Speaker 1: over territory. They're using those teeth to pull back each
Speaker 1: other's segments, essentially wrestling that way. And uh, because again
Speaker 1: sand gets in there, it's gonna irritate the flesh. And
Speaker 1: she posits that in extreme cases this could result in
Speaker 1: a viral infection that could kill a worm, but generally
Speaker 1: the bluser breaks away. So uh, yeah, just grappling with
Speaker 1: each other, exposing each other as inner flesh by pulling
Speaker 1: back with the teeth and eventually forcing one of them
Speaker 1: to give up and break. Yeah, And a lot. It's
Speaker 1: like in nature on Earth, a lot of territorial disputes
Speaker 1: between you know, angry males of species. They don't always
Speaker 1: end in death. They just one of them is like, okay,
Speaker 1: I give up. Yeah, if you can have it, you
Speaker 1: can eat all the female in this region that you want. Um. Finally,
Speaker 1: a word on diet from Shifflet. Her theory here is
Speaker 1: that the sandworm is a true autotroph as an organism
Speaker 1: that's able to to form a nutritional organic substances from
Speaker 1: simple inorganic substances such as carbon dioxide. In this case,
Speaker 1: the sandworm is producing all of its nutritional needs from
Speaker 1: inorganic compounds on the planet's surface. The energy for this,
Speaker 1: she says that it it drives the synthetic reactions to
Speaker 1: completion just by by traveling across the sand, which causes
Speaker 1: an electrostatic charge differential, which we do see in the
Speaker 1: books with a whole You know, you see that you
Speaker 1: already mentioned the static charts that tells you that a
Speaker 1: worm is approaching and uh. Incidentally, she also uses this
Speaker 1: as an as an explanation for why water would be
Speaker 1: fatal to a sandworm, and that it would cause the
Speaker 1: electrons to discharge abnormally. Yeah. Now, obviously it can't be
Speaker 1: that any massive water is fatal to a sandworm because
Speaker 1: there there is some tiny amount of water on a racus.
Speaker 1: But it sounds like a large amount of water will
Speaker 1: kill the sandworm, right, and it gets into that whole
Speaker 1: segmented thing because it's it's mentioned in the book that
Speaker 1: to really kill a sandworm, like to straight up kill it,
Speaker 1: it's so big. And since each shot, since it doesn't
Speaker 1: have a central nervous system, since each segment has its
Speaker 1: own nervous system, you would have to just nuke the
Speaker 1: whole thing with one of your your handy house atomics
Speaker 1: that you're not allowed to use anyway. Wow. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: uh yeah, it's a it's kind of a complex life cycle.
Speaker 1: Uh and uh it's it's summed up in this brief
Speaker 1: bit from the appendix to dune. Now they had a
Speaker 1: circular relationship little maker. Again, that's our our sound trout
Speaker 1: to pries spy spice mass little Maker to Shah Haloud
Speaker 1: Shah Haloo to scatter the spice upon which fed microscopic
Speaker 1: creatures called sand plankton, which we'll get into the sand
Speaker 1: plankton food for Shah haloud, growing, growing, becoming little makers.
Speaker 1: Now that of course is a little complicated, and we'll
Speaker 1: get into that, because here it seems like how can
Speaker 1: one be. It sounds like one part of its own
Speaker 1: life cycle is also part of it is also it's
Speaker 1: part of its diet. That's bizarre, alright. And this brings
Speaker 1: us to biologist Sibyl Hetchel, PhD s um. Science of
Speaker 1: Dune Explanation, which, uh is also really interesting and I
Speaker 1: think gives us our best comparison to real world biology. Okay,
Speaker 1: so first of all, she she she zooms in on
Speaker 1: the whole idea that sand trout produce oxygen deep underground,
Speaker 1: as mentioned by Kinds in the novel. But they need
Speaker 1: an energy source to produce oxygen, and since photo since
Speaker 1: theist is out of the question because their underground, right,
Speaker 1: the best candidate is of course deep hydrothermal vents. That's
Speaker 1: how we see it working on Earth, right. Okay, so
Speaker 1: one could interpret the sand trout is the producer of milange,
Speaker 1: and that's certainly Herbert doesn't really say exactly like it's
Speaker 1: just sandworms are key to the production of spice malhunch,
Speaker 1: but I don't know exactly how it goes happening, but
Speaker 1: of course we don't want them to go extinct. Right.
Speaker 1: So Hetchel deposits that just as sand trout scavenge and
Speaker 1: herd water, they may also tend a milange producing fungus.
Speaker 1: So in this case then it's not actually any part
Speaker 1: of the of the sandworms life cycle that produces the spice,
Speaker 1: but they are harvesters of spice, right. She's theorizing that
Speaker 1: they would sequester stashes of water around these hydrothermal areas,
Speaker 1: and this would cause the spice fungus to grow. Uh.
Speaker 1: And in our world, plants, bacteria, and fungi produced the
Speaker 1: majority of exotic compounds, such as psychedelic compounds, so this
Speaker 1: would make extra sense, right, the secondary compact pounds that
Speaker 1: synthesized for protection by a particular fungus. And of course
Speaker 1: they're are examples of animals on earth that actually do
Speaker 1: practice farming, I mean animals other than humans. Right. The
Speaker 1: example here would be, of course, the leaf cutter ants,
Speaker 1: and that's the comparison that that civil Hetchel makes in
Speaker 1: this uh. In this piece, the leaf cutter ants are
Speaker 1: of course a number of species that are found in
Speaker 1: the America's and they cut tree leaves. They drag them
Speaker 1: to an underground growth chamber and they keep it moist
Speaker 1: to gold, cultivate fungi on the leaves um and then
Speaker 1: they so they so basically it breaks down like this.
Speaker 1: They bring leaf cuttings back to the colony along well
Speaker 1: worn forest roads and paths. We've probably all seen video
Speaker 1: or images of this, you know, very very visual. Um.
