Yautja Encyclopedia: Science

Cloaking Devices

When light strikes a surface, some of that light is reflected, some of it is absorbed, and some of it transmitted (i.e., passes through). Most of the visible light that strikes a sheet of glass, for example, is transmitted, and thus glass is transparent.

Cloaking devices must somehow warp space so that incident light rays bend around the object instead of being reflected from it.

Optics is the science of light. Reflection and refraction are the principal means of focusing light with mirrors and lenses. Optical scientists often consider beams of light as bundles of linear rays. Refraction changes the direction of a light ray by virtue of its shape and the fact the speed of light within glass is different from the speed of light in air or on a vacuum.

Yautja technology presumably used some kind of force field to bend light around an object in such a way that it was impossible to see the object itself. A combination of geometry and special materials may help to render these objects virtually invisible to radar. Composite materials and special coatings in the ship's fuselage and wings absorb much of an incoming radar wave.

Special "electrochromic" paints change optical properties with applications of electric currents. Like a chameleon, an aircraft with an electrochromic paint job could be programmed to take the color of the sky or treetops, for example, rendering the plane very hard to see in daylight. Combined with cloaking devices, such aircraft would be extremely difficult to detect visually or by radar.

A Japanese scientist developed a coat which appears to make the wearer invisible. (Original information from AnaNova.) The illusion was part of a demonstration of optical camouflage technology at Tokyo University. It is the brainchild of Professor Susumu Tachi who is in the early stage of research he hopes will eventually make camouflaged objects virtually transparent. It's hoped the technology will be useful for surgeons frustrated their own hands and surgical tools can block their view of operations and pilots who wish cockpit floors were transparent for landings.

Interstellar Travel

Scientists are seriously looking at concepts such as wormholes, space-time distortions and space drives to achieve interstellar travel. This requires scientific breakthroughs on three fronts: propulsion (specifically propellant mass), speed and energy. Although we do not yet know if these breakthroughs can be achieved, we at least know how to begin making the progress to find out. In a sense, interstellar travel is already happening. The Pioneer 10 and Voyager 1 spacecraft, both launched in the 1970's, have travelled more than 6.5 billion miles from Earth and are on their way out of the solar system. The real question is when it will be fast and easy enough to send the first mission.

The first challenge is propulsion. Unlike aircraft that can thrust against the air, rockets need to bring along their own propellant to push against. By blasting propellant out the back, rockets push spacecraft. The problem is quantity. Propellant needs rise exponentially with increase in payload, destination, or speed. This assumes you are using chemical engines like those on the space shuttle. Even with nuclear fission rockets, ion propulsion, or antimatter concepts, the situation gets better, but not by much. Ideally, we would want to use a space drive that does not need any propellant. A few researchers have begun studying how to achieve this, searching for something else in space to push against, perhaps by pushing against the very structure of space-time itself, or by finding a way to modify gravitational or inertial forces.

Another challenge is energy. Even if we had a warp drive, it would still require a lot of energy.

FTL (Faster Than Light) travel

Traveling faster than the speed of light. The exact definition of FTL travel is traveling from A to B in less time than light, which travels at light speed. Light speed is the physical constant which represents the speed of energy waves and massless particles in vacuum, which is 299,792.458 km/s. Our nearest neighboring star is about 26 trillion miles away. That is more than four years away at the speed of light.

Einstein's theory of special relativity has frustrated scientists and science fiction fans ever since 1905. His theory of relativity established the speed limit and revealed that just approaching the speed of light causes horrible problems. If the speed of light forms a barrier, and we cannot travel at the speed of light, then we can never travel faster than the speed of light.

Current technology cannot reach FTL travel because there is no way to protect against the enormous G-forces that occur while the ship accelerates or decelerates.

As a spaceship travels closer and closer to the speed of light, the ship's length becoming shorter and shorter. The clocks tick slower and slower. And the ship's mass becomes greater and greater, requiring more and more energy to accelerate a bit closer to the ship's goal. Slowly the ship gains speed, expending huge quantities of energy. As the ship approaches the speed of light, it becomes infinitely massive, requiring infinite energy to accelerate that last tiny bit. The ship never make it. Because of this, only objects that have no mass, such as light, can travel at the speed of light. We cannot.

