How to Join the X-Men

is one that came in from faceback right. Derek Barrows asked if we might explore a certain topic that was of interest to him, right right, a certain super heroic topic sort of somewhat yea, Yeah. He wanted to know if, um, we can talk about the science behind X Men, which is a tall order. Well, it's especially tall because the X Men is fantasy. Yeah, I mean, there is no neetic modification that will allow you to turn your body into fire or or adamantium like steel or something. It's

pretty unlikely at any rate. Yeah, it's it's way more fantasy than science fiction. But we could look at it from a sort of almost their perspective, where we say, okay, for each individual X Man, X X person, member of the member of the X correction of X X man is totally X. Yeah. Each individual member of Professor X is elite. Uh force of school and women School School for Mutants. Yeah, I mean there are away person. Sounds like you have passed on. Okay, I'm sorry, I'm still

for each individual X man. Is there a way that we could use science and technology to somewhat mimic this person's supermutant powers in the real world? So, so, is there a way that such a power could be achievable either through some sort of alteration of a person, right, so, like cybernetics or genetic modification, right, or just simply using technology to mimic that power. So maybe a suit of some sort that can mimic one of the X Men's powers.

And as it turns out, another big challenge here that Derek has given us is the fact that the X Men happens to be a group that has had a lot of different characters in it. Ah. Yeah, there's a few characters in the Marvel universe. I don't know if you guys know this. Um Yeah, yeah, like a few, as in like a few thousand and and a good percentage of them. I've been in the X Men at some point or another. Yeah, And for that reason, we're going to need to split this into a couple of podcasts.

So today we are just focusing on the characters that I just recently found out where the quote original team, yeah, way back when the comic book started, right, I'm going to have to make a confession right here to the fans. Please don't hate me for this, but I'm sort of a casual X Men. Oh that's that's okay, Joe. I'm not going to call you a fake geek girl. It's

all right. I am a fake geek girl. So but but in other words, like if you only knew the X Men from say the film versions, then you have some of the cartoons right right, But you you I'm just giving an example, Joe, not saying you specifically, but if you out there in the listener land are only familiar with X Men through those methods, are those those forms of media? Then you know you might think, oh, Wolverine, Wolverine was always part of the X Men, of course, No,

not not part of the original X Men. So you're breaking my heart. But we will get to Wolverine in the next podcast. Along with some of our other sorted, sorted, assorted and sundry favorites. Yeah, some of them are sorted, I guess, like like Nightcrawler, one of my favorites not not in the original X Men. Will we will be covering Nightcrawler in the second episode. So who will we be covering today? It's got to be Cyclops, right, absolutely,

Scott Summers has been there since the beginning. Okay, I gotta raise my hand and have a question here. Maybe it's because I'm a casual fan that I don't understand this, but I've always had a question about how Cyclops works. When he does his little I beam thing. Yeah, it's kind of a big I beam thing. Really, it's not not that okay, So sure he presses a little button on his head and a huge, gigantic beam comes out of his face. Hit somebody knocks him back twenty ft

across the room. I'm confused about what that beam is because it looks, on one hand like it should be a sort of a laser or some kind of energy weapon, which would seem to have a kind of burning or irradiating effect. But instead, if you judge just by what it does to the enemy, it seems to be more concussive, like it's a it's a force knocking them back. Yeah, Joe, it sounds to me like you're not familiar with concussive force beams. Nope, probably because they only exist in the

comic books. Yeah. No, it's it's a form of energy. Many of the types of energy that are found in comics, and many of the materials that are found in comics are completely made up. They're made up in order to make the comic exciting, and you know, they they kind of makes sense. They're if they're logically consistent within the context of the comic book, but once you take it out of that, you think, how is that going to

be possible? I have my own theory about this. Also, it seemed that in in comic books, especially in comic books and cartoons that are more aimed at a younger audience, it might be kind of weird if one of your main heroes is constantly burning people alive. Gross, It's much nicer to just kind of push them. It's like you might as well have just kicked them really hard. It kind of kind of falls into the same category of watching the old g I. Joe cartoons and everyone's just

shooting blue and red light at each other. That doesn't seem actually cause damage to anything other than vehicles, and it doesn't matter be as as soon as the vehicles damage. You see a little parachute um. But okay, this concussive force, I'm sorry to get back to it. Right, And it looks like a laser, because that looks cool, right, right? I mean, how are you going to depict it? Right?

I mean you clearly you wouldn't want it to be invisible, because then it would just be some guys staring really hard at someone else and they suddenly fly backward and you think, what's happening is that telekinesis or so obviously it needs to be exciting to the to the reader. It has to be something that is going to really grab the imagination. If we're talking about real world correlatives,

it's most going to resemble probably either shock waves or lasers. Right, That's that's the closest we can say, one based upon the result that we see when Scott Summers blast somebody, and one that's based more on the appearance of it as it's depicted in the comic Boos, right, and shock waves, like like sound waves could hypothetically be used in a in a weaponized way, like sure, yeah, I mean sound is a physical force, right, This is a physical type

