Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: forward Thinking patent everyone, and welcome to Forrard Thinking about
Speaker 1: podcast that it looks at the future and says, so
Speaker 1: we went out, Magneto and Titanium Man and the Crimson
Speaker 1: Dynamo came along for the ride. I'm Jonathan Strickland and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And today we are going to be
Speaker 1: doing an episode based on a listener request. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is one that came in from faceback right. Derek Barrows
Speaker 1: asked if we might explore a certain topic that was
Speaker 1: of interest to him, right right, a certain super heroic
Speaker 1: topic sort of somewhat yea, Yeah. He wanted to know if, um,
Speaker 1: we can talk about the science behind X Men, which
Speaker 1: is a tall order. Well, it's especially tall because the
Speaker 1: X Men is fantasy. Yeah, I mean, there is no
Speaker 1: neetic modification that will allow you to turn your body
Speaker 1: into fire or or adamantium like steel or something. It's
Speaker 1: pretty unlikely at any rate. Yeah, it's it's way more
Speaker 1: fantasy than science fiction. But we could look at it
Speaker 1: from a sort of almost their perspective, where we say, okay,
Speaker 1: for each individual X Man, X X person, member of
Speaker 1: the member of the X correction of X X man
Speaker 1: is totally X. Yeah. Each individual member of Professor X
Speaker 1: is elite. Uh force of school and women School School
Speaker 1: for Mutants. Yeah, I mean there are away person. Sounds
Speaker 1: like you have passed on. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm still
Speaker 1: for each individual X man. Is there a way that
Speaker 1: we could use science and technology to somewhat mimic this
Speaker 1: person's supermutant powers in the real world? So, so, is
Speaker 1: there a way that such a power could be achievable
Speaker 1: either through some sort of alteration of a person, right, so,
Speaker 1: like cybernetics or genetic modification, right, or just simply using
Speaker 1: technology to mimic that power. So maybe a suit of
Speaker 1: some sort that can mimic one of the X Men's powers.
Speaker 1: And as it turns out, another big challenge here that
Speaker 1: Derek has given us is the fact that the X
Speaker 1: Men happens to be a group that has had a
Speaker 1: lot of different characters in it. Ah. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: few characters in the Marvel universe. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you guys know this. Um Yeah, yeah, like a few,
Speaker 1: as in like a few thousand and and a good
Speaker 1: percentage of them. I've been in the X Men at
Speaker 1: some point or another. Yeah, And for that reason, we're
Speaker 1: going to need to split this into a couple of podcasts.
Speaker 1: So today we are just focusing on the characters that
Speaker 1: I just recently found out where the quote original team, yeah,
Speaker 1: way back when the comic book started, right, I'm going
Speaker 1: to have to make a confession right here to the fans.
Speaker 1: Please don't hate me for this, but I'm sort of
Speaker 1: a casual X Men. Oh that's that's okay, Joe. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to call you a fake geek girl. It's
Speaker 1: all right. I am a fake geek girl. So but
Speaker 1: but in other words, like if you only knew the
Speaker 1: X Men from say the film versions, then you have
Speaker 1: some of the cartoons right right, But you you I'm
Speaker 1: just giving an example, Joe, not saying you specifically, but
Speaker 1: if you out there in the listener land are only
Speaker 1: familiar with X Men through those methods, are those those
Speaker 1: forms of media? Then you know you might think, oh, Wolverine,
Speaker 1: Wolverine was always part of the X Men, of course, No,
Speaker 1: not not part of the original X Men. So you're
Speaker 1: breaking my heart. But we will get to Wolverine in
Speaker 1: the next podcast. Along with some of our other sorted, sorted,
Speaker 1: assorted and sundry favorites. Yeah, some of them are sorted,
Speaker 1: I guess, like like Nightcrawler, one of my favorites not
Speaker 1: not in the original X Men. Will we will be
Speaker 1: covering Nightcrawler in the second episode. So who will we
Speaker 1: be covering today? It's got to be Cyclops, right, absolutely,
Speaker 1: Scott Summers has been there since the beginning. Okay, I
Speaker 1: gotta raise my hand and have a question here. Maybe
Speaker 1: it's because I'm a casual fan that I don't understand this,
Speaker 1: but I've always had a question about how Cyclops works.
Speaker 1: When he does his little I beam thing. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a big I beam thing. Really, it's not
Speaker 1: not that okay, So sure he presses a little button
Speaker 1: on his head and a huge, gigantic beam comes out
Speaker 1: of his face. Hit somebody knocks him back twenty ft
Speaker 1: across the room. I'm confused about what that beam is
Speaker 1: because it looks, on one hand like it should be
Speaker 1: a sort of a laser or some kind of energy weapon,
Speaker 1: which would seem to have a kind of burning or
Speaker 1: irradiating effect. But instead, if you judge just by what
Speaker 1: it does to the enemy, it seems to be more concussive,
Speaker 1: like it's a it's a force knocking them back. Yeah, Joe,
Speaker 1: it sounds to me like you're not familiar with concussive
Speaker 1: force beams. Nope, probably because they only exist in the
Speaker 1: comic books. Yeah. No, it's it's a form of energy.
Speaker 1: Many of the types of energy that are found in comics,
Speaker 1: and many of the materials that are found in comics
Speaker 1: are completely made up. They're made up in order to
Speaker 1: make the comic exciting, and you know, they they kind
Speaker 1: of makes sense. They're if they're logically consistent within the
Speaker 1: context of the comic book, but once you take it
Speaker 1: out of that, you think, how is that going to
Speaker 1: be possible? I have my own theory about this. Also,
Speaker 1: it seemed that in in comic books, especially in comic
Speaker 1: books and cartoons that are more aimed at a younger audience,
Speaker 1: it might be kind of weird if one of your
Speaker 1: main heroes is constantly burning people alive. Gross, It's much
Speaker 1: nicer to just kind of push them. It's like you
Speaker 1: might as well have just kicked them really hard. It
Speaker 1: kind of kind of falls into the same category of
Speaker 1: watching the old g I. Joe cartoons and everyone's just
Speaker 1: shooting blue and red light at each other. That doesn't
Speaker 1: seem actually cause damage to anything other than vehicles, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter be as as soon as the vehicles damage.
Speaker 1: You see a little parachute um. But okay, this concussive force,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry to get back to it. Right, And it
Speaker 1: looks like a laser, because that looks cool, right, right?
Speaker 1: I mean, how are you going to depict it? Right?
Speaker 1: I mean you clearly you wouldn't want it to be invisible,
Speaker 1: because then it would just be some guys staring really
Speaker 1: hard at someone else and they suddenly fly backward and
Speaker 1: you think, what's happening is that telekinesis or so obviously
Speaker 1: it needs to be exciting to the to the reader.
Speaker 1: It has to be something that is going to really
Speaker 1: grab the imagination. If we're talking about real world correlatives,
Speaker 1: it's most going to resemble probably either shock waves or lasers. Right,
Speaker 1: That's that's the closest we can say, one based upon
Speaker 1: the result that we see when Scott Summers blast somebody,
Speaker 1: and one that's based more on the appearance of it
Speaker 1: as it's depicted in the comic Boos, right, and shock waves,
Speaker 1: like like sound waves could hypothetically be used in a
Speaker 1: in a weaponized way, like sure, yeah, I mean sound
Speaker 1: is a physical force, right, This is a physical type
Speaker 1: of of phenomenon. So it's that movement of particles really yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it doesn't necessarily have to just be through air.