Speaker 1: They filter out the bad cuttings, they hand the good
Speaker 1: ones off to their farmer ants. Then they munch the
Speaker 1: leaf cuttings down into a fine mulch. Then they grow
Speaker 1: the delicious fung guy on that mulch, lay some eggs
Speaker 1: in it, and enjoy. They drag the depleted leaf cuttings
Speaker 1: to the dump chamber, along with all the dead ants
Speaker 1: and dead fungus. So the crazy part about this, and
Speaker 1: ultimately kind of sigh five uh sounding thing about the
Speaker 1: leaf cutter ants is that they gave up hunting and
Speaker 1: gathering fifty million years ago and they became farmers. And
Speaker 1: they they discovered the technology of agriculture before we did.
Speaker 1: They did, and well not only before we did, before
Speaker 1: we existed, right, They not only did they find this substance,
Speaker 1: but they essentially domesticated it, and it's grown extinct in
Speaker 1: the wild, like it's no longer something that they can
Speaker 1: go out and get. So the analogy here would be
Speaker 1: imagine if leaf cutter ants, uh could grow to become
Speaker 1: giant leaf cutter ants that can eat a city. But
Speaker 1: also if the fungus that the little leaf cutter ants
Speaker 1: grew in their colonies created a drug that lets you
Speaker 1: see the future. Yeah, yeah, imagine all those leaf cutter
Speaker 1: ants voltron ing up into a larger organism over the
Speaker 1: course of a thousand years. Um, And I do also
Speaker 1: want to know that it's it's also kind of like
Speaker 1: a caveman movie in that when a winged male prepares
Speaker 1: to leave a leaf on her cut her aunt colony
Speaker 1: to found a new colony, they have to take a
Speaker 1: sample of that precious fungi with them because again, it
Speaker 1: doesn't exist in the wild anymore. It was continually fascinated
Speaker 1: by that. Um, we're completely at the mercy of the
Speaker 1: ants if we want this fungus exactly, and of course
Speaker 1: we don't want it, but they require it completely. It's
Speaker 1: key to their their their life. But back to the sandworms. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we don't know exactly what sand plankton and sand
Speaker 1: trout are supposed to eat. But maybe they eat spice,
Speaker 1: uh and it and it, but you know it, but
Speaker 1: it wouldn't make sense. Hetchel argues for the creature to
Speaker 1: both create and consume spice, so the fungus again makes
Speaker 1: more sense from from that analogy as well from that
Speaker 1: comparison as well. So she well, I mean I wonder
Speaker 1: you could look at depending on what you mean by create,
Speaker 1: you could look at an example like honey in a
Speaker 1: bee colony. You know, the bees don't create the honey,
Speaker 1: but they sort of they process the honey. Yes, And
Speaker 1: I think that would be an apt analogy here for
Speaker 1: the milange as well, that the mash is kind of
Speaker 1: is a created element. UM. So she argues that sand
Speaker 1: trout communities um are essentially like a combination of leaf cutting,
Speaker 1: ant nest and hydrothermal vent community and in this case,
Speaker 1: sandplankton and sand trout would subsist on living spice, fungi,
Speaker 1: and bacterial mats that grow around the events. She also
Speaker 1: presents the notion that sand trout or essentially a sexual
Speaker 1: and they might subsist as clone communities for quite some
Speaker 1: time at least until the build up of carbon dioxide
Speaker 1: from their farming efforts triggers sexual reproduction and also triggers
Speaker 1: that spice blow the results from the build up, and
Speaker 1: then that that would scatter the newly produced sand plankton.
Speaker 1: So then the sand worm comes in. It wants to
Speaker 1: eat up that spice, and in doing so it disperses
Speaker 1: the offspring across vast distances, because of course sandworms have
Speaker 1: those large spread out territories. That makes sense with some
Speaker 1: earth earth life too. Or you can think about seeds
Speaker 1: that spread by growing in fruits that predators want to
Speaker 1: come and eat, or maybe not predators, you'd call them.
Speaker 1: I guess they're predators of the plant. They come and
Speaker 1: want to eat the fruit, and then they take the
Speaker 1: seeds with them wherever they go afterwards. So now she
Speaker 1: also goes on in this piece if she has some
Speaker 1: some thoughts on size constraints of enormous organisms. If you
Speaker 1: want to read about that, do check out the book
Speaker 1: to check out her peace. But we're not gonna go
Speaker 1: into him in this podcast. So one of the things
Speaker 1: I've already mentioned that I really loved about doing is
Speaker 1: that it's the most ecologically conscious novel i've ever read
Speaker 1: It's It's a novel that really has interesting thoughts about
Speaker 1: ecosystems and about resources in ecosystems, like how resources get
Speaker 1: used and conserve, specifically water and spice, and then also
Speaker 1: about how organisms feed into one another and create ecosystems.
Speaker 1: There's actually a section in the book where the planetary
Speaker 1: scientist and ecologist Kinds has visions of his father, who
Speaker 1: was also an ecologist and lived among the fremen on
Speaker 1: the dune plan in it, and the vision of his
Speaker 1: father says a couple of interesting things. He says, the
Speaker 1: more life there is within a system, the more niches
Speaker 1: there are for life. Life improves the capacity of the
Speaker 1: environment to sustain life. Life makes needed nutrients more readily available.