of of phenomenon. So it's that movement of particles really yeah. Yeah, And it doesn't necessarily have to just be through air. It can be through any medium, right, So sound travels physically through a medium. Um, right, well, yeah, you have to have you have to have something there. I mean, I think about me. I think of a vacuum is an absence of a medium. But but that's fair. Um, I'm thinking physical medium. So if you have a physical medium of some sort, whether it's gas, liquid, solid, sound

can move through it. It moves through at different speeds depending upon the density and the nature of that material. Uh. And it can have enough of a force to to knock you over. I mean, say, the sort of thing is just the expansion of air as well, if you are causing air to expand very quickly. But for example, with a supersonic jet, you guys may have heard a sonic boom if a supersonic jet passes overhead. The really cool thing is that as long as that jet is

traveling at a supersonic speed. It is generating a sonic boom. It's called a boom blanket, right, right, It's not just the single moment the thing that you hear isn't the single moment of the of the plane crossing the sound barrier. It's it's a continual thing that that everyone along the plane's path is going to hear. Yeah, if you could travel on the ground at the same rate as the plane flying overhead, you would constantly hear it, plus you'd

be generating your own um. But at any rate, Uh, it's it's really you know, the kind of thing that if you are close enough to it, you could get feel an impact from that shock wave. However, directing it at a specific location is a little more tricky. You can use acoustic waves and in interesting ways. There's some acoustic levitation that's really awesome. There are a lot of really cool examples of this, but we don't necessarily have a truly weaponized form of it where you could direct

it at a person to knock them off their feet. Um. Now, I'm sure people have been at things like concerts or whatever where they can feel that that percussive force whenever the era is moving through due to a really low base. It it's a little different, Okay, But I have another question I want to introduce here, which is that it's not a machine on cyclops head that is producing this effect. It seems to be that his eyes are naturally producing

the effect. His eyes are doing it all the time, and the only thing that keeps him from just shooting these concussive beams at everyone constantly is that little ruby visor that he's wearing. So when he pushes the button, he's essentially removing a filter right right, or opening an aperture or something like a shutter, which would be really tricky if it were real. Because I mean, so so this this follows his gaze, right, it's coming out wherever

he's looking with his eyeballs. Yeah, so if he guess, I mean, technically just seems to come straight out of his eyes. So I don't know if it necessarily needs to be where his uh, where where he's looking, as opposed to where his face is facing pointing. Yeah. Well, although if you wanted to base it on on eye movement, like a web and like that, you could certainly track um uh, the the user's eye movement using a pretty simple app. Actually, eye tracking hardware exists today. I mean,

we can already do this. And so if you did want to create a machine that would maybe shoot a laser wherever you're looking, I think that's totally doable. You can get a pair of glasses that track your pupils and then see, Okay, I just glanced at Jonathan's shoulder, and now burn that. Now I just glanced at his

top of his head? Do that? Now you're a mean man, first of all, First of all your mean Second of all, um, will you would be able to remove any kind of aiming issue you might have between what you are seeing and how you are able to, like your your hand eye coordination, that part is no longer now it's just eye coordination. Right. There is a downside, not coordination. Yea, there's a downside exactly. There's no coordination because it's only

one thing. The downside. The biggest downside would be any laser that's going to be sufficiently powerful enough to cause that kind of damage is also going to be bright as to cause permanent eye damage for you, the user. Um, if you've ever looked into any of the consumer lasers that are powerful enough to set fire to something simple like a piece of paper that's got dark color on it,

which is slightly easier to ignite than say white paper. Ah, any laser that's in the visible spectrum is going to be so bright at that power that it could cause permanent damage at least temporary damage. So and a head mounted laser weapon that is completely commanded by your eyes may not be the best choice. Okay, Yeah, that's convinced me. Essentially. I think any weapon where it's shooting from your face is probably not the best way to go. Yeah, I

wouldn't really face mount many weapons. I mean, I mean if it's even if it's just a concussive beam and not a bright laser, you're you're going to have I'm sure some kind of kick back from it. And that's a very good point. You just have black eyes all the time, it would be really bad. You guys, I've been told that my face is already weaponized. So the kick back point is a good point because it also introduces the energy concern. Yes, I mean imagining that you

are you have something coming out of your eyes. Like even if we go to just the pure fantasy realm and say somehow you've got something coming out of your eyes. It's a directed energy weapon. Where's that energy coming from? I mean, you can't just create energy. You would have to somehow, I don't know. You'd have to have a

battery powering it very power. And if we're if we're going through the biological side, let's say that just taking the comic book and that somehow we were able to make Scott Summers appear here in wedding cakes in order to black Like, how how would you actually generate the energy necessary to I mean, I don't understand that at all. In the mutant universe, all the mutants. This doesn't just apply to two cyclops, but all the mutants who have any sort of energy based power, The energy has to

come from them right off off panel. They never stop eating. I guess so I likeel there's just a million twinkies, would be fantastic if you just saw like little food crumbs coming off the edge of the panels whenever, Like that's just when they're shoving food into their faces so that their metabolism can keep up and they can get the energy necessary. Yeah, that's a that's a legitimate point, and it's gonna be it's gonna be a legitimate point