Speaker 1: It can be through any medium, right, So sound travels
Speaker 1: physically through a medium. Um, right, well, yeah, you have
Speaker 1: to have you have to have something there. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think about me. I think of a vacuum is
Speaker 1: an absence of a medium. But but that's fair. Um,
Speaker 1: I'm thinking physical medium. So if you have a physical
Speaker 1: medium of some sort, whether it's gas, liquid, solid, sound
Speaker 1: can move through it. It moves through at different speeds
Speaker 1: depending upon the density and the nature of that material. Uh.
Speaker 1: And it can have enough of a force to to
Speaker 1: knock you over. I mean, say, the sort of thing
Speaker 1: is just the expansion of air as well, if you
Speaker 1: are causing air to expand very quickly. But for example,
Speaker 1: with a supersonic jet, you guys may have heard a
Speaker 1: sonic boom if a supersonic jet passes overhead. The really
Speaker 1: cool thing is that as long as that jet is
Speaker 1: traveling at a supersonic speed. It is generating a sonic boom.
Speaker 1: It's called a boom blanket, right, right, It's not just
Speaker 1: the single moment the thing that you hear isn't the
Speaker 1: single moment of the of the plane crossing the sound barrier.
Speaker 1: It's it's a continual thing that that everyone along the
Speaker 1: plane's path is going to hear. Yeah, if you could
Speaker 1: travel on the ground at the same rate as the
Speaker 1: plane flying overhead, you would constantly hear it, plus you'd
Speaker 1: be generating your own um. But at any rate, Uh,
Speaker 1: it's it's really you know, the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: if you are close enough to it, you could get
Speaker 1: feel an impact from that shock wave. However, directing it
Speaker 1: at a specific location is a little more tricky. You
Speaker 1: can use acoustic waves and in interesting ways. There's some
Speaker 1: acoustic levitation that's really awesome. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: really cool examples of this, but we don't necessarily have
Speaker 1: a truly weaponized form of it where you could direct
Speaker 1: it at a person to knock them off their feet. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm sure people have been at things like concerts or
Speaker 1: whatever where they can feel that that percussive force whenever
Speaker 1: the era is moving through due to a really low base.
Speaker 1: It it's a little different, Okay, But I have another
Speaker 1: question I want to introduce here, which is that it's
Speaker 1: not a machine on cyclops head that is producing this effect.
Speaker 1: It seems to be that his eyes are naturally producing
Speaker 1: the effect. His eyes are doing it all the time,
Speaker 1: and the only thing that keeps him from just shooting
Speaker 1: these concussive beams at everyone constantly is that little ruby
Speaker 1: visor that he's wearing. So when he pushes the button,
Speaker 1: he's essentially removing a filter right right, or opening an
Speaker 1: aperture or something like a shutter, which would be really
Speaker 1: tricky if it were real. Because I mean, so so
Speaker 1: this this follows his gaze, right, it's coming out wherever
Speaker 1: he's looking with his eyeballs. Yeah, so if he guess,
Speaker 1: I mean, technically just seems to come straight out of
Speaker 1: his eyes. So I don't know if it necessarily needs
Speaker 1: to be where his uh, where where he's looking, as
Speaker 1: opposed to where his face is facing pointing. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: although if you wanted to base it on on eye movement,
Speaker 1: like a web and like that, you could certainly track
Speaker 1: um uh, the the user's eye movement using a pretty
Speaker 1: simple app. Actually, eye tracking hardware exists today. I mean,
Speaker 1: we can already do this. And so if you did
Speaker 1: want to create a machine that would maybe shoot a
Speaker 1: laser wherever you're looking, I think that's totally doable. You
Speaker 1: can get a pair of glasses that track your pupils
Speaker 1: and then see, Okay, I just glanced at Jonathan's shoulder,
Speaker 1: and now burn that. Now I just glanced at his
Speaker 1: top of his head? Do that? Now you're a mean man,
Speaker 1: first of all, First of all your mean Second of all, um,
Speaker 1: will you would be able to remove any kind of
Speaker 1: aiming issue you might have between what you are seeing
Speaker 1: and how you are able to, like your your hand
Speaker 1: eye coordination, that part is no longer now it's just
Speaker 1: eye coordination. Right. There is a downside, not coordination. Yea,
Speaker 1: there's a downside exactly. There's no coordination because it's only
Speaker 1: one thing. The downside. The biggest downside would be any
Speaker 1: laser that's going to be sufficiently powerful enough to cause
Speaker 1: that kind of damage is also going to be bright
Speaker 1: as to cause permanent eye damage for you, the user. Um,
Speaker 1: if you've ever looked into any of the consumer lasers
Speaker 1: that are powerful enough to set fire to something simple
Speaker 1: like a piece of paper that's got dark color on it,
Speaker 1: which is slightly easier to ignite than say white paper. Ah,
Speaker 1: any laser that's in the visible spectrum is going to
Speaker 1: be so bright at that power that it could cause
Speaker 1: permanent damage at least temporary damage. So and a head
Speaker 1: mounted laser weapon that is completely commanded by your eyes
Speaker 1: may not be the best choice. Okay, Yeah, that's convinced me. Essentially.
Speaker 1: I think any weapon where it's shooting from your face
Speaker 1: is probably not the best way to go. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: wouldn't really face mount many weapons. I mean, I mean
Speaker 1: if it's even if it's just a concussive beam and
Speaker 1: not a bright laser, you're you're going to have I'm
Speaker 1: sure some kind of kick back from it. And that's
Speaker 1: a very good point. You just have black eyes all
Speaker 1: the time, it would be really bad. You guys, I've
Speaker 1: been told that my face is already weaponized. So the
Speaker 1: kick back point is a good point because it also
Speaker 1: introduces the energy concern. Yes, I mean imagining that you
Speaker 1: are you have something coming out of your eyes. Like
Speaker 1: even if we go to just the pure fantasy realm
Speaker 1: and say somehow you've got something coming out of your eyes.
Speaker 1: It's a directed energy weapon. Where's that energy coming from?
Speaker 1: I mean, you can't just create energy. You would have
Speaker 1: to somehow, I don't know. You'd have to have a
Speaker 1: battery powering it very power. And if we're if we're
Speaker 1: going through the biological side, let's say that just taking
Speaker 1: the comic book and that somehow we were able to
Speaker 1: make Scott Summers appear here in wedding cakes in order
Speaker 1: to black Like, how how would you actually generate the
Speaker 1: energy necessary to I mean, I don't understand that at all.
Speaker 1: In the mutant universe, all the mutants. This doesn't just
Speaker 1: apply to two cyclops, but all the mutants who have
Speaker 1: any sort of energy based power, The energy has to
Speaker 1: come from them right off off panel. They never stop eating.
