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