Feed the Machine: Life, Camera, (RN)Action!
Clicketh and Readeth This week’s FtM will be short and sweet. Simply, what would happen if scientists tried to create new life in the lab using RNA reactors and succeeded? What if they put this lifeform in a hothouse and rapidly accelerated its evolution? What would come out of it? What would be the social, cultural, political, and theological ramifications of such an outcome? Come on, I am throwing you one underhand. You better hit it out of the park. Adam
Feed the Machine: Ah, My Eye!
Clicketh This article is incredibly cool. I think biological based SF is poised for an explosion. Most Hard SF is based upon physics or astronomy. Sometimes nanotech, which is an offshoot of chemistry, but the advances being made in biology are exceeding what we are coming up with in SF. This article immediately made me think of the pleasure gun in Niven’s Ringworld. Instead of debilitating with pain, it debilitated by over-excited the pleasure centers of the targets body. But much more devious things can be done with reward-reinforcement training. What about a weapon that released dried algae into the atmosphere, and then a photon bomb that triggered the reward pathways the algae inhabited? Wouldn’t a bomb be limitless in power? What about an optical virus, that created regressive loops in the viewers brain? What would happen if all one had to do to stop addiction is drink a shot of blue-green algae juice and look at a glorified light bulb? What would the world be like sans addiction? Would cigarette companies buy-out the start-ups developing these technologies and destroy them? Would people start using more drugs with the ease of quitting them? Would excuses ala Tiger Woods and David Duchovny be a thing of the past? I’m trying to show that any of these science articles can be used to explore both bad and good futures. SF is getting so dark. Don’t forget that our lives today were the future of someone a hundred years ago.
Feed the Machine: Love Me True
Read me. What is this world coming to? Jesse Schell interviews Bob Bates, game designer and former chair of the IGDA. In it, Bates predicts a few future changes in video games, but the one that is really interesting has to do with player-character interaction. He believes that soon, players will build real emotional conversations with avatars and other NPCs. This goes beyond being scared that your character is going to die, or feeling bad that they had a tragic past. These are real emotion bonds. What sort of societal changes would this bring on? Video game addiction is well on its way to becoming a recognized mental illness. I’m sure most readers out there can think of at least one person they know who spends a majority of their waking hours playing WoW. If avatar interactions become more real, more visceral, and draw the player into the game that much more, what will happen to our cozy little society? Will game boxes come with Surgeon General’s warnings and photos of obese, Cheetoh stained teens with “This could happen to you” written above it? Going further in time, will some sort of legal unions between players and NPCs come into the fold? How bout we look in the opposite direction, towards optimism. Will something like Ted Chiang’s “The Lifecycle of Software Objects” be our future? Can digital “beings” have any sort of legal status? Will the sun be tried for genocide should it knock out our power grids with a flare? I’m hesitant to muse any more because this is such a rich idea and I would much prefer to see what you all come up with. Go forth, and tell your pixelwife that you love her.
Feed the Machine: Cyclops Power
Read this article before proceeding. Growing up, I didn’t read comics, but that doesn’t mean I was unaware of comics. I knew the rudimentary figures of comic book lore. My favorite superhero, however, was Cyclops. How cool would it be to shoot laser beams out of your eyes! Getting into the genres more, laser beam eyes became more common and always cool. Well my little morsels of wundament, prepare for a whole new era of lasek surgery. Scientists have successfully engineered a cell to produce green laser light. The shape of the cell even acts like a lens. Now let’s begin imagining the possibilities. What if a layer of these cells could be spread over the lens of the eyeball? Could we get Cyclops like powers? Would it result in our blindness? Could we use our laser eyes for other abilities, like reading data off of CDs and DVDs from afar? Could we use them to see in different wavelengths, measure temperature or speed, etch metal? This is probably the most fantastic of the uses for green, lasing cells. I think a far more plausible and interesting use would be to replace the biochemical neurological system of a human being with a bio-optical system. How fast would we be able to think and move with reactions at the speed of light? Would we glow whenever a synapse would fire? Would we need brains that wrote to disc? Would we need to sit perfectly still for the signals to line up? Would we cook our organs? A hallmark of SF is the weaponization of technology. If we packed enough of these cells into a mold and had them lase at once or in sequence (for wave reinforcement), could we create a viable weapon? Could we code a bacteria with this lasing protein, encode it with an optical virus, and drop it into war zones to make enemy combatants peaceful? Will technology go the biologic way or will it stay artificial? That’s the question I want you to weigh in on this week. –Adam
Feed the Machine: Viral Time
Welcome to Feed the Machine, my weekly column for this ne’er-too-oft visited corner of the Interweb. Here, I take a science article and twist it to make science fictional ideas that you all can have, free of charge. For the first installment, read this article called “Viral Time” by Carl Zimmer on the Long Now blog. Oh, and if you don’t follow the Long Now blog, drop their RSS feed into your reader. SF is all about the future, and these are some of the most forward thinking people on the planet. From this article, a few ideas can be easily divined just from a preliminary skim. “One French scientist revived from our genome a functioning 2-million-year-extinct virus just by deducing the original code from the current variety in that stretch of DNA.” What other dormant viruses exist within our DNA? Are they helpful or hurtful? Do they have any commercial use, like creating ultracapacitors or ethanol? If the code for a unique virus that split oxygen and hydrogen from water was found on my DNA, could I sell vials of my skinflakes to venture capitalists? But these are all rather too easy. Let’s dig deeper into the article. For me, the last line of the article is the most intriguing. ”One hypothesis is that viruses took primordial RNA and generated DNA to better protect the genes. They might have created life as we know it, a long time ago.” Does this mean that virus’ are our god(s)? If this were proven to be true, would we worship the almighty Ur-virus, and hope to be saved from the Luciphage? Would churches be decorated with double helices instead of crucifixes? Where would bacteria fit into all of this? What could we do if we found the ur-virus? Could we send ten thousand samples on microprobes into interstellar space, hoping to bring about an intergalactic panspermia in a few billion years? Is this how we began? Would the panspermers be our gods then? But I’m neglecting the “it” genres of greenpunk and mundane SF. “ Every day half of all the bacteria in the oceans are killed by phages.” What if this changed by a single percentage point up or down? How would life on earth differ? What if earth became a dustbowl, would someone start impregnating any virus or bacteria they came across with photosynthesizing capabilities to try and restart the carbon cycle? How would that change the earth” And for you transhumanists out there. “About 8 percent of our genome—some 100,000 elements—comes from viruses, and some of those genes now work for us (enabling the mammalian placenta, for instance). “ What if all of the virus-given genome was removed from a prenatal human? How would they differ from us? Could they survive? What if we tweaked this virus code to give us latent abilities? What if humans became biofuel or hydrogen factories, only to be decanted by those who hold the rights to their genes? One last thing. Viruses seem to live outside the fourth dimension, like some metabeing. They can die in microseconds or live in ice for millions of years. The efficiency with which they go about life is astounding. This begs the question: would a sufficiently advanced civilization, who have outgrown their world and want to explore the universe, model their interstellar body type on viruses? A small, dormant protein shell housing a few million bioquantum bits. How many quintillions of beings could be transported across the galaxy in a slowship the size of the space shuttle? Why doesn’t time matter for a virus? What about it allows it to live the way it does? I’m doing this all stream of conscious like. These were the first ideas to pop into my head, generated by the smallest lifeforms we know of. Imagine what would happen if you sat down with the article for ten minutes and just thought. Hugo award, anyone? –Adam