Speaker 1: I guess so I likeel there's just a million twinkies,
Speaker 1: would be fantastic if you just saw like little food
Speaker 1: crumbs coming off the edge of the panels whenever, Like
Speaker 1: that's just when they're shoving food into their faces so
Speaker 1: that their metabolism can keep up and they can get
Speaker 1: the energy necessary. Yeah, that's a that's a legitimate point,
Speaker 1: and it's gonna be it's gonna be a legitimate point
Speaker 1: for just about everyone we talk about. Okay, but let's
Speaker 1: just put all that aside and play fantasy here for
Speaker 1: a second. Let's just say you could have some kind
Speaker 1: of unlimited energy reserve in your body. Is there a
Speaker 1: way you actually could, you know, use your eyes to
Speaker 1: direct an energy beam because the eyes are sort of
Speaker 1: their input devices, not output devices, well most of the time. Um, Okay,
Speaker 1: I suppose that we might be able to devise some
Speaker 1: kind of genetic upgrade. And and I'm real dubious about
Speaker 1: whether it's being an upgrade or not to to creator
Speaker 1: or install a kind of like tap at them lucidum
Speaker 1: in the human eye. Harry Potter spell, yes, no, um No,
Speaker 1: it's the it's the organ in many animals that creates
Speaker 1: like eye glow in low lights. So if you've ever
Speaker 1: been in a dark room with your cat and an
Speaker 1: alligator or an alligator, been in a dark room in
Speaker 1: an alligator a couple of times, okay, and their eyes
Speaker 1: have been glow and all creepy at you. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: like raccoons, Lots of lots of animals have this thing,
Speaker 1: but humans do not. Um. It's a reflective layer that
Speaker 1: gives the eyeballs, um, rods and cones a second chance
Speaker 1: at at collecting light, so it helps the animals see
Speaker 1: better in the dark. So great for nocturnal animals. Super
Speaker 1: rad yes, um, and and humans do not in fact
Speaker 1: have it. If if you're thinking, but I've seen red
Speaker 1: eye in photos in lots of people, that is not
Speaker 1: because of a tapitum lucidum. That is because of light
Speaker 1: reflecting off of the blood vessels in the back of
Speaker 1: our eyes. UM. So I guess you could say that
Speaker 1: what Scott has is like the most intense version of
Speaker 1: red eye imaginable, so intense that it's been magnified and
Speaker 1: focused to phenomenal degree. Yeah, So so you know, maybe
Speaker 1: maybe that if you know, if if we put in
Speaker 1: some kind of tappa and lucidum um, and then combined
Speaker 1: that with some sort of really advanced micro lensing technology
Speaker 1: like contacts or nanobots or whatever, um, then then you
Speaker 1: could you could join forces with these things to to
Speaker 1: create something not entirely quite like eye lasers um, although
Speaker 1: the problem of getting them to shoot out of your
Speaker 1: eyes without also just burning your eyeballs from the inside
Speaker 1: out would be a pretty major one. Not to mention
Speaker 1: it would be reliant upon light coming in as opposed
Speaker 1: to light emanating from you. This is reflecting. Maybe maybe
Speaker 1: there's some meadow materials that reflect more light than they
Speaker 1: take in. Okay, Okay, that's a that's a long stretch
Speaker 1: for that one is a very a very wonderful laur Lauren.
Speaker 1: But I'm going to say, for my money, I think
Speaker 1: the closest thing we could possibly get that we've talked
Speaker 1: about is just some kind of head mount a laser
Speaker 1: that was guided by eye tracking software. Yeah. I think
Speaker 1: it's much safer as an external system. Yeah. And even then,
Speaker 1: you're not talking about like a wide beam as we
Speaker 1: see in the comic books. It would be a pinpoint,
Speaker 1: right unless you had some sort of splitter or whatever,
Speaker 1: in which case it's not going to have the punch
Speaker 1: that that a focused laser would. Okay, let's go on
Speaker 1: to one that I'm sure he's going to be much
Speaker 1: more plausible. Ice Man. Yeah. Yeah, So ice Man is
Speaker 1: one of the original members. Um. He has powers include
Speaker 1: the ability to turn his body into ice, and yet
Speaker 1: he could still move around and function. He could also,
Speaker 1: depending upon the version you're reading, he could either generate ice,
Speaker 1: you know, as much as possible, or he could convert
Speaker 1: any sort of humidity or water in the area into ice.
Speaker 1: He could lower the temperature and use it to make ice. Now, wait,
Speaker 1: can he sort of like blast beams of cold he
Speaker 1: sort of blast beams of ice or or just projections
Speaker 1: of ice. Yeah. Yeah, it's not so much it's not
Speaker 1: so much a cold beam as when he puts his
Speaker 1: hands out, then you see ice emanating from his hands,
Speaker 1: and exactly he can do. He can do crushed or cube.
Speaker 1: He's very popular at all the parties that the X
Speaker 1: Man that glacier ice stuff. Though he does. What he
Speaker 1: does is he does the thing where he makes a
Speaker 1: platform out of ice and then he essentially magically skates
Speaker 1: across it while generating it directly in front of himself.
Speaker 1: And that's frozen. And I would say is very largely
Speaker 1: based on Ice Man, but better attitude. It's not magic.
Speaker 1: He's just a really good surfer. Yeah, NASA's silver surfer,
Speaker 1: by the way. But he's not mutant, so we're not
Speaker 1: going to talk about him. Okay, Well, at first glance,
Speaker 1: you might think, okay, maybe maybe something like this is
Speaker 1: possible because we have refrigeration technology and really good refrigeration technology.
Speaker 1: We can we can create via technology extremely cold environments,
Speaker 1: like the environment meants that they have to uh that
Speaker 1: they have to use to test space telescope mirrors. Sure
Speaker 1: they send them into space, or these super super cooled
Speaker 1: environments that are getting close down to absolute zero, or
Speaker 1: the super cold environment that's necessary in order for something
Speaker 1: like large hadron collider to work. Yeah, we're super cooling uh,
Speaker 1: semiconductors and superconductors. Okay, But the thing is about all
Speaker 1: of those is that humans aren't really supposed to hang
Speaker 1: out in those temperatures. Yeah, that's one. Don't do well
Speaker 1: in our body, you know. We we talked in our
Speaker 1: our episode about reanimating the dead about the problems with crayonics,
Speaker 1: and one of the big ones being the challenge of
Speaker 1: slowly uh lowering a person's body temperature in a in
Speaker 1: a series of efforts in order to get them to
Speaker 1: the right temperature. And we still don't know that we
Speaker 1: could ever bring them back from that because our bodies
Speaker 1: aren't designed for that. We don't we don't do well.
Speaker 1: And our body temperature, once it goes down below a
Speaker 1: certain level, we're not so active anymore, right, Well, we're
Speaker 1: not just creatures that you can just freeze and thaw out.
Speaker 1: We we suffer cellular damage, right right. We we contain
Speaker 1: a whole lot of water. Water expands when it freezes,
Speaker 1: which is terrific for for many physical properties of the
Speaker 1: planet Earth, but is really terrible for you. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: your parts of your body freeze. It's not just like
Speaker 1: you know, the meat that frozen your freezer and then
Speaker 1: you thaw it out and then basically it's still pretty
Speaker 1: much like meat. Live tissue doesn't work that way. It
Speaker 1: gets damaged and stuff happens to it that makes it
Speaker 1: not work. It's bad times. Now. Not all animals on
Speaker 1: Earth are necessarily like that. For example, there are some fish,
Speaker 1: some water dwelling creatures that have genes that make their
Speaker 1: body tissues frost resistant in a way that ours aren't.
