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