for just about everyone we talk about. Okay, but let's just put all that aside and play fantasy here for a second. Let's just say you could have some kind of unlimited energy reserve in your body. Is there a way you actually could, you know, use your eyes to direct an energy beam because the eyes are sort of their input devices, not output devices, well most of the time. Um, Okay, I suppose that we might be able to devise some

kind of genetic upgrade. And and I'm real dubious about whether it's being an upgrade or not to to creator or install a kind of like tap at them lucidum in the human eye. Harry Potter spell, yes, no, um No, it's the it's the organ in many animals that creates like eye glow in low lights. So if you've ever been in a dark room with your cat and an alligator or an alligator, been in a dark room in an alligator a couple of times, okay, and their eyes

have been glow and all creepy at you. Yeah, or like raccoons, Lots of lots of animals have this thing, but humans do not. Um. It's a reflective layer that gives the eyeballs, um, rods and cones a second chance at at collecting light, so it helps the animals see better in the dark. So great for nocturnal animals. Super rad yes, um, and and humans do not in fact have it. If if you're thinking, but I've seen red eye in photos in lots of people, that is not

because of a tapitum lucidum. That is because of light reflecting off of the blood vessels in the back of our eyes. UM. So I guess you could say that what Scott has is like the most intense version of red eye imaginable, so intense that it's been magnified and

focused to phenomenal degree. Yeah, So so you know, maybe maybe that if you know, if if we put in some kind of tappa and lucidum um, and then combined that with some sort of really advanced micro lensing technology like contacts or nanobots or whatever, um, then then you could you could join forces with these things to to create something not entirely quite like eye lasers um, although the problem of getting them to shoot out of your eyes without also just burning your eyeballs from the inside

out would be a pretty major one. Not to mention it would be reliant upon light coming in as opposed to light emanating from you. This is reflecting. Maybe maybe there's some meadow materials that reflect more light than they take in. Okay, Okay, that's a that's a long stretch for that one is a very a very wonderful laur Lauren. But I'm going to say, for my money, I think the closest thing we could possibly get that we've talked about is just some kind of head mount a laser

that was guided by eye tracking software. Yeah. I think it's much safer as an external system. Yeah. And even then, you're not talking about like a wide beam as we see in the comic books. It would be a pinpoint, right unless you had some sort of splitter or whatever, in which case it's not going to have the punch that that a focused laser would. Okay, let's go on to one that I'm sure he's going to be much more plausible. Ice Man. Yeah. Yeah, So ice Man is

one of the original members. Um. He has powers include the ability to turn his body into ice, and yet he could still move around and function. He could also, depending upon the version you're reading, he could either generate ice, you know, as much as possible, or he could convert any sort of humidity or water in the area into ice. He could lower the temperature and use it to make ice. Now, wait, can he sort of like blast beams of cold he sort of blast beams of ice or or just projections

of ice. Yeah. Yeah, it's not so much it's not so much a cold beam as when he puts his hands out, then you see ice emanating from his hands, and exactly he can do. He can do crushed or cube. He's very popular at all the parties that the X Man that glacier ice stuff. Though he does. What he does is he does the thing where he makes a platform out of ice and then he essentially magically skates across it while generating it directly in front of himself.

And that's frozen. And I would say is very largely based on Ice Man, but better attitude. It's not magic. He's just a really good surfer. Yeah, NASA's silver surfer, by the way. But he's not mutant, so we're not going to talk about him. Okay, Well, at first glance, you might think, okay, maybe maybe something like this is possible because we have refrigeration technology and really good refrigeration technology.

We can we can create via technology extremely cold environments, like the environment meants that they have to uh that they have to use to test space telescope mirrors. Sure they send them into space, or these super super cooled environments that are getting close down to absolute zero, or the super cold environment that's necessary in order for something like large hadron collider to work. Yeah, we're super cooling uh,

semiconductors and superconductors. Okay, But the thing is about all of those is that humans aren't really supposed to hang out in those temperatures. Yeah, that's one. Don't do well in our body, you know. We we talked in our our episode about reanimating the dead about the problems with crayonics, and one of the big ones being the challenge of slowly uh lowering a person's body temperature in a in a series of efforts in order to get them to

the right temperature. And we still don't know that we could ever bring them back from that because our bodies aren't designed for that. We don't we don't do well. And our body temperature, once it goes down below a certain level, we're not so active anymore, right, Well, we're not just creatures that you can just freeze and thaw out. We we suffer cellular damage, right right. We we contain

a whole lot of water. Water expands when it freezes, which is terrific for for many physical properties of the planet Earth, but is really terrible for you. Yeah, so your parts of your body freeze. It's not just like you know, the meat that frozen your freezer and then you thaw it out and then basically it's still pretty much like meat. Live tissue doesn't work that way. It gets damaged and stuff happens to it that makes it not work. It's bad times. Now. Not all animals on