Speaker 1: And it's possible. I mean, you could say, well, we
Speaker 1: could create a transgenic human maybe maybe, yeah, possibly, because
Speaker 1: we we do that with toy dose. Right, There's there's
Speaker 1: some tomatoes that are frost resistant because they have this
Speaker 1: fish gene. I don't know if those actually worked, but
Speaker 1: they tried to make ka I think in the I
Speaker 1: think in the nineties there was a company that tried
Speaker 1: to use uh these frost resistant fish genes to make
Speaker 1: tomatoes frost resistant, when, of course people freaked out because
Speaker 1: they were like, oh, no, fish tomatoes, it's Franken style,
Speaker 1: or it's going to be fish flavored tomatoes, which just
Speaker 1: shows a distinct misunderstanding of how genes work. Right. But
Speaker 1: so if if Bobby Drake got this fish transplant, he
Speaker 1: might taste fishy. This is already already the best issue
Speaker 1: of X men I've ever heard of. Please continue. He
Speaker 1: was a transgenic human that was, you know, as an embryo,
Speaker 1: given a splice in from a fish gene that would
Speaker 1: allow parts of his body to freeze and then thaw
Speaker 1: out without the kind of tissue damage that a human
Speaker 1: would normally uh sustain. I don't know if that's really possible,
Speaker 1: but there's sort of one very far off maybe. Okay,
Speaker 1: but but that's just preventing our dear friend Bobby from
Speaker 1: dying immediately upon activating his mutant powers. He doesn't get cold.
Speaker 1: He's the one guy in the movie Theaters. I don't
Speaker 1: know what you're complaining about. Okay, yeah, but the next
Speaker 1: problem here is that we don't have someone emanating cold
Speaker 1: yet um, and this this is really tricky, okay, because
Speaker 1: most of our bodily functions create heat as byproducts of
Speaker 1: their electrochemical and physical reactions, right right, it's a waste product,
Speaker 1: and so creating a mechanism by which a living body
Speaker 1: would give off cold instead of heat. I mean, even
Speaker 1: considering that the cold and heat are technically relative. Um,
Speaker 1: something is colder or hotter than something else. But you
Speaker 1: don't have an absolute cold or hot right. Um, it's
Speaker 1: really biologically unlikely because it's just not the way that
Speaker 1: metabolism works. You doesn't have some sort of organic heat
Speaker 1: ex change system that worked at an incredible level of
Speaker 1: efficiency and speed, and that doesn't really there's not an
Speaker 1: organic way of doing Yeah, you could be a you
Speaker 1: could be a heat sink. I guess, yeah exactly. I
Speaker 1: mean I think the problem we're getting to is that
Speaker 1: you don't really give off cold. Yeah, nothing gives off cold.
Speaker 1: You can, you can be a heat sink. And what's
Speaker 1: happening there is that you're colder than the things around you,
Speaker 1: and you're pulling heat away from them. It's coming into you.
Speaker 1: So that's why an ice cube feels cold. It's not
Speaker 1: that it's giving your hand cold, it's that it's stealing
Speaker 1: heat from your hand, and so that it would be
Speaker 1: hard to direct something like that. I can't really and
Speaker 1: cold doesn't radiate the way heat does. Like you can
Speaker 1: have heat with infrared radiation. That's heat is radiation, That's
Speaker 1: exactly what it is. But but cold doesn't work that way.
Speaker 1: And so the only way I can think that you
Speaker 1: can direct like a beam of cold would be to
Speaker 1: sort of a a cold substance like a cold gas
Speaker 1: or a cold liquid liquid nitrogen or something like that.
Speaker 1: So say something more like more like Mr Freeze does. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But then but then you're kind of getting away from
Speaker 1: the X Men idea and you're just saying like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so I've got a gun hooked up to a tank
Speaker 1: full of liquid nitrogen on my back and I can
Speaker 1: squirt it at you. But that might be about as
Speaker 1: close as we can get. Yeah. Yeah, Um, so I
Speaker 1: Iceman not one of the more likely ones we could
Speaker 1: translate in any meaningful way. Uh. If we move on
Speaker 1: to the next original member of the X Men, that
Speaker 1: would be Angel. Yeah, Warren Worthington, the third Angel. Okay,
Speaker 1: So in my casual X Men exposure, I was aware
Speaker 1: of Archangel, but never just Angel, same same, same dude. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think something happened to him. Yeah, some there was
Speaker 1: some kind of metal many things. Yeah, there's there's several
Speaker 1: different incarnations of Angel, including a blue metal winged version,
Speaker 1: and but the original one was a riginal and was
Speaker 1: a dude with wings who could also shoot stuff energy,
Speaker 1: vaguely defined energy from his hands. And um, so we've
Speaker 1: already kind of covered the energy thing, um because it
Speaker 1: was very similar to the concussive blast from from cyclops
Speaker 1: in a way. So you could put lasers on your hands.
Speaker 1: But yeah, and keep in mind, keep in mind lasers
Speaker 1: also require quite a lot of energy, so you would
Speaker 1: have have to carry pretty heavy battery packs if you
Speaker 1: wanted to be able to shoot lasers from your hands,
Speaker 1: and that would be exhausting and uh and even then
Speaker 1: they would drain fairly quickly and you would end up
Speaker 1: with these these weights trapped your arms that don't actually
Speaker 1: do anything. Okay, Okay, so we've done lasers. Let's focus
Speaker 1: on the wings, all right. So angels wings are on
Speaker 1: his back very much in the way that that a
Speaker 1: lot of mythological angels are, right, Yeah, with the wings
Speaker 1: are located behind like the shoulder blades, and then they
Speaker 1: can extend out to either side of the person um.
Speaker 1: So you know, birds have wings. If we put wings
Speaker 1: on a human like that, they'd just be able to fly.
Speaker 1: I mean, you just have to make them like long
Speaker 1: enough so that they'd be the same as, you know,
Speaker 1: relatively speaking a ratio wise like a bird. Right. Well,
Speaker 1: you'd also have to hollow out the humans bones, lighten
Speaker 1: their entire physical structure, and give them a metabolism capable
Speaker 1: of producing energy to allow for flight, plus alter muscular
Speaker 1: structure and skeletal structures so that the muscles have something
Speaker 1: to hold onto. And that would mean that we have
Speaker 1: brand new muscles that humans don't have currently because because
Speaker 1: wings on a bird that kind of corresponds to our arms,
Speaker 1: right sure, sure, So if you cut off your arms
Speaker 1: and attached wings to the to the same musculature, you
Speaker 1: might get around some of that. Maybe I would still
Speaker 1: think you'd have a problem with the fact that the
Speaker 1: human body I would guess it's too dense. I definitely
Speaker 1: know some people are too dense. Birds fly not just
Speaker 1: because they have wings, but as you pointed out, because
Speaker 1: they have a very high surface area to mass ratio,
Speaker 1: and they've got their wings extended so they can get
Speaker 1: a lot of the you know, they can get a
Speaker 1: lot of that air flowing under them in the right way. Um,
Speaker 1: and they don't weigh very much. Yeah, when you when
Speaker 1: you increase the weight of a bird, you're cutting down
Speaker 1: on its ability to fly. It's the same reason you see, Uh,
Speaker 1: like an airplane heavier than aircraft has to use a
Speaker 1: lot of energy to stay in the air. That's why
Speaker 1: they use so much fuel is that they've got to
Speaker 1: maintain these really fast speeds in order to to keep
Speaker 1: slamming enough air under the plane and stay aloft. When
Speaker 1: when you've got a heavy, dense object, your energy requirements
Speaker 1: quickly go out of control. Well, there are multiple things
Speaker 1: that would have to happen in order for a human
Speaker 1: to even remotely be close to being able to fly
Speaker 1: like a bird. Right. So one is that putting the
Speaker 1: wings on the back is a no go. That would
Speaker 1: be that would require a type of motion that is
Speaker 1: not really conducive to flying. You might be able to
Speaker 1: have gliding if you had a large enough wingspan, um,
Speaker 1: but you would not be able to to fly like
Speaker 1: a bird because your your limbs would not be located
Speaker 1: in the right place for you to get the correct
Speaker 1: kind of of stroke you would need in order to fly.
