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