Earth are necessarily like that. For example, there are some fish, some water dwelling creatures that have genes that make their body tissues frost resistant in a way that ours aren't. And it's possible. I mean, you could say, well, we could create a transgenic human maybe maybe, yeah, possibly, because we we do that with toy dose. Right, There's there's some tomatoes that are frost resistant because they have this

fish gene. I don't know if those actually worked, but they tried to make ka I think in the I think in the nineties there was a company that tried to use uh these frost resistant fish genes to make tomatoes frost resistant, when, of course people freaked out because they were like, oh, no, fish tomatoes, it's Franken style, or it's going to be fish flavored tomatoes, which just shows a distinct misunderstanding of how genes work. Right. But so if if Bobby Drake got this fish transplant, he

might taste fishy. This is already already the best issue of X men I've ever heard of. Please continue. He was a transgenic human that was, you know, as an embryo, given a splice in from a fish gene that would allow parts of his body to freeze and then thaw out without the kind of tissue damage that a human would normally uh sustain. I don't know if that's really possible, but there's sort of one very far off maybe. Okay, but but that's just preventing our dear friend Bobby from

dying immediately upon activating his mutant powers. He doesn't get cold. He's the one guy in the movie Theaters. I don't know what you're complaining about. Okay, yeah, but the next problem here is that we don't have someone emanating cold yet um, and this this is really tricky, okay, because most of our bodily functions create heat as byproducts of their electrochemical and physical reactions, right right, it's a waste product, and so creating a mechanism by which a living body

would give off cold instead of heat. I mean, even considering that the cold and heat are technically relative. Um, something is colder or hotter than something else. But you don't have an absolute cold or hot right. Um, it's really biologically unlikely because it's just not the way that

metabolism works. You doesn't have some sort of organic heat ex change system that worked at an incredible level of efficiency and speed, and that doesn't really there's not an organic way of doing Yeah, you could be a you could be a heat sink. I guess, yeah exactly. I mean I think the problem we're getting to is that you don't really give off cold. Yeah, nothing gives off cold. You can, you can be a heat sink. And what's happening there is that you're colder than the things around you,

and you're pulling heat away from them. It's coming into you. So that's why an ice cube feels cold. It's not that it's giving your hand cold, it's that it's stealing heat from your hand, and so that it would be hard to direct something like that. I can't really and cold doesn't radiate the way heat does. Like you can have heat with infrared radiation. That's heat is radiation, That's exactly what it is. But but cold doesn't work that way.

And so the only way I can think that you can direct like a beam of cold would be to sort of a a cold substance like a cold gas or a cold liquid liquid nitrogen or something like that. So say something more like more like Mr Freeze does. Yeah. But then but then you're kind of getting away from the X Men idea and you're just saying like, well, okay, so I've got a gun hooked up to a tank full of liquid nitrogen on my back and I can squirt it at you. But that might be about as

close as we can get. Yeah. Yeah, Um, so I Iceman not one of the more likely ones we could translate in any meaningful way. Uh. If we move on to the next original member of the X Men, that would be Angel. Yeah, Warren Worthington, the third Angel. Okay, So in my casual X Men exposure, I was aware of Archangel, but never just Angel, same same, same dude. Yeah, I think something happened to him. Yeah, some there was

some kind of metal many things. Yeah, there's there's several different incarnations of Angel, including a blue metal winged version, and but the original one was a riginal and was a dude with wings who could also shoot stuff energy, vaguely defined energy from his hands. And um, so we've already kind of covered the energy thing, um because it was very similar to the concussive blast from from cyclops in a way. So you could put lasers on your hands.

But yeah, and keep in mind, keep in mind lasers also require quite a lot of energy, so you would have have to carry pretty heavy battery packs if you wanted to be able to shoot lasers from your hands, and that would be exhausting and uh and even then they would drain fairly quickly and you would end up with these these weights trapped your arms that don't actually do anything. Okay, Okay, so we've done lasers. Let's focus

on the wings, all right. So angels wings are on his back very much in the way that that a lot of mythological angels are, right, Yeah, with the wings are located behind like the shoulder blades, and then they can extend out to either side of the person um. So you know, birds have wings. If we put wings on a human like that, they'd just be able to fly. I mean, you just have to make them like long enough so that they'd be the same as, you know,

relatively speaking a ratio wise like a bird. Right. Well, you'd also have to hollow out the humans bones, lighten their entire physical structure, and give them a metabolism capable of producing energy to allow for flight, plus alter muscular structure and skeletal structures so that the muscles have something

to hold onto. And that would mean that we have brand new muscles that humans don't have currently because because wings on a bird that kind of corresponds to our arms, right sure, sure, So if you cut off your arms and attached wings to the to the same musculature, you might get around some of that. Maybe I would still think you'd have a problem with the fact that the human body I would guess it's too dense. I definitely

know some people are too dense. Birds fly not just because they have wings, but as you pointed out, because they have a very high surface area to mass ratio, and they've got their wings extended so they can get a lot of the you know, they can get a lot of that air flowing under them in the right way. Um, and they don't weigh very much. Yeah, when you when you increase the weight of a bird, you're cutting down

on its ability to fly. It's the same reason you see, Uh, like an airplane heavier than aircraft has to use a lot of energy to stay in the air. That's why they use so much fuel is that they've got to maintain these really fast speeds in order to to keep slamming enough air under the plane and stay aloft. When when you've got a heavy, dense object, your energy requirements

quickly go out of control. Well, there are multiple things that would have to happen in order for a human to even remotely be close to being able to fly like a bird. Right. So one is that putting the wings on the back is a no go. That would be that would require a type of motion that is

not really conducive to flying. You might be able to have gliding if you had a large enough wingspan, um, but you would not be able to to fly like a bird because your your limbs would not be located in the right place for you to get the correct kind of of stroke you would need in order to fly. So wings on the back that doesn't work. You would have to have them located more or less where our arms are now. You would need to have the solid density problem. And like you were saying, Lauren, that it

takes a lot of energy to fly. But you know, if if we could fix that energy problem, um, you know, increase the human metabolism and circulation and respiration to the point where our muscular skeletal systems could in fact handle flight, that would be super rad for for other reasons too, like like look at look at bats, which are the only mammal which truly flies instead of merely gliding, although I'd say that gliding is pretty cool on its own.