Speaker 1: So wings on the back that doesn't work. You would
Speaker 1: have to have them located more or less where our
Speaker 1: arms are now. You would need to have the solid
Speaker 1: density problem. And like you were saying, Lauren, that it
Speaker 1: takes a lot of energy to fly. But you know,
Speaker 1: if if we could fix that energy problem, um, you know,
Speaker 1: increase the human metabolism and circulation and respiration to the
Speaker 1: point where our muscular skeletal systems could in fact handle flight,
Speaker 1: that would be super rad for for other reasons too,
Speaker 1: like like look at look at bats, which are the
Speaker 1: only mammal which truly flies instead of merely gliding, although
Speaker 1: I'd say that gliding is pretty cool on its own.
Speaker 1: UM and there they're immune systems because of their higher
Speaker 1: metab babilisms are really for serious there so excellent. It's
Speaker 1: um all that extra bodily heat like they run up
Speaker 1: above a hundred degrees like around like a hundred and
Speaker 1: four when they're active. UM means that they're basically inhospitable
Speaker 1: to most bacteria and and viruses that are really terrible
Speaker 1: for us. And I'm sure that bacteria viruses would evolve
Speaker 1: over time if if they didn't have, say, us to
Speaker 1: make delicious snacks out of. But but that could be
Speaker 1: really cool. I wonder if that has anything to do
Speaker 1: with why bats are often a reservoir for disease that
Speaker 1: can be spread to other animals. They think that's it exactly.
Speaker 1: They actually think that, um, that a bola probably originated
Speaker 1: in bats, and that um, when a bat has something
Speaker 1: as as deadly for humans as a bola, it's like
Speaker 1: it's like the flu. To us, it's like a common cold. Um.
Speaker 1: But but they're but they're able able to uh to
Speaker 1: host to be reservoirs for those kind of deadly deadly viruses. Um.
Speaker 1: And and as human civilization is encroaching on their territory,
Speaker 1: they're spreading. They're spreading the viruses too. There are farm
Speaker 1: animals or to us. Okay, so that's true. Maybe we
Speaker 1: could genetically engineer humans to to be capable of flight.
Speaker 1: I mean, that seems pretty pretty far out there, but
Speaker 1: not not impossible. I think at that point would require
Speaker 1: systemic changes. You couldn't call them a human anymore. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, you know, because the just the changes
Speaker 1: alone in the circulatory and respiratory systems would make them
Speaker 1: look very different from us. Sure, but the question is
Speaker 1: do we even need to worry about this because we
Speaker 1: have the ability to fly, We just need machines to
Speaker 1: help us do it. Right, We got these things called
Speaker 1: planes and helicopters and gyrocopters and all sorts of stuff
Speaker 1: that we can use to, yeah, to to get around
Speaker 1: if we wanted to, whether it's recreationally or we actually
Speaker 1: need to get from point A to point B. I
Speaker 1: guess the thing that's appealing about having wings like Angel
Speaker 1: instead of like having a small aircraft is something about
Speaker 1: agility and uh that you're just more mobile, like you
Speaker 1: wouldn't have to like get in the plane. It's an
Speaker 1: ultimate expression of freedom. It's the same sort of freedom
Speaker 1: that having your own car represents. The American dream. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the jet pack dream. You could literally go wherever
Speaker 1: whenever you wanted because you had the means of transportation
Speaker 1: as part of you. So I can certainly see where
Speaker 1: the appeal is. And uh, you know the classic if
Speaker 1: you had a choice between two superpowers, one's invisibility, one's flight,
Speaker 1: which do you go with? I'm a I'm a flight guy,
Speaker 1: so I mean, I totally get it from that perspective,
Speaker 1: but uh yeah, there we've seen some kind of cool
Speaker 1: developments in wingsuit technology that would give you more of
Speaker 1: a flight like experience without having anything else strapped to you.
Speaker 1: So these are suits that end up increasing the surface
Speaker 1: area of a person. Takes a lot of skill to
Speaker 1: actually use one effectively. Um, I've heard of some pretty uh,
Speaker 1: pretty harrowing experiences with people who hadn't really had a
Speaker 1: lot of experience with this sort of stuff and they
Speaker 1: could go into a role and that's pretty bad. But
Speaker 1: these are always used in tandem with parachutes, and the
Speaker 1: idea is that it slows your level of descent. You
Speaker 1: start falling vertically at a slower speed while still maintaining
Speaker 1: your horizontal movement, so you can um continue to move
Speaker 1: forward and fly, but you're also falling. You're not you're
Speaker 1: not generating enough lift for you to to go up
Speaker 1: to ascend it all. So eventually you have to deploy
Speaker 1: your parachute essentially at the same altitude that you would
Speaker 1: if you were doing a normal jump. It's just that
Speaker 1: you're able to move forward quite a bit in that
Speaker 1: same amount of of vertical space, and so it's it's cool.
Speaker 1: And then if you wanted to do something really nifty,
Speaker 1: you could attach a motor to yourself and have a
Speaker 1: jet attack wingsuit. Could you guys see about the guy
Speaker 1: who flew around the Alps with us? He didn't did
Speaker 1: it an eight minute flight with a jet pack suit,
Speaker 1: and it was pretty awesome And it looks like a
Speaker 1: superhero flying around, albeit a superhero is not going to
Speaker 1: be a whole lot of use once he hits the
Speaker 1: ground because his suit is kind of bulky. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that it was really neat to watch, and that's something
Speaker 1: that's a possibility. But that's about as close as we're
Speaker 1: going to get to Angel's abilities. Okay, how about we
Speaker 1: move on to another one. Okay, yeah, the big blue
Speaker 1: fur ball, Well, okay, you're talking about Beast, but in
Speaker 1: the original comics, he was not blue or a furball.
Speaker 1: He was kind He's kind of a squat dude who
Speaker 1: looked a little kind of like a feline, features a
Speaker 1: little bit of a feeling. He was almost almost more
Speaker 1: guerrilla ish. I think in the originals, I guess, I
Speaker 1: guess I'm thinking of the original beat. Yeah, Yeah, no, no no, Hank,
Speaker 1: Hank McCoy a doctor, Hank McCoy, pardon me. Um had
Speaker 1: physical proportions along the lines of of like a non
Speaker 1: human great ape, like a like a gorilla. He had
Speaker 1: the longer arms, the larger hands, and larger, more dexterous feet.
Speaker 1: That the fur and cat like fee cheers, and physical
Speaker 1: resilience and wall climbing and all of those other powers
Speaker 1: were due to various secondary mutations, depending on which comics
Speaker 1: you were reading at the time. Yeah, he was Um.