Speaker 1: It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous
Speaker 1: chemical interplay from organism to organism. And I think that
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense, because whenever you imagine a
Speaker 1: a rich, thriving ecosystem on Earth, it's one that already
Speaker 1: has a lot of life forms succeeding in It is
Speaker 1: kind of counterintuitive from a resource competition or evolutionary perspective,
Speaker 1: places that have a lot of competitions seem like they
Speaker 1: they should be harder to survive in. But life creates
Speaker 1: ways for other life to thrive. And this is sort
Speaker 1: of part of the problem with aracous as it's imagined,
Speaker 1: unless you you imagine it terraformed and seated with other
Speaker 1: life forms, as some aracters in the novel do kind
Speaker 1: of imagine. I think primarily they talked about, let's plants,
Speaker 1: some grasses and you know, and settle the dunes. It
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to have enough biodiversity to be very hospitable
Speaker 1: to life forms. And uh, in addition to the sandworms,
Speaker 1: like what life forms are described as inhabiting Aracus, Herbert
Speaker 1: mentions some scavenging birds and a few other carrion eaters
Speaker 1: and some kind of scrubby plants. But I got the sense,
Speaker 1: I don't know what you thought about this. I get
Speaker 1: the sense that a lot of these animals that are
Speaker 1: described as inhabiting Aracus are imports from human settlement. I
Speaker 1: don't know what you thought. That's that's the sense I
Speaker 1: got as well. They, like the scavenging birds, have certainly
Speaker 1: evolved over over time to to thrive on Aracus. Like
Speaker 1: they're there's you know, they're far more conscious. They can
Speaker 1: basically hear water, you know, miles away, but that they're
Speaker 1: essentially a terrestrial product. Yeah, while the sandworm is it
Speaker 1: is entirely alien. So I don't know, maybe somewhere in
Speaker 1: the if it's in the sequels, or if I missed it.
Speaker 1: In the book, Herbert does talk about other life forms
Speaker 1: native to Aracus, but I can't think of any examples
Speaker 1: where I remember him talking about that. And and I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask the question, if we imagine that the sandworm,
Speaker 1: at the various stages of his life cycle, were the
Speaker 1: one and only organism native to a planet, is something
Speaker 1: like that possible in reality? Can you have a one
Speaker 1: organism ecosystem? Yeah, even if it's a really complex organism
Speaker 1: like this one. I was trying to find examples of this.
Speaker 1: I found one. Actually I think you found it first.
Speaker 1: But in two thousand and eight there were reports that
Speaker 1: the first known single organism ecosystem had been discovered, and
Speaker 1: this was miles under the earth in the moment, I
Speaker 1: apologize if I'm pronouncing this wrong, Momponing gold mine in
Speaker 1: South Africa, and it was a bacteria called de Sulfuru
Speaker 1: dis audax viator. It was a rod shaped bacterium, and
Speaker 1: it makes its living in a very remarkable way. It
Speaker 1: doesn't need sunlight and it doesn't need any prey organisms,
Speaker 1: so it lives down there by itself, and instead it
Speaker 1: puts together the organic molecules it needs by access only
Speaker 1: to water, carbon, and nitrogen in the ground using energy
Speaker 1: from According to this Lawrence Berkeley Lab source I read
Speaker 1: on this, hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay
Speaker 1: of uranium. So this is a it's surviving on chemicals
Speaker 1: created by radiation in the ground, almost two miles under
Speaker 1: the ground. This is essentially about as close to an
Speaker 1: alien microbe as I've ever heard of on Earth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty it's pretty far removed from our traditional ecosystem model. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so I just thought that was fascinating. But another
Speaker 1: way of thinking about it is, if you imagine way
Speaker 1: way back in time two I don't know, situations of
Speaker 1: a biogenesis on Earth, you probably at least have to
Speaker 1: imagine that there are some periods in the history of
Speaker 1: life where there was only one organism, um and then
Speaker 1: and then of course we got a branching ecosystem. So
Speaker 1: that again makes me wonder if you could naturally have
Speaker 1: a planet where there's really only one type of organism there.
Speaker 1: It seems like the natural course of biological evolution is
Speaker 1: to diversify. But another way of thinking about this that
Speaker 1: that occurred to me is that what if it is
Speaker 1: the case that the sand worm and its various stages
Speaker 1: of life is the only major organism alive on Iracus
Speaker 1: And it wasn't always that way, And so it could
Speaker 1: have been a planet rich with life that has essentially
Speaker 1: been conquered by a single invasive species, Like there's one
Speaker 1: organism that destroys all eco diversity on the planet. I
Speaker 1: could say, Okay, I could see that being the case too, Yeah,
Speaker 1: where you end up with just a sandworm only ecosystem
Speaker 1: because it's that dominant of species in this environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, one wonders how sustainable a system like that
Speaker 1: would be. Uh. And then of course, if you want
Speaker 1: to think about other parallels to the sandworm in reality,
Speaker 1: you've of course got the Mongolian death worm. Ah. Now
Speaker 1: the Mongolian death worm is not real though, right? Maybe
Speaker 1: not to you. Well, I didn't know. I maybe I've
Speaker 1: missed a new study where the occasionally you see an
Speaker 1: expedition to to to find it. No, as far as
Speaker 1: I'm aware, no one has ever discovered the Mongolian deathcorm.
Speaker 1: But if you're not familiar, you should. I bet you've
Speaker 1: written a blog post about that. I don't know if
Speaker 1: I've ever really covered mongolian death worm. Um. I have
Speaker 1: run across you have something called a sandworm that lives
Speaker 1: in beach sand. But of course that's an entirely different scenario. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's unfortunate, okay, Robert, Yeah, imagine yourself at a party
Speaker 1: with some hip young people who start passing around the
Speaker 1: hottest new designer drug. It is the spice Melange. And
Speaker 1: Herbert never is exactly clear what the spice in the
Speaker 1: book looks like, but I'm going to try to imagine
Speaker 1: it here based on a scene from the movie and
Speaker 1: a description quote I read from a from a sequel.