UM and there they're immune systems because of their higher metab babilisms are really for serious there so excellent. It's um all that extra bodily heat like they run up above a hundred degrees like around like a hundred and four when they're active. UM means that they're basically inhospitable to most bacteria and and viruses that are really terrible for us. And I'm sure that bacteria viruses would evolve over time if if they didn't have, say, us to

make delicious snacks out of. But but that could be really cool. I wonder if that has anything to do with why bats are often a reservoir for disease that can be spread to other animals. They think that's it exactly. They actually think that, um, that a bola probably originated in bats, and that um, when a bat has something as as deadly for humans as a bola, it's like it's like the flu. To us, it's like a common cold. Um. But but they're but they're able able to uh to

host to be reservoirs for those kind of deadly deadly viruses. Um. And and as human civilization is encroaching on their territory, they're spreading. They're spreading the viruses too. There are farm animals or to us. Okay, so that's true. Maybe we could genetically engineer humans to to be capable of flight. I mean, that seems pretty pretty far out there, but not not impossible. I think at that point would require

systemic changes. You couldn't call them a human anymore. Yeah, I mean, yeah, you know, because the just the changes alone in the circulatory and respiratory systems would make them look very different from us. Sure, but the question is do we even need to worry about this because we have the ability to fly, We just need machines to

help us do it. Right, We got these things called planes and helicopters and gyrocopters and all sorts of stuff that we can use to, yeah, to to get around if we wanted to, whether it's recreationally or we actually need to get from point A to point B. I guess the thing that's appealing about having wings like Angel instead of like having a small aircraft is something about agility and uh that you're just more mobile, like you wouldn't have to like get in the plane. It's an

ultimate expression of freedom. It's the same sort of freedom that having your own car represents. The American dream. Yeah, it's the jet pack dream. You could literally go wherever whenever you wanted because you had the means of transportation as part of you. So I can certainly see where the appeal is. And uh, you know the classic if you had a choice between two superpowers, one's invisibility, one's flight,

which do you go with? I'm a I'm a flight guy, so I mean, I totally get it from that perspective, but uh yeah, there we've seen some kind of cool developments in wingsuit technology that would give you more of a flight like experience without having anything else strapped to you. So these are suits that end up increasing the surface area of a person. Takes a lot of skill to

actually use one effectively. Um, I've heard of some pretty uh, pretty harrowing experiences with people who hadn't really had a lot of experience with this sort of stuff and they could go into a role and that's pretty bad. But these are always used in tandem with parachutes, and the idea is that it slows your level of descent. You start falling vertically at a slower speed while still maintaining your horizontal movement, so you can um continue to move

forward and fly, but you're also falling. You're not you're not generating enough lift for you to to go up to ascend it all. So eventually you have to deploy your parachute essentially at the same altitude that you would if you were doing a normal jump. It's just that you're able to move forward quite a bit in that same amount of of vertical space, and so it's it's cool. And then if you wanted to do something really nifty, you could attach a motor to yourself and have a

jet attack wingsuit. Could you guys see about the guy who flew around the Alps with us? He didn't did it an eight minute flight with a jet pack suit, and it was pretty awesome And it looks like a superhero flying around, albeit a superhero is not going to be a whole lot of use once he hits the ground because his suit is kind of bulky. But yeah, that it was really neat to watch, and that's something that's a possibility. But that's about as close as we're

going to get to Angel's abilities. Okay, how about we move on to another one. Okay, yeah, the big blue fur ball, Well, okay, you're talking about Beast, but in the original comics, he was not blue or a furball. He was kind He's kind of a squat dude who looked a little kind of like a feline, features a little bit of a feeling. He was almost almost more guerrilla ish. I think in the originals, I guess, I guess I'm thinking of the original beat. Yeah, Yeah, no, no no, Hank,

Hank McCoy a doctor, Hank McCoy, pardon me. Um had physical proportions along the lines of of like a non human great ape, like a like a gorilla. He had the longer arms, the larger hands, and larger, more dexterous feet. That the fur and cat like fee cheers, and physical resilience and wall climbing and all of those other powers were due to various secondary mutations, depending on which comics you were reading at the time. Yeah, he was Um.