Speaker 1: He was just kind of strong and smart. Yeah, which
Speaker 1: was you know, they didn't dream as big, I guess
Speaker 1: in that first in that first run. But of course
Speaker 1: the story about his mutation is that it continued on
Speaker 1: that that what you saw in those original comics wasn't
Speaker 1: the the full maturation of his mutation something else? Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it was usually do I think to to his
Speaker 1: own tinkering in one way or another. So the question
Speaker 1: there is could we really make a human being be
Speaker 1: similar to to the beast. Part of this is of course,
Speaker 1: again a look at changing the actual physiology of a human,
Speaker 1: like if you're talking about UM, you know, altering the
Speaker 1: ratio of how long an armspan is that kind of stuff? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, of course there are people who are born
Speaker 1: with various mutations where their arms might be longer than
Speaker 1: what would be normal for a person of that frame,
Speaker 1: or maybe within the norm I should say, as opposed
Speaker 1: to normal. That as its own logal, you know, like
Speaker 1: some some of those some of the Olympic athletes, for example,
Speaker 1: have have bodies that just happened to be extremely well
Speaker 1: suited to whatever. Right. Yeah, you can see some swimmers
Speaker 1: who have really long arms that are helps them in
Speaker 1: their uh, in their sport. Um. Designing that genetically might
Speaker 1: not be an impossibility in the future. It's not something
Speaker 1: we can do even remotely right now. But it could
Speaker 1: be that with a greater understanding of genetics and ability
Speaker 1: to alter them, that we could in fact start to
Speaker 1: engineer people to have better physical abilities and better physical resilience. Well,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about making someone more like a guerrilla,
Speaker 1: I mean it seems inherently easier. I mean, I'm not
Speaker 1: a geneticist, obviously it seems inherently easier to make someone
Speaker 1: more like a close genetic relative of their species. Well,
Speaker 1: I think no matter, I don't know that we would
Speaker 1: ever get to like a transgenic approach, though, um, I
Speaker 1: think it would be more likely we would identify the
Speaker 1: genes responsible for certain development in human beings and then
Speaker 1: tweak them as opposed to take take you know, a
Speaker 1: biomimicry approach, although that I guess it's a possibility. It's
Speaker 1: just that the genetics of an ape and the genetics
Speaker 1: of a human are have enough differences where I'm not
Speaker 1: sure that that's the right way to go, but I
Speaker 1: don't know. Yeah, yeah, And and the strength scientists think
Speaker 1: in in great apes is not only due to their
Speaker 1: to their limb proportions and and and muscular skeletal systems. Okay, um,
Speaker 1: you know they are much stronger than humans like like
Speaker 1: reports vary, but it's at least twice as strong upper
Speaker 1: body wise at any rate. And and some of it,
Speaker 1: researchers suspect has to do with their neural makeup, especially
Speaker 1: in the spine. Um that the idea goes that humans
Speaker 1: have a lot of motor neurons in our spines, which
Speaker 1: gives us really good fine motor control and really good endurance.
Speaker 1: Like we can we can run really fast, and we
Speaker 1: can type on a keyboard when we get there but
Speaker 1: it makes it really difficult for us to coordinate all
Speaker 1: of our muscles in in the kind of bursts of
Speaker 1: strength that we see in aims. That's really interesting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And if you're talking about the sort of strength that
Speaker 1: you see in the comics where Beast is able to
Speaker 1: do truly superhuman feats, we would also be limited by
Speaker 1: just the fragility of our bodies. Right, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: some things that you're not going to be able to
Speaker 1: do because it would it would injure you to do so. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm reminded of I think it was a Saturday Night
Speaker 1: Live skit actually, where the skit was that there was
Speaker 1: a weightlifter who was going to lift an enormous amount
Speaker 1: of weights. And so it's like one of the SNL
Speaker 1: guys in a suit that's made to look supermulky, sort
Speaker 1: of like the old Hans and Fronds stuff, and he
Speaker 1: stands up at both arms rip off because they're still
Speaker 1: holding onto the because the white was too and he
Speaker 1: just looks disappointed. He's not he's not he's not screaming
Speaker 1: in pain. He's just like, oh man, But uh, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of the same sort of thing is the sense
Speaker 1: that you know you there, we be limited by our
Speaker 1: own bodies, not just in the capacity of strength we have,
Speaker 1: but how much how much weight our body could actually support.
Speaker 1: It would be It would be a lot of genetic
Speaker 1: tinkering to to bring all of those factors together. Um.
Speaker 1: His his intelligence is also partially a mutation. Um. And
Speaker 1: and that you know, we've done episodes, whole episodes before
Speaker 1: on how we might make ourselves smarter. Yeah, we're getting
Speaker 1: into sort of Gattica territory with this stuff too. Write
Speaker 1: this idea of being able to tweak ourselves through genetic
Speaker 1: manipulation to have the best us that we can be right, right,
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of questions that come up
Speaker 1: with oh so many ethical questions. I mean, because mostly
Speaker 1: this wouldn't be stuff that we could do to ourselves,
Speaker 1: but due to the next generation of embryos that would
Speaker 1: be fusing with and so and beyond that, you have
Speaker 1: the question of if becomes available, who does it become
Speaker 1: available to. So even if you eventually say, yeah, this
Speaker 1: is something we should do, then you then you have
Speaker 1: the question of who should we do it too. And
Speaker 1: if it's not everyone, that's a big problem. I think
Speaker 1: we should just completely avoid the question of whether we
Speaker 1: should actually do this to an Okay, we're playing in
Speaker 1: fantasy world here, this is the X Men. It will
Speaker 1: be another episode. I don't think we should turn anybody
Speaker 1: into beast or angel, right, But if we're talking about
Speaker 1: the ability to boost someone's physical and mental abilities, then
Speaker 1: it becomes a little more tricky. Right. We're not We're
Speaker 1: not saying turn them into this comic book character. We're
Speaker 1: saying things like, can we help this person be healthier
Speaker 1: and smarter? And that's where it starts to sneak in
Speaker 1: and get tricky. Okay, I I agree with both of you. Um,
Speaker 1: but hey, you guys, I want to talk about about for.
Speaker 1: Please do I'm a bald man. I want to hear
Speaker 1: about this. Do we get blue fur back? Now? I
Speaker 1: don't want a beast that looks like a person. Yeah, yeah, No, no,
Speaker 1: we can. I mean you want for you can totally
Speaker 1: get for. Okay, we've we have absolutely isolated the genes
Speaker 1: and various medications and steroid treatments that are responsible for
Speaker 1: hypertrichosis a k A werewolf syndrome a k A being
Speaker 1: really hairy. So this would be blue dye and you're there. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: these are you know, you probably heard about stories of
Speaker 1: folks who have suffered from this who had uh then
Speaker 1: ended up leveraging it or having it leveraged for them
Speaker 1: for in a circuit side shows. Yeah. Yeah, the wolf
Speaker 1: boy syndrome. That's pretty much what we're talking about here. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And so so that that's hella possible, and and there's
Speaker 1: and you know, there's already people in the in the
Speaker 1: body mod community who are making themselves through through plastic
Speaker 1: surgery and implants of various kinds, look more feline. So
Speaker 1: so the future is now, yeah, there, there's definitely the
Speaker 1: body modification part. If you want to look at least
Speaker 1: as far as features go, like the beast, then there's
Speaker 1: at least the possiblity you could do that. I mean,
Speaker 1: the the disproportionate arms and legs would be a little different. Now,
Speaker 1: that's not something you can easily alter, but the other
Speaker 1: features certainly totally and you can get those little glasses. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right, enough about beasts. I think we should move
Speaker 1: on to the last couple, which we're sort of going
Speaker 1: to pair together. I think it makes sense because their
Speaker 1: their powers are so similar to one another, right, which
Speaker 1: is Jean Gray and Professor X. Now I know these two,
Speaker 1: and I want to start right off the bat by
Speaker 1: saying something that might be a little surprising, which is
Speaker 1: I think maybe out of all of these something like
Speaker 1: the telepathic powers of Jane Gray and Professor X are
Speaker 1: some of the most technologically plausible in the real X
Speaker 1: men kind of sense. And let me explain what I
Speaker 1: mean by that. I don't believe in psychics and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. You know that you're born with the ability
Speaker 1: to reach into someone's mind and see their past. But Joe,
Speaker 1: we only use ten per one of our brains. Don't
Speaker 1: go down oka enough, Okay, okay, No. I want to
Speaker 1: talk about the way that we have already learned that
Speaker 1: brain signals can be interpreted by computers and vice versa,
Speaker 1: and using technology as a sort of middleman, you can
Speaker 1: have brain to brain communication and brain to brain control.