Speaker 1: It's it's a little glass box. And then inside the
Speaker 1: box there is some orange mass. It almost looks like
Speaker 1: a like an evacuated insect shell, you know how, like
Speaker 1: when the cicadas leave their shells behind after they mold
Speaker 1: some stuff like that. It's kind of brownish orange. And
Speaker 1: then you press down a little piston to crush some
Speaker 1: of this stuff. In the glass and an orange liquid
Speaker 1: strains out and it smells like cinnamon and you can
Speaker 1: drink it right up, or you can add it to
Speaker 1: food or beverages or have it transformed into a gas
Speaker 1: if you're old navigator in the tank, but it's going
Speaker 1: to be doing some weird stuff to you. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: if you're in araqan U Dennizen, if you if Iraqus
Speaker 1: is your home and you're not privy to a lot
Speaker 1: of outsider food coming in from other worlds, uh, it's
Speaker 1: just gonna find its way into your diet. It's just
Speaker 1: an ambient part of of water and food on the world. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you're not careful and you keep taking too
Speaker 1: much spice, you may begin to see the future and
Speaker 1: become fatally addicted. Yeah, and your eyes will turn blue
Speaker 1: despite the fatal addiction. There's something kind of appealing about
Speaker 1: the way they describe some of the spice consumption in
Speaker 1: the novel. Yeah. They mentioned having, you know, having a
Speaker 1: cup of spice coffee some I think there's some spice
Speaker 1: cakes that are mentioned here and there. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you're like, yeah, I would kind of like that a
Speaker 1: nice you know, a nice consciousness expanding cup of coffee
Speaker 1: as opposed to this, you know these red Bull and
Speaker 1: Samuda cocktails that I keep going. So characteristics of the
Speaker 1: spy us in the book, which very according to the
Speaker 1: person taking it and the intake level, would be some
Speaker 1: of the following. First, I should say that it's core
Speaker 1: the spice is described, I think is an awareness drug
Speaker 1: and that it changes perception and consciousness. Uh. Now, the
Speaker 1: first major feature described is that it's the geriatric spice.
Speaker 1: It's when taken in small quantities over long periods of time,
Speaker 1: it extends your lifespan. And that's something we probably should
Speaker 1: have mentioned more earlier on. Like, that's another reason that
Speaker 1: Iraq is the center of the universe, because not only
Speaker 1: does the spice enable interstellar travel, uh, it also allows
Speaker 1: the wealthy people to extend their lives. Right, once you're
Speaker 1: a feudal lord and you've conquered all your enemies and
Speaker 1: you've secured a place in the in the power structures
Speaker 1: of the universe, what's the next thing you need? You've
Speaker 1: got to live forever, right, So it does that. And
Speaker 1: then another effect of it is that it stains your eyes.
Speaker 1: Taking spice will will cause blue ten ting of the eyes,
Speaker 1: not just the irises, but the whole eye. It's a
Speaker 1: mind expander. It grants heightened awareness. In some cases it
Speaker 1: allows prescience or limited omniscience. I don't know if limited
Speaker 1: omniscience is a phrase that makes any sense. It allows
Speaker 1: you to have some knowledge beyond your physical time and place,
Speaker 1: and the ability to see some aspects of the future
Speaker 1: or aspects of the present removed by distance, or to
Speaker 1: share communal awareness, sort of collaborating across aspects of mind
Speaker 1: with others. And they often make geographic comparisons in the book.
Speaker 1: So it's like looking into the future is kind of
Speaker 1: like looking across the landscape. And depending on your circumstances,
Speaker 1: you might be kind of standing in all like a
Speaker 1: shallow basin and you can't actually see that far. Other
Speaker 1: times it's flat. Other times maybe you're on a hill,
Speaker 1: and it depends on your prescient availabilities. How far can
Speaker 1: you see? Yeah, And then of course the negative that
Speaker 1: the downside I alluded to earlier is the addiction. When
Speaker 1: you take it in large quantities, you will get addicted
Speaker 1: to it, and if you stop taking it, you will die. Well,
Speaker 1: that'll happen, unfortunately. So the idea of a drug that
Speaker 1: expands consciousness is certainly something you find in many cultures writing,
Speaker 1: including our own. You know, lots of people believe things
Speaker 1: like hallucinogens like LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, mushrooms, uh, and the
Speaker 1: ayahuasca brew which I think the chemical uh, the active
Speaker 1: chemical and that is D m T right. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so under various circumstances, people have suggested all these drugs
Speaker 1: not only provide euphoria and sometimes sensory hallucinations, but they
Speaker 1: actually provide access to information or knowledge about reality that
Speaker 1: is not otherwise available to people. One of the most
Speaker 1: common claims you hear is the sort of transcendence journey
Speaker 1: you might call it, where the hallu synogen gives the
Speaker 1: user a mental vantage point from which he or she
Speaker 1: claims to see a deeper reality or to now understand
Speaker 1: that our day to day experiences are not all there is.
Speaker 1: I'm sure you've encountered this before. Oh yeah, And of
Speaker 1: course it's and that's key to most religions too, that
Speaker 1: you have at the heart there's a deeper understanding of reality, um,
Speaker 1: that you have to uncover. Yeah, And I think that's interesting.