He was just kind of strong and smart. Yeah, which was you know, they didn't dream as big, I guess in that first in that first run. But of course the story about his mutation is that it continued on that that what you saw in those original comics wasn't the the full maturation of his mutation something else? Yeah, well it was usually do I think to to his own tinkering in one way or another. So the question there is could we really make a human being be

similar to to the beast. Part of this is of course, again a look at changing the actual physiology of a human, like if you're talking about UM, you know, altering the ratio of how long an armspan is that kind of stuff? Uh, you know, of course there are people who are born with various mutations where their arms might be longer than what would be normal for a person of that frame, or maybe within the norm I should say, as opposed

to normal. That as its own logal, you know, like some some of those some of the Olympic athletes, for example, have have bodies that just happened to be extremely well suited to whatever. Right. Yeah, you can see some swimmers who have really long arms that are helps them in their uh, in their sport. Um. Designing that genetically might not be an impossibility in the future. It's not something

we can do even remotely right now. But it could be that with a greater understanding of genetics and ability to alter them, that we could in fact start to engineer people to have better physical abilities and better physical resilience. Well, if you're talking about making someone more like a guerrilla, I mean it seems inherently easier. I mean, I'm not a geneticist, obviously it seems inherently easier to make someone

more like a close genetic relative of their species. Well, I think no matter, I don't know that we would ever get to like a transgenic approach, though, um, I think it would be more likely we would identify the genes responsible for certain development in human beings and then tweak them as opposed to take take you know, a

biomimicry approach, although that I guess it's a possibility. It's just that the genetics of an ape and the genetics of a human are have enough differences where I'm not sure that that's the right way to go, but I don't know. Yeah, yeah, And and the strength scientists think in in great apes is not only due to their

to their limb proportions and and and muscular skeletal systems. Okay, um, you know they are much stronger than humans like like reports vary, but it's at least twice as strong upper body wise at any rate. And and some of it, researchers suspect has to do with their neural makeup, especially in the spine. Um that the idea goes that humans have a lot of motor neurons in our spines, which gives us really good fine motor control and really good endurance.

Like we can we can run really fast, and we can type on a keyboard when we get there but it makes it really difficult for us to coordinate all of our muscles in in the kind of bursts of strength that we see in aims. That's really interesting. Yeah, And if you're talking about the sort of strength that you see in the comics where Beast is able to do truly superhuman feats, we would also be limited by

just the fragility of our bodies. Right, I mean, there's some things that you're not going to be able to do because it would it would injure you to do so. Right, I'm reminded of I think it was a Saturday Night Live skit actually, where the skit was that there was a weightlifter who was going to lift an enormous amount

of weights. And so it's like one of the SNL guys in a suit that's made to look supermulky, sort of like the old Hans and Fronds stuff, and he stands up at both arms rip off because they're still holding onto the because the white was too and he just looks disappointed. He's not he's not he's not screaming

in pain. He's just like, oh man, But uh, you know, sort of the same sort of thing is the sense that you know you there, we be limited by our own bodies, not just in the capacity of strength we have, but how much how much weight our body could actually support. It would be It would be a lot of genetic tinkering to to bring all of those factors together. Um. His his intelligence is also partially a mutation. Um. And and that you know, we've done episodes, whole episodes before

on how we might make ourselves smarter. Yeah, we're getting into sort of Gattica territory with this stuff too. Write this idea of being able to tweak ourselves through genetic manipulation to have the best us that we can be right, right, And there are a lot of questions that come up

with oh so many ethical questions. I mean, because mostly this wouldn't be stuff that we could do to ourselves, but due to the next generation of embryos that would be fusing with and so and beyond that, you have the question of if becomes available, who does it become available to. So even if you eventually say, yeah, this is something we should do, then you then you have the question of who should we do it too. And

if it's not everyone, that's a big problem. I think we should just completely avoid the question of whether we should actually do this to an Okay, we're playing in fantasy world here, this is the X Men. It will be another episode. I don't think we should turn anybody into beast or angel, right, But if we're talking about the ability to boost someone's physical and mental abilities, then it becomes a little more tricky. Right. We're not We're

not saying turn them into this comic book character. We're saying things like, can we help this person be healthier and smarter? And that's where it starts to sneak in and get tricky. Okay, I I agree with both of you. Um, but hey, you guys, I want to talk about about for. Please do I'm a bald man. I want to hear about this. Do we get blue fur back? Now? I don't want a beast that looks like a person. Yeah, yeah, No, no, we can. I mean you want for you can totally

get for. Okay, we've we have absolutely isolated the genes and various medications and steroid treatments that are responsible for hypertrichosis a k A werewolf syndrome a k A being really hairy. So this would be blue dye and you're there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, these are you know, you probably heard about stories of folks who have suffered from this who had uh then ended up leveraging it or having it leveraged for them for in a circuit side shows. Yeah. Yeah, the wolf

boy syndrome. That's pretty much what we're talking about here. Yeah. Yeah, And so so that that's hella possible, and and there's and you know, there's already people in the in the body mod community who are making themselves through through plastic surgery and implants of various kinds, look more feline. So so the future is now, yeah, there, there's definitely the body modification part. If you want to look at least as far as features go, like the beast, then there's

at least the possiblity you could do that. I mean, the the disproportionate arms and legs would be a little different. Now, that's not something you can easily alter, but the other features certainly totally and you can get those little glasses. Okay, all right, enough about beasts. I think we should move on to the last couple, which we're sort of going

to pair together. I think it makes sense because their their powers are so similar to one another, right, which is Jean Gray and Professor X. Now I know these two, and I want to start right off the bat by saying something that might be a little surprising, which is I think maybe out of all of these something like the telepathic powers of Jane Gray and Professor X are some of the most technologically plausible in the real X men kind of sense. And let me explain what I

mean by that. I don't believe in psychics and stuff like that. You know that you're born with the ability to reach into someone's mind and see their past. But Joe, we only use ten per one of our brains. Don't go down oka enough, Okay, okay, No. I want to talk about the way that we have already learned that brain signals can be interpreted by computers and vice versa, and using technology as a sort of middleman, you can have brain to brain communication and brain to brain control.