Speaker 1: We've already seen this where there have been experiments where
Speaker 1: humans have been able to control the bodies of animals
Speaker 1: through brain computer interfaces. Did you see about this? I
Speaker 1: did not, Like a like a human wired up through
Speaker 1: a brain computer interface can by thinking, control the muscles
Speaker 1: in a rat's body, like make a rat move its tail. Interesting.
Speaker 1: It's kind of similar to it to the way that
Speaker 1: um some of the pros species are working these days,
Speaker 1: where if if they if they wire it up to
Speaker 1: your to your skull, you can you can control and
Speaker 1: an arm press thattic example, with your brain. Now, if
Speaker 1: you imagine continually refining our approach to reading and interpreting
Speaker 1: brain signals through computer interfaces, you can totally see how
Speaker 1: someone might actually be able to use a computer interface
Speaker 1: to know what somebody else is thinking about, or to
Speaker 1: control what somebody else is thinking about. The issue here
Speaker 1: I would say mainly is that we imagine Geen Graham,
Speaker 1: Professor X can do it without machines. And right now
Speaker 1: what this would involve is potentially very large and powerful
Speaker 1: machines like fm R I and stuff like that. Well,
Speaker 1: and right now, the type of communication I've seen with
Speaker 1: the experiments that I'm familiar with involve more of a
Speaker 1: person and a computer display and another person with another
Speaker 1: computer display and communicating through that. So, in other words,
Speaker 1: you're not having a direct brain to brain communication in
Speaker 1: that sense where you can actually relay useful information. It
Speaker 1: would be more using your brain to interact with the computer.
Speaker 1: The other person on the other side would see the
Speaker 1: message and then they could think and send back a
Speaker 1: message similar to that, and even then I think it's
Speaker 1: picking messages. But one interesting thing I can talk about
Speaker 1: that I just saw the week we're recording this podcast
Speaker 1: was some experiments that were done at Georgia Tech a
Speaker 1: few years ago where uh, they were working with American
Speaker 1: sign language and uh, working with people who were suffering
Speaker 1: from an ailment and we're going to be locked in.
Speaker 1: But before they got locked in, locked in being they
Speaker 1: can no longer move or have one more muscle control. Um,
Speaker 1: they would practice signing and sign language and their brain
Speaker 1: waves were read, and it turned out that someone who
Speaker 1: was locked in, if they were thinking in sign language
Speaker 1: to try and communicate a message, the same areas of
Speaker 1: their brain would light up, whether they were able to
Speaker 1: move those muscles or not. So thinking of words and
Speaker 1: sentences is soup, Like that's beyond what we can do
Speaker 1: right now, being able to say all right, uh when
Speaker 1: you think of the word mary, yeah, yeah. It may
Speaker 1: be that if you were to give someone twenty different
Speaker 1: phrases and you and you mapped how each phrase looked
Speaker 1: every single time, they just read that one phrase, and
Speaker 1: then you gave them the option of choosing any of
Speaker 1: those phrases, you might be able to figure out which
Speaker 1: one it was they were thinking of, if in fact,
Speaker 1: they are able to think specifically of that phrase. But
Speaker 1: that's a lot of ifs. But it turns out that
Speaker 1: this is this is promising, it's something we can go down.
Speaker 1: We're just like you were saying, Joe, We're just not
Speaker 1: We're not there yet, but it doesn't mean that we
Speaker 1: can't one day get there. So it'll be interesting to
Speaker 1: see if we ever get to that kind of brain
Speaker 1: to brain interaction. I'm not sure how useful it is,
Speaker 1: seeing as how we have other forms of communication that
Speaker 1: aren't relying on it, other than in the cases of
Speaker 1: people who are suffering from these maladies. Right, but I
Speaker 1: mean for me and you, we can just talk, and
Speaker 1: I don't know that there's our office environment hasn't gotten
Speaker 1: to the point where I feel like I need to
Speaker 1: just think directly at you because I'm afraid that you know,
Speaker 1: Josh is going to overhear me. We haven't quite reached
Speaker 1: that point yet. Give another year. Well, but obviously what
Speaker 1: will be useful in the future is mind control. Uh,
Speaker 1: you know, here's the thing is that part of me
Speaker 1: is skeptical about it, but another part of me says, well,
Speaker 1: the processes in the mind are electrical and chemical, and
Speaker 1: if you were able to induce electrical and chemical processes
Speaker 1: out externally, there's nothing to say that it wouldn't work.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, part of us wants to believe
Speaker 1: that there at least is some other element that's outside
Speaker 1: of that matter, you know, the whole mind body problem
Speaker 1: that people will talk about, but all scientific evidence points
Speaker 1: to it's very much matter that is at play here
Speaker 1: that if you suffer brain damage, then you can have
Speaker 1: very a very different personality for example. Well yeah, and
Speaker 1: that brings us to another thing that comes up with
Speaker 1: Professor X and Jane Gray, which is the manipulation of
Speaker 1: other people's memories. Sure, sure, because what you're talking about
Speaker 1: in terms of brain damage is the inability for parts
Speaker 1: of the brain, for for neurons, for neural pathways to
Speaker 1: reconnect the way that they used to, and in memories,
Speaker 1: that's exactly what we've talked about before. Over in the hypothalmus,
Speaker 1: we have these neural pathways that create that represent a memory.
Speaker 1: When you try to remember something, you're actually reconstructing that
Speaker 1: neural pathway, right, but it never reconstructs exactly the same way. Well,
Speaker 1: you can tamper with somebody's memories without getting inside their brain.
Speaker 1: You just need to talk to them. I mean, you
Speaker 1: can contaminate someone's memory of an event just by saying words,
Speaker 1: or you can just let or highly susceptible to them.
Speaker 1: You can just let them be on their own and
Speaker 1: ask them to tell the story. Every time you hear
Speaker 1: the story, it's gonna be a little different. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's just it's one of those things where we do
Speaker 1: not remember things perfectly. We feel we do because it's
Speaker 1: in our heads, and we we can perceive it as
Speaker 1: this is something that we can rely upon. I experienced this,
Speaker 1: and I memory. It's not that people are lying to
Speaker 1: you necessarily when they tell a story differently. They might
Speaker 1: genuinely be remembering the story in that slightly different way.