Speaker 1: I think the hallucinogen comparison to spices. Perhaps quite on point,
Speaker 1: because in a two thousand five book called my clum
Speaker 1: Running by the American mycologist paulse statements, that's a person
Speaker 1: who studies fungus. Uh. The author claims that Frank Herbert. Well,
Speaker 1: I should just read this quote. It says Uh. He
Speaker 1: says that Frank Herbert was apparently an enthusiastic mushroom collector
Speaker 1: himself who came up with this great system for for
Speaker 1: growing chantrell mushrooms in a way that people hadn't realized
Speaker 1: how to do before, by creating this spore slurry in
Speaker 1: a bucket. But anyway, he says of Frank Herbert. Frank
Speaker 1: went on to tell me that much of the premise
Speaker 1: of Dune, the magic spice spores that allowed the bending
Speaker 1: of space tripping, the giant worms, maggots digesting mushrooms, the
Speaker 1: eyes of the fremen, the cerulean blue of psilocybin mushrooms,
Speaker 1: the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Binny Jess,
Speaker 1: It's influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred
Speaker 1: mushroom cults of Mexico, came from his perception of the
Speaker 1: fungal life cycle and his imagination was stimulated through his
Speaker 1: experiences with the use of magic mushrooms. All right, well,
Speaker 1: then that that certainly matches up with with what we
Speaker 1: see in the book. And again bearing in mind that
Speaker 1: this is you know, rising out of NINETI and mid
Speaker 1: sixties and and uh and a lot of the counterculture
Speaker 1: movements that were taking place there, and the and the
Speaker 1: roll of drugs and lucinogens in that subculture. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: certainly though one thing about that that was weird. I
Speaker 1: googled the psilocybin mushrooms and they didn't look blue to me.
Speaker 1: I don't know. Yeah, maybe there's sometimes I have not Yeah,
Speaker 1: they look like mushrooms to me. I've never noticed anyway.
Speaker 1: To go back to the science of Dune, the writer
Speaker 1: Carol Hart, PhD has a great essay about the spice,
Speaker 1: melange and the science of Dune, and she makes some
Speaker 1: really interesting points comparing the spice to hallucinogens like the
Speaker 1: ones I mentioned above, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca. And there
Speaker 1: are the following changes that you can notice that are similar.
Speaker 1: One would be changes to the eyes. The spice, it seems,
Speaker 1: causes a more permanent kind of change with the blue tent,
Speaker 1: but hallucinogens like LSD and ayahuasca typically cause an extreme
Speaker 1: dilation to the pupils. She also notices suspension of time right,
Speaker 1: ecstatic us, an ecstatic and sometimes frightening sense of communion
Speaker 1: with others, out of body sensations, loss of self and
Speaker 1: merger into a oneness, euphoria, death, rebirth, experience, vision slash,
Speaker 1: hallucinations and opprescience and life changing realizations. And I think
Speaker 1: this is one of the most interesting things because, like
Speaker 1: like I said earlier, a lot of times people take
Speaker 1: hallucinogens not just with the idea that I'm going to
Speaker 1: see something interesting, but they take it with the idea
Speaker 1: that they're learning something about the true nature of reality.
Speaker 1: They're getting access to facts and useful information. She says,
Speaker 1: for example, for the Amazonian Shamans, ayahuasca allowed the soul
Speaker 1: to leave the body, to search out the explanation for
Speaker 1: illness in the individual or problems threatening the community, and
Speaker 1: to decide the course of action. Yeah, I I remember reading, uh,
Speaker 1: some words from Buddhist Alan Watts, who is also part
Speaker 1: of you know the certainly a name. During the decent
Speaker 1: seventies and he was commenting on on the views of
Speaker 1: psychedelic drugs in the counterculture, and he compared them to
Speaker 1: the use of a telescope or microscope that it's something
Speaker 1: that you, you know, you put your eye to the
Speaker 1: telescope of the microscope to learn something about reality, but
Speaker 1: then you also have to re engage with reality. You
Speaker 1: have to put the telescope or the microscope down in
Speaker 1: order to to take those lessons and apply them to life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: another really interesting parallel with Dune, I think is that
Speaker 1: the effect of the drug, whether you're talking about real
Speaker 1: hallucinogens or the spice in Dune, is not just a
Speaker 1: product of the drug. It's not just here are the
Speaker 1: molecules in the drug and what they'll do to you,
Speaker 1: but there are there are product sort of combinatorial product
Speaker 1: of the drug acting on body and the preparation that
Speaker 1: the user has experienced. So it's about preparation, it's about departure. States.
Speaker 1: Some people will take acid, take LST and just mess
Speaker 1: around and have some weird experiences and don't learn a
Speaker 1: whole lot from it. Some people might have bad trips,
Speaker 1: some people might have what they would consider to be
Speaker 1: transcendent experiences. And I think there are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who throughout the years have been advocates of controlled
Speaker 1: hallucinogen use, who lament the fact that it's taken for kicks. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, we look at some of the current research
Speaker 1: and we're finally seeing a lot more research into psychedelics
Speaker 1: uh these days. For a while, it was such a
Speaker 1: taboo area, you know, really kind of poisoned by uh
Speaker 1: the more you know, extreme aspects of the counterculture in
Speaker 1: the way that it it gained coverage in the media,
Speaker 1: we're finally seeing it being an area that can get
Speaker 1: funded and and and be studied. Uh. And there have
Speaker 1: been some some really fascinating looks into how the right
Speaker 1: levels of hallucinogens combined with appropriate priming, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: preparation for the experience, uh and as well as sort
Speaker 1: of after uh exploration of what they felt it can
Speaker 1: be you to to help eternally ill patients as they
Speaker 1: prepared to die. It can be used in in various therapies,
Speaker 1: even addiction therapies. UH. So so yeah, that the priming,
Speaker 1: the purpose, really the ritual of it is essential. I mean,
Speaker 1: I imagine a number of our listeners can think of
Speaker 1: you know, some individual they've come across before that at
Speaker 1: least on the surface, looks like they are gaining nothing
Speaker 1: of value from their experimentation with psychedelics. And and then
Speaker 1: on the other hand, you know, there are cases where,
Speaker 1: you know, this particular thinker claims to have had some
Speaker 1: sort of profound insight um intellectually or creatively while trying
Speaker 1: one of these substances. Yeah, So, as Albert Hoffman, the
Speaker 1: discoverer of LSD, once wrote, he said, special internal and
Speaker 1: external advanced preparations are required. With them, an LSD experiment
Speaker 1: can become a meaningful experience. So I think he was
Speaker 1: one of those people you're talking, you know who, who
Speaker 1: recommended the preparations that go into making yourself ready for
Speaker 1: the mental journey of expanded consciousness. If you don't put
Speaker 1: the preparation time in, it doesn't work. And we see
Speaker 1: this in the novel Dune because people consuming lots of
Speaker 1: spice react to it in very different ways. You get
Speaker 1: the sense that when paul A Tradees starts taking lots
Speaker 1: of spice and then has his moment of expanded consciousness,
Speaker 1: begins to see the future, begins to have you know,
Speaker 1: heightened awareness and pressions and limited omniscience. It's all because
Speaker 1: of the things that have gone into making Paul who
Speaker 1: he is. It's not just like he got a really
Speaker 1: strong hit of it, you know. So it's the fact
Speaker 1: that he's been trained in the Benny Jesser at ways
Speaker 1: that we talked about in the last episode in The
Speaker 1: mint at Ways. All this that went into making him
Speaker 1: who he is also made the expanded consciousness what it was.