We've already seen this where there have been experiments where humans have been able to control the bodies of animals through brain computer interfaces. Did you see about this? I did not, Like a like a human wired up through a brain computer interface can by thinking, control the muscles in a rat's body, like make a rat move its tail. Interesting.

It's kind of similar to it to the way that um some of the pros species are working these days, where if if they if they wire it up to your to your skull, you can you can control and an arm press thattic example, with your brain. Now, if you imagine continually refining our approach to reading and interpreting brain signals through computer interfaces, you can totally see how someone might actually be able to use a computer interface to know what somebody else is thinking about, or to

control what somebody else is thinking about. The issue here I would say mainly is that we imagine Geen Graham, Professor X can do it without machines. And right now what this would involve is potentially very large and powerful machines like fm R I and stuff like that. Well, and right now, the type of communication I've seen with the experiments that I'm familiar with involve more of a person and a computer display and another person with another

computer display and communicating through that. So, in other words, you're not having a direct brain to brain communication in that sense where you can actually relay useful information. It would be more using your brain to interact with the computer. The other person on the other side would see the message and then they could think and send back a message similar to that, and even then I think it's

picking messages. But one interesting thing I can talk about that I just saw the week we're recording this podcast was some experiments that were done at Georgia Tech a few years ago where uh, they were working with American sign language and uh, working with people who were suffering from an ailment and we're going to be locked in. But before they got locked in, locked in being they

can no longer move or have one more muscle control. Um, they would practice signing and sign language and their brain waves were read, and it turned out that someone who was locked in, if they were thinking in sign language to try and communicate a message, the same areas of their brain would light up, whether they were able to move those muscles or not. So thinking of words and sentences is soup, Like that's beyond what we can do right now, being able to say all right, uh when

you think of the word mary, yeah, yeah. It may be that if you were to give someone twenty different phrases and you and you mapped how each phrase looked every single time, they just read that one phrase, and then you gave them the option of choosing any of those phrases, you might be able to figure out which one it was they were thinking of, if in fact, they are able to think specifically of that phrase. But

that's a lot of ifs. But it turns out that this is this is promising, it's something we can go down. We're just like you were saying, Joe, We're just not We're not there yet, but it doesn't mean that we can't one day get there. So it'll be interesting to see if we ever get to that kind of brain to brain interaction. I'm not sure how useful it is, seeing as how we have other forms of communication that aren't relying on it, other than in the cases of

people who are suffering from these maladies. Right, but I mean for me and you, we can just talk, and I don't know that there's our office environment hasn't gotten to the point where I feel like I need to just think directly at you because I'm afraid that you know, Josh is going to overhear me. We haven't quite reached that point yet. Give another year. Well, but obviously what

will be useful in the future is mind control. Uh, you know, here's the thing is that part of me is skeptical about it, but another part of me says, well, the processes in the mind are electrical and chemical, and if you were able to induce electrical and chemical processes out externally, there's nothing to say that it wouldn't work.

I mean, you know, part of us wants to believe that there at least is some other element that's outside of that matter, you know, the whole mind body problem that people will talk about, but all scientific evidence points to it's very much matter that is at play here that if you suffer brain damage, then you can have very a very different personality for example. Well yeah, and that brings us to another thing that comes up with Professor X and Jane Gray, which is the manipulation of

other people's memories. Sure, sure, because what you're talking about in terms of brain damage is the inability for parts of the brain, for for neurons, for neural pathways to reconnect the way that they used to, and in memories, that's exactly what we've talked about before. Over in the hypothalmus, we have these neural pathways that create that represent a memory. When you try to remember something, you're actually reconstructing that

neural pathway, right, but it never reconstructs exactly the same way. Well, you can tamper with somebody's memories without getting inside their brain. You just need to talk to them. I mean, you can contaminate someone's memory of an event just by saying words, or you can just let or highly susceptible to them. You can just let them be on their own and ask them to tell the story. Every time you hear

the story, it's gonna be a little different. I mean, it's just it's one of those things where we do not remember things perfectly. We feel we do because it's in our heads, and we we can perceive it as this is something that we can rely upon. I experienced this, and I memory. It's not that people are lying to you necessarily when they tell a story differently. They might genuinely be remembering the story in that slightly different way.