Einstein discovered this limitation when he realized that the speed of light will always be measured to be the same, no matter what the observer's speed is relative to the light. The only way for the velocity of light to remain constant is for your measurements of distance and time to change.

The Warp drive idea is something like a moving sidewalk. By expanding space-time behind the starship and contracting it in front, a segment of space-time moves and carries the ship with it. The starship itself still moves slower than light within its space-time, but when you add the "moving sidewalk" effect, the apparent motion exceeds the speed of light. Thus, you circumvent the light speed limit.

Suspended Animation

Many animals hibernate during winter months, waiting out the freezing winter months in underground burrows until the first thaw of spring. During hibernation, the animal's blood pressure, heart, and respiration rates and glandular activity drop to extremely low levels, allowing the animal to survive for months on whatever body fat and fluids they've stored before entering the dormant state.

Some animals literally freeze in winter, including certain species of frogs. When the frogs thaw out in early spring, their hearts begin beating to pump blood into their extremities, gradually warming the rest of their bodies until they are completely revived.

Cryonic suspension involves freezing the body in liquid nitrogen. It is a (currently non-standard) medical technique for attempting to prevent the permanent cessation of life in individuals on the brink of death. A person who is cryonically suspended cannot be revived by current medical technology. The freezing process does too much damage. The reason for performing a cryonic suspension is the belief that science, technology, and society will advance to the point where revival of the person is both possible and desirable.

The problem with freezing human tissue is that water, unlike virtually all other substances, actually expands by a small amount on freezing. This has the effect of rupturing cells (which are composed mostly of water) when they freeze, creating massive amounts of cellular damage. Frostbite is an example of the kind of damage cells experience when they are frozen.

Frogs that hibernate in a frozen state appear to circulate a "natural antifreeze" agent (in insects this agent is called glycerol), consisting of special kinds of proteins that prevent ice crystals from growing to the point that they disrupt cells.

Terraforming

"Terraforming" is a word invented by science fiction writer Jack Williamson.

There is nowhere beyond Earth, as far as we know, where we will find environments in which unprotected humans can survive. In the future, we shall have to decide whether to leave a planet unaltered or modify it to make it closer to that of Earth. With technologies that have been the subject of much study, terraforming would be feasible for some of the bodies in the solar system. Environmentalists, pointing at the mistakes humans have made on Earth, will have much to protect in this venture.

In Aliens, the planet LV-426 (Acheron) was in the midst of being terraformed for human colonization in 2130-40's when an Alien infestation occurred. In Total Recall, a giant corporation tries to prevent terraforming from happening on Mars with an elaborate cover-up. In Red Planet, they also try to terraform Mars in hopes to relocate there from a dying Earth.

Artificial Gravity / Weightlessness

People have long been concerned with the problems that might arise during prolonged space travel. A mission to Mars could last up to three years, and many biomedical problems could compromise such a mission. One of these problems, known even to Jules Verne when he wrote From the Earth to The Moon in 1685 (written almost a century before the flights of the astronauts), was weightlessness. Because this condition cannot be reproduced for more than a few seconds on Earth, no one knew how the human body would react to it.

We do not have any way to create artificial gravity. Generating artificial graviton particles is imaginable, but there is no way to say how it might be done.

One solution was to make the living quarters of the spaceship a slowly revolving drum, so the centrifugal force gave the occupants the sensation of weight, allowing them to walk on a cylindrical "floor".

Stanley Kubrik showed this in 2001: A Space Odyssey's orbiting Hilton Hotel. Babylon 5 also makes use of this revolving drum.

There may be long-term effects about which almost little is yet known. Humans have lived in space now for longer than a year, and indeed some astronauts have become addicted so addicted to weightlessness that they were reluctant to return.

Space Elevators

Future technologies will make space travel no more expensive than atmospheric flight. The real cost, in terms of energy, of putting a human into space will be a few hundred dollars, not the present millions of dollars. One way of approaching this target would be to use a "space elevator," which would lift people into space using cables lowered from satellites or space stations in geostationary orbit.

This concept was developed in 1960 by the Russian engineer Y. N. Artsutanoc. Sir Arthur C Clarke describes this in his novel The Foundations of Paradise.