Speaker 1: You can see that in contrast to another character in
Speaker 1: the novel The Twisted Mint at do you call him
Speaker 1: Pider or Peter? Um always read At as Peter, but
Speaker 1: Piper might be more accurate. They call him Pider. In
Speaker 1: the David Lynch movie, I'll call him Peter. Peter Davrees
Speaker 1: the The Bad Men Tad who works for the evil
Speaker 1: harconans uh he They say he takes huge amounts of
Speaker 1: spice too. He's just gobbles it like candy. He can't
Speaker 1: get enough of it. But he does not seem to
Speaker 1: have this same type of expanded awareness that Paul has
Speaker 1: from extended spice use. And it seems to be that
Speaker 1: it's it's because of different types of preparation going into
Speaker 1: the experience. Yeah, I mean The other example, of course,
Speaker 1: of the Guild navigators who have been engineered in bread
Speaker 1: to to pilot these spaceships uh while using the spice.
Speaker 1: So they consume the spice in order to safely navigate
Speaker 1: folded space and as a celestial mechanic. John C. Smith
Speaker 1: points out in the Science of doone UH, there's a
Speaker 1: quantum physics tie in here. So eight years before the
Speaker 1: publication of doone, physicist Hugh Ever the Third proposed a
Speaker 1: radical interpretation of quantum mechanics that everything that can happen
Speaker 1: does happen, and each possible action spawns a new universe.
Speaker 1: This is what's known as the many worlds theory. Every
Speaker 1: time there's an indeterminate quantum event, the world the universe
Speaker 1: branches off into separate realities. It's the very thing that
Speaker 1: the Borges referenced with the Library of Battle, that this
Speaker 1: library would contain not only all books, but all possible books.
Speaker 1: So taking the spies here would have allowed the navigator
Speaker 1: to at least see the immediate path of the ship
Speaker 1: in many different multiverses uh, and then safely, you know,
Speaker 1: choose the safest path um. And interestingly enough, there is
Speaker 1: kind of a real world tie in here because according
Speaker 1: to a nineteen seventy three studied compiled by the RAND
Speaker 1: Corporation for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, UM,
Speaker 1: there was a Soviet plan to launch psychics into orbit.
Speaker 1: Quote how how much should we how much face should
Speaker 1: we put in this report? I mean maybe a grain
Speaker 1: of salt, I'll read the quote here. Regarding precognition, we
Speaker 1: found only one unverified report by a Soviet investigator that
Speaker 1: a program was being planned to train astronauts to quote
Speaker 1: foresee and to avoid accidents in space. It was clear
Speaker 1: from the context that he was referring to pre cognitive process.
Speaker 1: So I don't know, uh, if they did look into it,
Speaker 1: obviously didn't work out. But this was a time of when,
Speaker 1: you know, the stakes were high in the Cold War.
Speaker 1: So if there was a possibility that there was something
Speaker 1: to some sort of paranormal uh situation, you checked it out, yea?
Speaker 1: Why not train a bunker full of psychics? Yeah? The same.
Speaker 1: The same Rand Corporation report also mentioned UM that there
Speaker 1: was a test into psychic communication by sacrificing a litter
Speaker 1: of baby rabbits on board of on board of Soviet
Speaker 1: submarine and the idea here was that the mother rabbit,
Speaker 1: located on the surface receive psychic signals from the dying young.
Speaker 1: So again, uh, this is all unverified, but but it
Speaker 1: seems possible based on some of the other reports we've
Speaker 1: heard about both the US and Soviet investigations into the
Speaker 1: potential use of paranormal effects. You know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that's interesting to me about the role of spice
Speaker 1: in the Dune universe is that it posits a world
Speaker 1: in which the entire universe is completely dependent on a
Speaker 1: resource that essentially produces effects similar to things that are
Speaker 1: taboo in our culture that not only do we, you know,
Speaker 1: not depend on as a society, but we try to
Speaker 1: stamp out and say that's not okay. Yeah, Like, essentially
Speaker 1: everyone in the book seems to be taking some sort
Speaker 1: of um performance enhancing substance. If it's not milange, then
Speaker 1: it's the uh you know, then they're taking samudo, or
Speaker 1: they're taking the I can't remember the name of it,
Speaker 1: but that line that the mentent drink, which I believe
Speaker 1: is supposed to be derived from the same source as samuda,
Speaker 1: the purple stand lips. Yeah, so everybody's just cranked to
Speaker 1: the gills on something because you can't depend on the
Speaker 1: thinking machine, You've got to depend on the human mind.