Speaker 1: And that's why we've often said that eyewitness testimony in
Speaker 1: court cases is not so reliable because we have faulty memories,
Speaker 1: and yet we rely on it very heavily in the
Speaker 1: court system because we find it. We find storytelling to
Speaker 1: be very compelling and a lot of times it's the
Speaker 1: only evidence you have, and that's problematic, but it's also
Speaker 1: I mean it we're all susceptible to this. It's not
Speaker 1: like you were saying, Lauren, It's not that someone's necessarily
Speaker 1: setting out to to deceive anyone. It's just what happened.
Speaker 1: But but what about one of those other classic x
Speaker 1: menish psychic powers illusions, like like projecting illusions. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: so the way that I understand it and correct me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong, because this is just my standing of
Speaker 1: this power. My understanding is the way the illusions work
Speaker 1: is that it's another form of mind manipulation, where in
Speaker 1: the mind of the person the target, you have created
Speaker 1: this illusion, so there's nothing physical there. Like if if
Speaker 1: there was someone that you had not perceived who is
Speaker 1: also in that same environment, they would not see the illusion,
Speaker 1: or smell or or hear the illusion. I this is
Speaker 1: this is another thing that sounds kind of crazy, but
Speaker 1: I think this is actually somewhat plausible. Well yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: if you were able to again figure out with the
Speaker 1: help of equipment, right, if you were if you were
Speaker 1: again able to figure out the specific uh neural um
Speaker 1: behavior that goes on with any given sensory perception sort
Speaker 1: of thing, and you were able to replicate it like
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean, imagine being able to press a
Speaker 1: button and then suddenly you smell roses even though there
Speaker 1: are no roses there. I mean, that's something that you
Speaker 1: can at least imagine if you were able to specifically
Speaker 1: map and replicate a neural pathway. Uh, I mean practically,
Speaker 1: what this would look like is if you could put
Speaker 1: some kind of sensor on the brain, says M. Every
Speaker 1: time this person sees somebody standing in the corner of
Speaker 1: the room, these five thousand neurons light up or I
Speaker 1: don't know how many, in whatever order. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: can pinpoint exactly what that looks like physically in the brain,
Speaker 1: and then you can just stimulate those neurons directly to
Speaker 1: do the same thing without them seeing anything. Would that
Speaker 1: would it work backwards? Would they think that they had
Speaker 1: seen a person? And I think it's highly plausible that
Speaker 1: they would sure. I mean, and of course, all of
Speaker 1: this that we're talking about the way that the technology
Speaker 1: and our understanding of the brain works right now means
Speaker 1: that you would need to have a direct brain connection,
Speaker 1: like implants in your brain, electric stuff in there and
Speaker 1: it's sort of a big, big, big, big strike against
Speaker 1: the dirt clod. And let me it's not just going
Speaker 1: to control your mind, but first alone, you too some
Speaker 1: very invasive surgery. Well it's not just that, right, is
Speaker 1: that there are different parts of the brain responsible for
Speaker 1: different things. So in order for us to be able
Speaker 1: to have a wide spectrum of UM influence, you have
Speaker 1: to do multiple brain surgeries with multiple electrodes. One electrode
Speaker 1: in one center of the brain is not going to
Speaker 1: do everything. Um, you know, you might be able to
Speaker 1: really mess up someone's ability to form short term or
Speaker 1: long term memory, but that would be you know, that
Speaker 1: would just be one thing you could do. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So and obviously this stuff we're talking about certainly has
Speaker 1: ethical issues. Of course. One more thing, though, is that
Speaker 1: if we're including Gene Gray on this, we need to
Speaker 1: talk about telekinesis, which I think is far less plausible
Speaker 1: than telepathy technological standpoint. I mean, you can, because of
Speaker 1: how brain computer interfaces are so rapidly advancing, I can
Speaker 1: see controlling other brains. But there's a direct physical pathway there,
Speaker 1: there's electronic links. I mean, you can see the method
Speaker 1: of action that's controlling the brain and understand it. I
Speaker 1: don't see any method of action to you looking across
Speaker 1: the room and making books fly up in the air.
Speaker 1: To me, that just seems like it's not gonna happen.
Speaker 1: We'll probably have more to say about even remotely similar
Speaker 1: abilities when we talk about magneto in the next episode,
Speaker 1: because then we can at least talk about magnetism. Right.
Speaker 1: But I I suppose that if you, you know, previous
Speaker 1: to wanting to move that book across the room, you
Speaker 1: attached a a small drone to the book and had
Speaker 1: a mental connection with the drone, that's certainly control it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you have what I like to call an assistant,
Speaker 1: and you tell your assistant, hey, I want that book,
Speaker 1: and your assistant goes and picks up the book and
Speaker 1: hands it to you, that's not telekinesis. So I just say,
Speaker 1: just attach very thin filaments to everything you could potentially
Speaker 1: need in your environment, have them all lay that only
Speaker 1: you can see them, and then freak out the kids
Speaker 1: in the neighborhood by dragging the filaments that just slowly
Speaker 1: moves across the area. There you go. If you live
Speaker 1: out the rest of your life in a very small
Speaker 1: controlled area. You can have a lot of telech do
Speaker 1: not do this with hot super coffee, but not go well,
Speaker 1: you know, I think it's kind of funny that in
Speaker 1: the end, I think you would have to agree with me,
Speaker 1: or you can argue if you want. But out of
Speaker 1: all of the original X men, I think the most
Speaker 1: plausible is Beast. Yeah. Yeah, I think out of all
Speaker 1: of them, that seems like the closest, the one that
Speaker 1: we could get the closest to with real technology and
Speaker 1: genetic He doesn't he doesn't admit any weird waves a raise,
Speaker 1: he doesn't. You know, he doesn't have any kind of
Speaker 1: extrasensory perception. It's really the least magical. Yeah, he's kind
Speaker 1: of the point. He's really strong, like he was very
Speaker 1: much supplanted by Wolverine other than the fact that he's
Speaker 1: smart and Wolverine is kind of a lunkhead. But or
Speaker 1: he was something. Shouldn't speak ill of the dead next
Speaker 1: Oh no, look, you shouldn't speak ill of logan anyway.
Speaker 1: But this is a cliffhanger for next time. A right,
Speaker 1: fair enough, fair enough, so, uh, we thank you so
Speaker 1: much for the suggestion. And uh and here's a little
Speaker 1: glimpse behind the Curtain. While these two episodes may very
Speaker 1: well air back to back, we're not recording them back
Speaker 1: to back. So Lauren is going to have a week
Speaker 1: to simmer about the the aspersions I have cast upon
Speaker 1: poor weapon X, and we will have a knockdown, drag
Speaker 1: out fight, possibly with that Amandium Claus next week about it.
Speaker 1: But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes,
Speaker 1: maybe there's some other just crazy wacky topic that you
Speaker 1: wanted us to tackle, like is X possible in the future,
Speaker 1: If there's a question you've always wondered, send it to us.
Speaker 1: We will take that X. We will do our research,
Speaker 1: we will debate, we will discuss, and we will have
Speaker 1: a grand old time and we'll cord it so you
Speaker 1: can hear it. But in order for us to do that,
Speaker 1: you gotta get in touch with us. So send us
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