And that's why we've often said that eyewitness testimony in court cases is not so reliable because we have faulty memories, and yet we rely on it very heavily in the court system because we find it. We find storytelling to be very compelling and a lot of times it's the only evidence you have, and that's problematic, but it's also I mean it we're all susceptible to this. It's not like you were saying, Lauren, It's not that someone's necessarily

setting out to to deceive anyone. It's just what happened. But but what about one of those other classic x menish psychic powers illusions, like like projecting illusions. Yeah. So, so the way that I understand it and correct me if I'm wrong, because this is just my standing of this power. My understanding is the way the illusions work is that it's another form of mind manipulation, where in the mind of the person the target, you have created

this illusion, so there's nothing physical there. Like if if there was someone that you had not perceived who is also in that same environment, they would not see the illusion, or smell or or hear the illusion. I this is this is another thing that sounds kind of crazy, but

I think this is actually somewhat plausible. Well yeah, I mean, if you were able to again figure out with the help of equipment, right, if you were if you were again able to figure out the specific uh neural um behavior that goes on with any given sensory perception sort of thing, and you were able to replicate it like I mean, I mean, imagine being able to press a button and then suddenly you smell roses even though there

are no roses there. I mean, that's something that you can at least imagine if you were able to specifically map and replicate a neural pathway. Uh, I mean practically, what this would look like is if you could put some kind of sensor on the brain, says M. Every time this person sees somebody standing in the corner of the room, these five thousand neurons light up or I

don't know how many, in whatever order. Yeah, and you can pinpoint exactly what that looks like physically in the brain, and then you can just stimulate those neurons directly to do the same thing without them seeing anything. Would that would it work backwards? Would they think that they had seen a person? And I think it's highly plausible that

they would sure. I mean, and of course, all of this that we're talking about the way that the technology and our understanding of the brain works right now means that you would need to have a direct brain connection, like implants in your brain, electric stuff in there and it's sort of a big, big, big, big strike against the dirt clod. And let me it's not just going to control your mind, but first alone, you too some

very invasive surgery. Well it's not just that, right, is that there are different parts of the brain responsible for different things. So in order for us to be able to have a wide spectrum of UM influence, you have to do multiple brain surgeries with multiple electrodes. One electrode in one center of the brain is not going to do everything. Um, you know, you might be able to really mess up someone's ability to form short term or long term memory, but that would be you know, that

would just be one thing you could do. Um. Yeah. So and obviously this stuff we're talking about certainly has ethical issues. Of course. One more thing, though, is that if we're including Gene Gray on this, we need to talk about telekinesis, which I think is far less plausible than telepathy technological standpoint. I mean, you can, because of how brain computer interfaces are so rapidly advancing, I can see controlling other brains. But there's a direct physical pathway there,

there's electronic links. I mean, you can see the method of action that's controlling the brain and understand it. I don't see any method of action to you looking across the room and making books fly up in the air. To me, that just seems like it's not gonna happen. We'll probably have more to say about even remotely similar abilities when we talk about magneto in the next episode, because then we can at least talk about magnetism. Right.

But I I suppose that if you, you know, previous to wanting to move that book across the room, you attached a a small drone to the book and had a mental connection with the drone, that's certainly control it. Yeah. If you have what I like to call an assistant, and you tell your assistant, hey, I want that book, and your assistant goes and picks up the book and

hands it to you, that's not telekinesis. So I just say, just attach very thin filaments to everything you could potentially need in your environment, have them all lay that only you can see them, and then freak out the kids in the neighborhood by dragging the filaments that just slowly moves across the area. There you go. If you live out the rest of your life in a very small

controlled area. You can have a lot of telech do not do this with hot super coffee, but not go well, you know, I think it's kind of funny that in the end, I think you would have to agree with me, or you can argue if you want. But out of all of the original X men, I think the most plausible is Beast. Yeah. Yeah, I think out of all of them, that seems like the closest, the one that we could get the closest to with real technology and genetic He doesn't he doesn't admit any weird waves a raise,

he doesn't. You know, he doesn't have any kind of extrasensory perception. It's really the least magical. Yeah, he's kind of the point. He's really strong, like he was very much supplanted by Wolverine other than the fact that he's smart and Wolverine is kind of a lunkhead. But or he was something. Shouldn't speak ill of the dead next Oh no, look, you shouldn't speak ill of logan anyway. But this is a cliffhanger for next time. A right, fair enough, fair enough, so, uh, we thank you so

much for the suggestion. And uh and here's a little glimpse behind the Curtain. While these two episodes may very well air back to back, we're not recording them back to back. So Lauren is going to have a week to simmer about the the aspersions I have cast upon poor weapon X, and we will have a knockdown, drag out fight, possibly with that Amandium Claus next week about it.

But if you guys have any suggestions for future episodes, maybe there's some other just crazy wacky topic that you wanted us to tackle, like is X possible in the future, If there's a question you've always wondered, send it to us. We will take that X. We will do our research, we will debate, we will discuss, and we will have a grand old time and we'll cord it so you can hear it. But in order for us to do that, you gotta get in touch with us. So send us

an email. Our address is FW thinking at how Stuff Works dot com. Or drop us a line on Twitter, Facebook or Google Plus. On Twitter and Google Plus we have to handle f W thinking. Just search FW thinking and Facebook will pop right up. Leave us a message. We read all of them. We look forward to them, and you'll hear from us again really soon. For more on this topic in the future of technology, visit forward Thinking dot Com, brought to you by Toyota Let's Go Places,