Speaker 1: So maybe you could say that if we had to
Speaker 1: get rid of our computers, there would be I don't
Speaker 1: know less opposition to recreational drug use. Maybe. So all right,
Speaker 1: you know, we're running out of time here, and I
Speaker 1: don't know, we might even have to cut this part,
Speaker 1: but I do want to mention the beneath a lack
Speaker 1: Sue face dancers before we close out. These are characters
Speaker 1: that you did not encounter in the book because they
Speaker 1: don't show up until book two and then play an
Speaker 1: increasingly important role moving on. But as we mentioned, uh,
Speaker 1: I think in the first episode that many if the
Speaker 1: lack su this is a group, this is like a
Speaker 1: faction in the Doune universe that are really involved in
Speaker 1: trans human post human um machinations. They're changing the human
Speaker 1: form uh engineering new people uh to to survive in
Speaker 1: this post singularity, you know, Postbutalian jihad world, and so
Speaker 1: they're doing things like like essentially engaging in cloning the
Speaker 1: producer of these ghoula's that play an important role in
Speaker 1: the later books, where dead individuals brought back as a
Speaker 1: clone h. I like the sound of that. Yeah, they're
Speaker 1: the they're the faction that creates the twisted uh mentats
Speaker 1: we've already discussed. And then they also have these face
Speaker 1: dancers who are known and feared as spies and assassins
Speaker 1: UM and their essentially their shape shifters. They can change
Speaker 1: their their face, their appearance, um, their their voice everything
Speaker 1: to resemble another person UM and and so they you know,
Speaker 1: give some unparalleled acting ability. They serve as entertainers throughout
Speaker 1: the galaxy and UM and they're also key at the
Speaker 1: Laxu diplomats and conspirators as and as well as just
Speaker 1: core members of their society. So uh. There, there's actually
Speaker 1: a couple of cool articles about how this might work, essentially,
Speaker 1: how a shape shifting humanoid might work as an organism. Uh.
Speaker 1: The first uh and the primary one I want to
Speaker 1: mention comes to us from the Dune Encyclopedia, and this
Speaker 1: is from contributor Walter E. Myers, and he very much
Speaker 1: in envisions face dancer biology a shape shifting biology as
Speaker 1: a complex creation of training, breeding, embryotic manipulation, genetic team
Speaker 1: current tinkering, and surgical augmentation. So basically throwing all of
Speaker 1: these various everything. We got everything we got at creating
Speaker 1: this shape shifting creature. So I'm not gonna go through
Speaker 1: the entire entry because it's a he has a lot
Speaker 1: of details that he throws out, But here are the
Speaker 1: high points. This is what you need. Key alterations include
Speaker 1: selected breeding for appropriate physicality and muscle control, because you're
Speaker 1: gonna need muscle control to shift the face around out
Speaker 1: and shift everything about. Embryotic stimulation of overdeveloped back muscles
Speaker 1: and hyper elastic spine for height control. The embryonic manipulation
Speaker 1: of the bodies of psylamic sacks, altering their position and
Speaker 1: allowing them to serve in the voluntary inflation of artificial
Speaker 1: tubes that are implanted after puberty, thus allowing conscious body
Speaker 1: size alteration, so essentially bladders in the body that allow
Speaker 1: you to just fill up as needed. Childhood augmentation of
Speaker 1: facial structure replacing certain facial bones with elastic cartilage, coupled
Speaker 1: with extensive training to allow total manipulation of facial features.
Speaker 1: Cellular embryonic manipulation to allow conscious control of scalp temperature
Speaker 1: and temperature, because this would be used to allow the
Speaker 1: color manipulation of artificial liquid crystal hair follicles that are
Speaker 1: later planted like individually, genetic manipulation to enable the conscious
Speaker 1: formonal control of eye pigment, fetal manipulation, and surgical augmentation
Speaker 1: to produce male genitals that are attractable within a vaginal
Speaker 1: cavity for visual gender swapping. So they wouldn't actually be
Speaker 1: able to change sex, but they could sort of retract
Speaker 1: the genitals into a cavity as if they were the
Speaker 1: landing gear of an airplane. Training and surgery to enhance
Speaker 1: deferential muscle and autonomic nerve control. Uh So, in other words,
Speaker 1: a face dancer by this definition would be an extremely
Speaker 1: complex product uh and no mere human subspecies. But this
Speaker 1: is just one take. We also have a take from
Speaker 1: Sandy Field in her essay Evolution by Any Means on Dune,
Speaker 1: and this is from the Science of Dune, and she
Speaker 1: goes into a lot of a lot of these sort
Speaker 1: of highly evolved human models that we discuss here, but
Speaker 1: she posits that the face dancers mimic their targets through
Speaker 1: conscious migration of body cells. So in order to swiftly
Speaker 1: change form, a face dancer would need to reck reorganize
Speaker 1: its skin cells, uh, muscle, liature, and skeletal elements, a
Speaker 1: feat they might accomplish through the the dissolution and recombination
Speaker 1: of the cell to sell bonds that hold the tissue together. Now,
Speaker 1: how might the the lax who have accomplished this. Here's
Speaker 1: what she had to say. Quote the concerted action of
Speaker 1: newly created hormones selected genetically by the the laxu over
Speaker 1: many generations could act to allow different cell types to
Speaker 1: move when prompted by neurological signals. Face dancing then could
Speaker 1: be a genetically derived ability to generate specific hormones at
Speaker 1: will which allow for the concerted movement of skin, muscle, bone,
Speaker 1: and other cells to new locations to create the appearance
Speaker 1: of another person. So there you go. I mean, I
Speaker 1: appreciate that as a as a great attempt to explanation.
Speaker 1: I somehow don't feel like a creature like that could
Speaker 1: exist in reality. I mean, certainly you can imagine some
Speaker 1: types of uh, you know, chameleon type elements like changing
Speaker 1: pigmentation and when we see octopuses and stuff that have
Speaker 1: a remarkable ability to change their external appearance at wed will.