Androids/Synthetic Humans

Mechanical life form. Appears, reacts, thinks, learns and acts like a human. The word robot became the popular term for human-like machines when the Czech author Karel Capek used it in his play RUR: Rossum's Universal Robots. Capek's brother, Josef, suggested the term for the enslaved automatons described in the play; "robot" derives from a Czech word for indentured servant.

Androids are robots that are crafted to look and act like human beings, presumably to ease their use and acceptance among people.

Could we someday build robots as intelligent as Ash or Bishop or Call? Can we make robots that see, hear, and speak, like them? Recent advances in robotics suggest that it may someday be possible to build an artificial device that looks and acts like a human. The principle challenge in creating a "thinking machine" is crafting a computer that somehow rises above its programming.

Computers and programs capable of some degree of learning - a sign of intelligence - have been developed. An important research organization for robotics is the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. Creating Star Trek's Mr. Data would be a historic feat of cybernetics, and right now it's very controversial in computer science whether it can be done. Maybe a self aware computer can be put into a human-sized body and persuaded to live sociably with us and our limitations. That is a long way ahead of our computer technology, but maybe not impossible.

Can we create robots that have their own emotions, and why would we want to? Can robots detect our emotions? Can robots express emotions?

In some science fiction, emotional computers and robots usually end up wreaking havoc. Ash, in following his mission, is willing to kill his crew mates, or allow them to die to ensure success of that mission. In others, they are exiled for them. In Artificial Intelligence, an android named David, no matter how hard he tries, cannot win the love of his mother. It is a revelation that breaks his heart and sends him on a desperate journey to evade his tormentors and somehow make himself into a real boy.

Most people believe robots should be rational, logical, and scientific, unaffected by emotion. Yet some scientists argue that while too much emotion can cause irrational behavior, so can too little.

Researchers have spent a lot of time trying to pinpoint the different sections in the brain where abstract thinking and emotional responses occur. Yet what scientists are now realizing is that most functions of the brain tends to involve both logic and emotion. The systems work in concert, intertwined, information constantly passing between them. Emotions do not intrude on reason; they are actually a critical part of it. Perhaps computers have been unable to reason intelligently because they are missing the equivalent of the "emotional" part of a brain.

Emotions could potentially aid in the decision-making process, associating certain options with good or bad "gut" feelings, and giving the computer a sense of the importance of various factors. Emotions could help computers to realize certain actions or decisions lead to negative results, and to avoid repeating those mistakes in the future. Emotions could help robots set priorities, create motivations, make decisions, focus their attention, and communicate more helpfully with humans.

Bionics

People have made use of simple prosthetic devices for centuries, but they cannot be connected to the human nervous system yet - the prosthetic must be designed in such a way that muscles can manipulate the prosthetic to perform the desired function.

The science of bionics seeks to create replacements for lost limbs, organs, and tissues that are fully integrated with connecting tissue and nerves.

Artificial eyes featuring retinas constructed out of light sensitive CCD chips have been developed in medical research labs. If the electrical signals from CCD's can be routed into the optic nerve, someday we can provide sight to the blind.

By 1998, researchers have created electrically conducting fibers several microns in diameter that can be grafted into human nerve cells. Bionic devices will someday be developed that responds to electrical impulses traveling down the nerve into the artificial component.

Cloning

DNA is the master molecule of life. Everything that a cell does - from basic reproduction to the kinds of chemical compounds it manufactures - is controlled by DNA. Chromosomes are composed of DNA molecules and supporting histrone molecules. The cells of human beings contain 46 chromosomes.

Genes are segments of chromosomes that "code" for the production of various protein molecules, which in turn form the tissues, organs, and other structures that make up living organisms.

A sheep named Dolly made headlines when she became the first mammal to be successfully cloned. A clone is a genetic duplicate of an individual. Before dolly, most geneticists suspected every cell of an individual's body, the bone cells to the skin cells, contained all the DNA necessary to make a complete duplicate of an individual. Dolly proved that this was a scientific fact.

Yet, how much of human personality is determined by genetics, and how much is shaped by the environment? Studies of identical twins (who share the same genes) who have separated at birth, or shortly afterwards, seem to show that many behavioral traits are inherited through genes. Yet recent neurological studies have convincingly demonstrated that the environment in which a child grows up has a profound influence on the development of the brain, which in turn influences intelligence, emotional development, and creative abilities.