Speaker 1: But the moving of bones and things like that, that
Speaker 1: sounds impossible to me. Yeah, I I do love the
Speaker 1: the the rigor in both of these examples, because one
Speaker 1: takes a very um, you know, genetic, cellular hormonal approach,
Speaker 1: and the other is a very more of a varied
Speaker 1: approach but also all into just post human cybernetic tinkering.
Speaker 1: And I guess in reality you could create a model
Speaker 1: that is a combination of the two, maybe draw in
Speaker 1: some bio mimicry by looking to the world of of
Speaker 1: the of the octopus or the cuttlefish and saying, well,
Speaker 1: how could you create those same sort of flesh effects
Speaker 1: in a humanoid creature. Well, here's something I would say.
Speaker 1: I don't know to what extent they have shape shifting
Speaker 1: precision in the books, but I would I would buy
Speaker 1: this creature more if it could make basic changes to
Speaker 1: its body. But but sort of target a particular individual
Speaker 1: like I, you know, can look now exactly like Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb as opposed to just I can look different than
Speaker 1: I normally look. Yeah, yeah, it would. And I think
Speaker 1: in the books it's laid out that it depends on
Speaker 1: how long they study a target. So if they study,
Speaker 1: you know, they just sort of glance at you would
Speaker 1: be like a very rough version, but they would ideally
Speaker 1: want to uh study you in earnest for a few
Speaker 1: days before replacing you. Yeah, all right, so there you go.
Speaker 1: We're out of time. Uh that's the biology of done.
Speaker 1: But before we go, Robert, I gotta ask you about
Speaker 1: David Lynch movie. I've been burning to talk about this. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, I read the book and then I watched
Speaker 1: the movie, and there's so much to like about the movie, actually,
Speaker 1: because it's got great sets and costumes. Some parts of
Speaker 1: it are truly weird, uh in ways that are really
Speaker 1: fun and exciting, and other aspects of it are just incomprehensible.
Speaker 1: I watched it with my wife Rachel, and I constantly
Speaker 1: had to explain things because the movie does not make
Speaker 1: sense on its own. Yeah, it's It's been a long
Speaker 1: time since I've seen the movie, though I did last night.
Speaker 1: I rewatched the intro material that was on the TV
Speaker 1: airing of it, where they have the the still illustrations
Speaker 1: and some narration to set up the world. Uh. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I agree. There's there's so much that doesn't work in
Speaker 1: the films and ultimately led to it being a kind
Speaker 1: of a train wreck. But then there's so many elements
Speaker 1: that are they're well done. Like some of the casting
Speaker 1: is just weird. Some of the casting it's just spot on.
Speaker 1: The costumes are amazing, some of the visual takes on
Speaker 1: the world are just perfect. But it just doesn't all
Speaker 1: come together. Yeah, you know, I think Doone could be
Speaker 1: a really great animated movie. Yeah, Like imagine if Miyazaki
Speaker 1: had had taken it on, you know, because you have
Speaker 1: the ecological elements that he's you know, it's so president
Speaker 1: in his work. Oh man, that's a thing that I
Speaker 1: think was really lacking, and at least the version of
Speaker 1: doing that I saw. Now I heard that there there's
Speaker 1: shorter there's a shorter version and a longer version. I'm
Speaker 1: not sure which one I saw. Uh. If there's a
Speaker 1: shorter version, I cannot imagine it because the version I
Speaker 1: saw left out so much explanation it's crazy. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: the one thing that really seemed left out of the
Speaker 1: movie is the ecological themes of the book. All the
Speaker 1: concerns about water, about about how to survive in the environment.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a this is a key part
Speaker 1: of the book, and it's you know, maybe one out
Speaker 1: of every three pages is primarily about water, and this
Speaker 1: is just not the case in the movie. Yeah, indeed,
Speaker 1: and that's you know, ultimately a you know, a large
Speaker 1: thing to be missing from the finished product. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, the movie does have I don't know if
Speaker 1: you remember this from the movie, but the the strategically
Speaker 1: inserted pug. Oh yes, how how c Trades has a pug. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if you mentioned this, I saw he The pug
Speaker 1: shows up in the still illustrations for the TV version intro.
Speaker 1: So it's got Jurgen proc now standing there with his
Speaker 1: his beard in his uniform holding a pug. There's also
Speaker 1: a scene of Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck fighting a
Speaker 1: battle and he's got the pug in his arms. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I do not remember. I've in my reread of the book,
Speaker 1: I've not come across the pug. Pretty sure. They added
Speaker 1: that their pug at Tradees is not in the book.
Speaker 1: They added the pug, they adding the added the weirding module,
Speaker 1: um and a few other things. They added him then
Speaker 1: left out some some key things as well. So yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. Well, hey, I know that a lot
Speaker 1: of you out there have comments you would like to
Speaker 1: add on the Dune Universe, on the Dune movies, on
Speaker 1: some of this uh uh, some of the possible science
Speaker 1: behind the biology behind the technology that discussed in the
Speaker 1: other episodes, and we would of course loved to hear
Speaker 1: from you. As always, check out our homepage Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind dot com. Uh, and you also want
Speaker 1: to check out the landing page for this episode that
Speaker 1: will include links out to these books that we've mentioned
Speaker 1: too related our coals, as well as where you can
Speaker 1: find some of the music that we featured and uh
Speaker 1: and indeed, as we close out here, we're gonna be
Speaker 1: listening to the track Aracus by musician Raleigh Porter off
Speaker 1: his two thousand eleven album Aftertime, released by Subtext Recordings. Uh.
Speaker 1: There'll be a link to that on the landing page
Speaker 1: for this episode. But you can also learn more about
Speaker 1: human his work at Raleigh Porter dot com. And if
Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with us about your
Speaker 1: favorite aspect of the Dune novels or the Dune movies,
Speaker 1: or your least favorite aspect, or just tell us what
Speaker 1: you think about Dune or give us feedback on the episode,
Speaker 1: you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands
Speaker 1: of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot com