The Science of Dune: Technology

Holtzmann enabled space fabric distortion travel. And as always you can rest assured that no making machine has taken your life through its care, but rather the prescient Milange augmented powers of the human mind. So set back, enjoy our in flight presentation of mar deep conversations and our flight attendant toward check in. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and uh, I want to thank a musician

or Raleigh Porter for that bit of music there. That's the lack xoo off his two thousand and eleven album Aftertime, released by Subtext Recording, and you'll find a link on the landing page for this episode to learn more about that work. But it's the title of this episode and our our intro narration um UH Presents. We were, of course talking about the Done universe in this week's episodes, so we've probably heard us talking about Dune on recent

episodes of the show. I've mentioned several times that I've been reading it. I finally finished reading it. I loved this book. Yeah, I'm about halfway through my my reread of it, and this I think this will be the third time I've read it, and it's it's a book that has a special place in my heart as well. It's very straight inched to me that a book written fifty years ago. That's one of the reasons we're doing this is that this year in it's the fiftieth anniversary

of the publication of Done. That a book this old can feel so fresh and imaginative. So much science fiction is disturbingly familiar when you when you go to it. I don't know. When I went into the world of Done, I was constantly surprised by what I encountered. Yeah, it's so unlike, you know, anything that had come before it, and and and unlike. Even though it's it's had a huge impact on the genre. Um, there's nothing quite like

it to this day. I mean, it's uh you have this space age feudalistic society and it's full of you know, you have profits, you have fabulous creatures, you have strange science, strange technology that's changing the shape of life. Yeah. So to describe the influencer in terms of the influenced, a young person approaching Done today might want to think of it as sort of like Game of Thrones in space. There's a lot of political intrigue, yeah, but also with

with a lot of philosophical commentary. And I have to say, this is the most ecological novel I've ever read. I've never read anything as concerned with ecology and the conservation of resources. Yeah, A tremendous amount of thought went into the creation of this, this alien ecosystem, an alien ecosystem that is not only intrinsically interesting, but but plays an

enormously important role in the plot. Right, So we're gonna do two episodes about the science of Dune, talking about the world imagined by Frank Herbert In in his novel Dune and in the larger Done universe, but then also real world parallels to this science and how doone has influenced science fiction. Yeah, So we're gonna be discussing some

of the science fiction some of the actual science. But one of the reasons that they that the sci fi aspects of Frank Herbert's done, you know, continues to sate so well is, first of all, it's set a tremendously long period of time in the future, and he does a great job about giving you some details but leaving a lot of the details a bit ambiguous and unexplained, and you're just sort of left to fill in fill in the blanks in your own mind, right, and if

you know how sci fi fans work, they will fill in those blanks. Yes. So two of our primary resources here um are, first of all, a fabulous new publication titled The Science of Doone, edited by Kevin R. Grazier ps PhD uh. It's an unauthorized exploration into the real science behind Frank Herbert's fictional universe. And it's a series of essays all you know, by experts in their in

their field, planetologist, cosmologists, etcetera. It's a fabulous book. We'll have a link to where you can pick up a copy on the landing page. For this episode. We also dug in a little bit into the Dune Encyclopedia which came out in It's long out of print, but there are used copies out there available for purchase. And this was compiled by Dr Willis E. Nick Nelly and uh.

This also involved a number of different freelance writers and and some scientists weighing in on not only the science potential science underlying the details of Herbert so a Universe, but also some of just the cultural aspect as well. Right, it's got recipes for frem and flatbread. Yes, I was. You pointed that out yesterday and I was very fascinated by the topic. They're also lyrics to songs. There's as well as some some some science into how say, you know,

sandworms or faith dancers may have worked. You know, thinking about the recipe for frem and flatbread, I wonder why the fremen would cook anything, because cooking is almost always the cause of much evaporation and loss of moisture. Well, perhaps they have a special oven, like a still oven that cat captures all that moisture. Yes, so they seal off the kitchen and no moisture can escape and then

you can cook. Yeah, indeed, that makes sense. Now, I also just wanna don't want to preface here too that they were dealing primarily with the nineteen novel Dune, with some discussion of details that may pop up in Frank Herbert's later novels. We don't really get into any of the more recent works by by Brian Herbert. Brian Herbert is of course the son of Frank Herbert, and he continued the saga, did some prequels and a number of legends of done books with with his collaborator. But I

have personally not read them. I know a lot of people enjoy them, so um, yeah, we would love to hear from anyone who who has read those books, who has additional information they want to share based on their enjoyment of that sort of continued universe. Right, But these two episodes we're doing are going to be primarily the

first novel, Dune, and then our wonderful supplementary materials. Yeah, the kind of stuff that I think, for the most part, people even who haven't read the book might be familiar with from either the of course, the Dave Lynch film adaptation, Oh and we got to talk about that. Oh yeah, the Sci Fi Channel mini series from several years back, or just sort of the general cultural residents of the series. Um, and we're gonna try and make sure it's not too deep.

So if you have little or no understanding of the Dune Universe, we'll hold your hand through the stands. So we mentioned it's going to be a two part episode. This first episode today is going to be about primarily the technology of the Dune Universe, and then the next episode we do or we're going to try to focus on the organic components, the biology and the ecology of

the Done universe. But before we get into the meat of today's episode, I think we we should just give a very very brief cursory plot synopsis to people who haven't read the book but want to be able to

have a basic idea of what's going on. So what happens in the novel Dune, Well, essentially you have a space opera in which you have a galactic civilization spread across various planets right right, and there is one precious key resource in the universe that everybody wants and sort of controls all trade, and that resources the spice milange.

It comes from one planet in the entire universe, and that planet is a racous also known as Doune Yeah, it's the stuff that really makes uh, ultimately travel between planets possible. It makes the interplanetary economy possible. So everything is hinging on this one precious commodity. It's kind of the It's essentially the oil of the done universe, right, and you can't get it anywhere else. So the characters that come in on this story that there are two

main houses in the story. There's House of Tradees and there's House Harconan. The Tradees are it's it's kind of manniche and I guess the the Tradees are the good guys and the Harconans are very very bad guys. Yeah, I mean the Harconans are they're they're they're a product of the environment to to a certain extent, but yeah, they're they're pretty villainous. Yeah, and they are essentially competing

for roll of the planet that produces spice. And there's a lot of warfare and backstabbing and treachery and double crossing and and tests of loyalty. But ultimately the main thrust of the story is the adventure of Paula Trades, the young son of House of Trades, and his mother Jessica. While they're learning how to live on the planet Dune and eventually participating in a journey of cosmic discovery and

revenge and drugs. Like at the heart, it's such a quintessential, like nineties sixties product, right because it's about a young man who takes an allucinogen and then save the calaxies. You know, I never thought of it that way, but that's that's pretty much right. We'll get way more into the drugs in the second episode, but today we wanted to talk about the the technological theater of the Dune universe.

And I think one of the coolest concept that's created in the book that that Frank Herbert comes up with is the idea that this is a future scenario without computers or robots. Right, yeah, it is a post but Laryan jihad world. Uh So, basically, imagine that the singularity

has occurred. We have thinking machines everywhere that are caring for is looking after us more of I tend to interpret more it's like the beneficial aspects of of a post singularity world in which your computers are not like, you know, enslaving you and making you weren't work in their salt minds, but they've just become such a ubiquitous aspect of our lives, and eventually humans rebel against that. Yeah.

So there is in the past of this universe a great war against the machines, and it's it's referred to, as you said, by the name the but Larry and Jihad from the name Butler, but Larry and Jihad. And I like the idea that it invokes the concept of jihad.

So it's not just like in the Terminator movies where there is a war for survival against the machines, or maybe like you might find in the Matrix or something like that, the machines take over, they decide they want to kill us or enslave us, and we fight back. There is there is that element, I think, but there is also a deeper, more spiritual element, which is where the concept of the jihad comes in. It's a physical struggle,

but it's also a spiritual struggle for the soul of humankind. Yeah. Indeed, like some of the Herbert Frank, Herbert himself didn't really give you a lot of details on you lift it. You know, like a lot of the details in the den univers little ambiguous, and you're helping You're left to sort of um, you know, dwell on the philosophical implications, but just a few quotes from the fictional tons, such as the Orange Catholic Bible that play a prominent role

in the universe. Thou shalt not create a machine and the likeness of a human mind, thou shalt not disfigure the soul. And then this is a great line from some of the appendix material uh in the sixty novel. Then came the Butlerrian Jihad, two generations of chaos, the god of machine logic was overthrown among the masses, and a new concept sept raised man may not be replaced.

I've been thinking a lot about this um just in my daily life, you know, about not even with like thinking machines, but just the use of Facebook in your daily life, you know, the the use of social media, the use of all these gadgets. And so for me, when I think of the Spottlerian Jihad, it's it seems as much rebellion against that as it is against you know,

some robot with a with a laser gun. Sure, and it's not unusual for our technology to change us, right, I mean, it doesn't just make our lives easier it changes the way we we prioritize things and the way we we go about our lives. One way of looking at this might be something like agriculture. I mean, that's a technology that I think a lot of people would argue fundamentally change the human animal Homo sapiens is not

the same anymore or after we invented agriculture. And you could probably look at the rise of thinking machines of computers and perhaps the same way it is changing us in a very fundamental way. I mean, who knows what that look like ten thousand years in the future, as as the doone universe imagines, But it's doing something to

our brains. When we can have vast computational power, vast power of storage of information, and as imagined by this sort of singularity, future decision making power that we can outsource two machines. Yeah, I just think of all the things we outsourced already, all the things we no longer bother to remember because the machine remembers it for us. So yeah, like you said, your your interpretation of this coming in, I agree with this about the butlery and jihad.

It having something to do with the way humans are changed by our dependence on machines. So either way, we end up with a situation in these these books, in this world where we've kicked out the computers, which humans one, the humans one. But now the humans have to do all the things of the machines were doing beforehand. So what do you do when suddenly, uh, you know, just think about a business, so you can't depend on accounting

software anymore, you need what do you do? You have to turn to the human mind to deal with all that accounting. What do you do when it comes to navigational concerns? I mean, even in our own lives will become dependent on these like things like Google maps and ways right to tell us how to get from point A to point B. If we throw that out the window, suddenly we have to look at maps. Suddenly we have to know which way is north and south. It falls

to the human to know how to navigate. Yeah, and it gets even tougher of course when you're in space. So without the aid of advanced computer computation, Um, they

have to turn to human capabilities. Uh, and they have to essentially breed and train uh, special classes of humans to to to take on these varying taxing tasks, right, and so some of these classes that you encounter in the Dune universe, well, one of them, the most straightforward upgrading of the human mind to replace computers would be the mentats. There are several characters in the book who are explained to be mentats. And this is pretty straightforwardly

a human computer. It's a person whose mind has been trained and I think in some ways stimulated by drugs. Yeah, they're constantly consuming some variation with some wine type like SA sort of supercharge them. It's kind of like a red bull. Yeah. It talks about their purple stained lips. And these mentats really do in some ways fulfill the function of computers. And otherwise they're sort of like advisors.

They're they're sort of the perfect computer human hybrid. They can do computation, they can store vast amounts of information. They seem to pretty much remember everything like that. They do not ever forget any details, or at least as far as I can tell from the first novel um. But then also they are attuned to human nuance. It's something that's not true the computers today. They might be more replacement for the kind of you know, superhuman artificial

intelligence that we imagine in the post singularity world. Yeah, and it's interesting too that they have kind of an ethical guideline to them, and if you want one that's twisted, you have to essentially it's like a jail broken iPhone. Yeah, I want to order a sociopathic mentap. Yeah, in that case, you have to go to the Relaxa and they will provide you with one. And of course one of them is a is a major character in the early goings of the novel. Yeah, that's true. And then of course

there's the Spacing Guild. These are the individuals who handle in your planetary travel, and this is a very complex, dangerous arrangement. So you have Guild navigators, individuals who have been specially bread trained and to varying degrees engineered to make the kind of advanced navigational computations necessary to get from planet A planet B without just popping out of existence. Yeah. Now, we mentioned that the mentats rely on some kind of

drug that stains their lips purple. The Guilt Navigators definitely rely on a drug, and that drug is the drug we talked about of the opening spice, and that'll will go more into the spice and the effects of Spice in the second episode, but it's a key part of their outlook of their abilities is not just this computational power, but also sort of the ability to see the future,

which Spice gives them. Yeah, at least a very limited amount, just so you can see where your various choices will take you, and you can, at least in the next few seconds, avoid the ones that will destroy you. Yeah, and therefore sort of feel your way through the dark, uh safely from point A to point B. Yeah. And then there's a third group of these sort of advanced humans that I think is is maybe the most interesting of the three, and also the hardest to pin down

and define. But they're the Binni jesster It. So, the main character of the novel Poul Traits. His mother is Jessica, and she's a Binny jesser At trained woman. The Benny jesser At are a female order of super smart, very perceptive, highly trained priestesses of some kind who haven't they haven't they have an aptitude for politics for one. Thing like that. They are tuned into all the finer points of human expression that we miss every day. There's sort of human

lie detectors. They can tell what people are thinking and what they're gonna do by micro expressions on their faces, tonal shifts in their voices, and that they command a sort of supreme knowledge of the human animal and how it works. And they play a fascinating long game too, of manipulating mythology, um mnemonics and UH and culture to

their benefit. Yeah. One of the most interesting examples of this that comes up in the novel is the of them is it the called the Missionary of Protectiva, which is this fascinating idea that the this order goes throughout the galaxy, seeding planets with mythology that later members of the order can rely upon if they're in a pinch.

So it says, if you went to every city in the country you live in, spreading rumors about I don't know, prophecies about someone who would come to your community and save it from poverty and and and everything, and then you tell all your friends exactly what to do to fulfill those prophecies. Yeah. Yeah, So it's a FACTULSS fail safe. And also they were going laying the grounds for future manipulation uh. And of course at their heart they also have a breeding program, Yeah, which has some I think

some creepy similarities to eugenics programs. Yeah, Andy, there's definitely a eugenic vibe to it. They're trying to breed a specific person what they call the quizstat's hat iraq um, a term signifying one who can be many places at once. I thought the translation of that term was the shortening of the way. Yes, that right, Yeah, I believe, Yeah,

that is also invoked as well. But according to the Don Appendix, in simpler terms, what they saw it is quote a human with mental powers permitting him to understand and use higher order dimensions. So they're trying they're essentially trying to breed a superman tat, a human supercomputer with from some precientabilities found in the Guild Navigators, but without necessarily without the without necessarily having to imbue the spice. Yeah. Yeah, So in a sense, they're trying to to get to

that next phase of evolution. Uh, in terms of human thinking, the human thinking apparatus. I don't think you can make evolution happen, just got await on it. They're determined them. And then on top of that, you have the beneath a Laxu who have continued to refine human form and function, often in ways that push the envelope of a sceptabilities though, and this you see that, you know, that post human conundrum, like how much can you change a human and it

still be a human? Yeah? I love this aspect of the universe, that it's so fresh and interesting that they imagine a future without robots and computers, because robots and computers, of course are ubiquitous and uh in science fiction, and I think a lot of times with good reason, because that it certainly does seem to be the trend in human history is outsourcing all of our capabilities to machines that can do them better or at least do them cheaper, or I don't know, a greater scale. But here we

have human technology. It is really the wet ware future universe where all of the things that computers used to do, or even that you know they can't do for us today but we only imagine they could do, are all replaced by human perfection. Yeah, you know, and it all makes me think two of our episodes in Techno Religion, right, so, particularly some of the can ndrums of how do I create a refrigerator that will operate in keeping with the

laws of the status. Right, You're you're having to advance your technology, but do so within search certain religious frameworks and religious guidelines. Right. Oh, yeah, because we don't want to lose sight of that. It is dictated in the Orange Catholic Bible. And it's not just that people sort of frown on computers. The Bible says you shall not do it, right, It's it's blasphemy to do this sort of thing, so you have to you have to work

around it. Yeah. So the sort of upgraded advanced human brain technology is a larger feature of the Dune universe, and if we want to try to relate that to real technology, I can't see that there's all that much we could say about it, except that, of course people can There are some people with exceptional mental abilities. People

can hone their their skills in certain areas. But I don't know if there's a wine you can drink that will make you a ment at And I'm doubtful we will ever discover such a thing because I tend to assume that the human mind is already operating probably a pretty close to its capacity. I don't buy into this whole like, you know, we only use ten percent of

our brains. No, yeah, yeah, that that tend to throw that out the window when you start and also when you start looking at like what makes an individual a genius? You know, it's not just in nature, but it's also in nurture. There are several different factors. And granted, I'm sure that the manipulations of the big Bennie Jessa it would involve both nature and nurture. But but still yeah.

But on the other hand, if we do want to isolate specific capabilities of these people, say the capability of the Beni Jessa to read micro expressions, I think that very well could be trained in a person. Uh. And then other things like the ability of a ment at to recall vast amounts of information beyond what would normally

be accessible to the average humans memory. I think you could compare that to what the really good people, the memory athletes do, you know, like we talked about in the memory Palace episode of people make these memory palaces that like, how exactly does that work? Oh? That's of course just using a different type of memory and invoking spatial memory to to memorize say a list of terms

or a you know, or a table of information. Yeah, So if you have a list of five hundred numbers that you could never remember, well, what if you imagine those numbers as objects that are kind of strange oriented in a room that you're familiar with. Some people can use methods like this to recall things that we would never normally recall. Yeah, but anyway, that's sort of the

the human technology and the broader universe of doing. I think we should now zero in on the planet Done itself, the planet Iracus, because the physical conditions on the surface of this planet constitute a huge part of the struggle of this book. A lot of the plot is just based around the fact that this is a desert planet. Water is extremely scares. People are constantly fighting to stay alive and preserve moisture in a place where every single

drop of water wants to evaporate and disappear. Yeah. It's like an extremely harsh life and it requires some some rather ingenious, uh, cultural innovations, but also technological innovations. Yeah. And I think one of the most interesting pieces of technology we encounter in the book Dune is the still suits.

So what are the still suits? All? Right? So still suit and this is something I imagine people are definitely familiar with from the movies and and and again may just be familiar with outside of having ever seen or read anything doing related. But it's a second skin worn by the deserted inhabiting Fremen of Iracus, and it traps body moisture and recycles it through tubes, cooling the wear

and also preventing water loss. So they collect your sweat, your urine moisture from your fecal matter, and then coils it around you, cools you down a bit, and then you drink it out of a little a little straw in your mouthpiece. Yeah. So, if you've seen pictures of kar McLaughlin with little things dangling out of his nose in the desert, that's probably from the movie Dune. Unless he did in another movie with stuff hanging out of his nose in the desert, that's from the movie Dune.

And he's wearing the at least the David Lynch version of what the still suit looks like. The fremen you mentioned or these are sort of the native inhabitants of the planet Iraqus. These are the people who are perfectly adapted over many generations to life in this extremely harsh desert condition. Yeah, and the Fremen they take their still suit disciplined very seriously. They don't waste any water. They keep their still suits on unless they're in a sealed

off place that can retain moisture. And it sounds like a rough life, but it's also very interesting is described in the novel because of course, what happens to you in the desert without a still suit, well, you die. And uh, it's we're told that if you're out there unprotected in the desert, you can't last a full day unless you have just a massive amount of water on hand.

It just burns you right out right. But if you have the Fremen still suit, a proper frem And still suit, not one of those city models, you can you can actually limit your water loss to fifteen mili leaders a day. And so so yeah, it's an invention of of necessity by these uh, these Fremen who were former nomads that you know says they were in sunny noahs, in sunny nomads who popped around from planet to planet, evidently picking up different technologies and uh and you know, material technology

along the way, which they then implement in designing the suit. Yeah, and So there's a scientist character in the novel Dune named Kinds lye at Kinds, who explains how the still suits work. Yeah, and most and again this is another example of Herbert giving us some details, perhaps in this case a few too many details. This we'll get into, but leaving a lot of the the the nitty gritty stuff to the reader to to figure out. So Kins tells us that is still suit as a micro sandwich quote,

a high efficiency filter and heat exchange system. So you have a layer that touches the skin that's porous, and perspiration passes through it, and it cools the body in a manner to maintains the existing cooling process of the bodies, which we'll get into that's key and problematic. And then you have two additional layers on the suit that include heat exchange filaments and salt precipitators. Uh, the ladder of which is used to reclaim salt. Now why do we

call it a still suit? H? What does that mean? It's just like a moonshine still distillery. Yeah, you're separating, which is you know, all about separating different liquids. The still up in the Appalachian mountains. Uh, that's all about separating alcohol. But with the still suit, it's about separating potable water from salt, h and other waste materials in a wear's excretions. Now, what I immediately wonder when I

encountered this concept is, Okay, that sounds very interesting. I under if something like that could be done in real life. But one of the main questions is where does it get its energy from? Like how how is this distillation process powered? Because if you think of a still you've got to boil things. You've got to be feeding energy into the system to power the distillation process. What's going

on in the still suit? Well, according to two kinds and ultimately according to front of carbon here, uh, it's all due to body movement, especially breathing, and in this and some ausomatic action, it's providing the pumping force for all of this water. Uh. And again, as we'll get into that that there are a lot of questions surrounding

how that would actually work. But then, of course, once the water gets distilled, it gets filtered into these things that they talked about in the novel called catch pockets, which is great because then you just got a little straw and you can just suck the water straight out of your suit when you're thirsty. Yeah. Yeah, and um used to be your p Now it's tasty desert water. Yeah.

And it and urine and feces are processed in your thigh pads, which is a detail remember kind of sticking on when I read this for the first time, like back in junior higher high school. Yeah, they just mentioned that so briefly. Yeah, because it also it makes it makes you feel like you're you're probably constantly aware of the like the poop cakes that are stored in your in the thighs of your your pants. I'm like, Frank,

tell me more about the feces. I've got to know, Like does it We were talking about this the other day, Like does it? Like I was kind of imagining it's it's kind of cleaning out of the filter on your dryer, except every so often a freman has to stop and remove this this flat cake of like super dry poop. Yeah.

I imagine it, for some reason as a powder. Okay, I think that would make sense to Yeah, if you if you've removed all of the liquid from it, I guess it could pretty easily be disintegrated into a powder. You can just sort of dust out the back of your suit. Yeah, I can see that working. You just drop your poop powder. And then again, if it's a powder, you might be that you might easily inhale it. I don't know. Speaking of breathing, that's another way your body

loses moisture. Right, every time you exhale your you're wasting some precious water vapors going straight out your nose, that's right. And that's why on the still suit you breathe in through a mouth filter and you breathe out through the nose, and then you have that little nostril too. That's supposedly reclaiming moisture. From your explanation, and that's pretty much it, right, I mean, Herbert doesn't give us all that much detail and exactly how the still suit works, despite how important

it is in the novel, that's right. So it we have to turn to uh two expert commentators to figure out exactly how it might work and how it maybe doesn't work based on our current technological understanding. Okay, is there? Uh? Should we should we go first to the dune Encyclopedia or the science of dune. Um? I think we're gonna go to science of Dune first, because I think this has the most robust explanation, and then the and then

the doing encyclopedia potentially fills in some some gaps. So the still suit article wasn't by the editor Grazier, but was by a different guy. Yes, NASA engineer John C. Smith wrote this one. UH. The top tackles the topic at some length in the piece still suit UH. He points out that we've seen a lot of still suit patents over the decades since the release of doone, but they all kind of muck up the thermodynamics, and the thermodynamics are really one of the sticking points here, um

he made. Ultimately, he maintains that if you take a strict literal interpretation of Herberge writing the still suit quote probably would not work and most likely would cook the wear like a croc pile. Yeah, that's awesome, you know. And yet we can we can certainly envision technological advancements that would make a still suit possible in the future.

And and since we're talking about a sci fi realm thirteen thousand years in the future, that's certainly time enough for various UH technologies and especially meta materials to come online. To enable it. Right. Well, okay, well maybe we should look at this one energy loss source at a time. So let's think about sweat first. Sow does something really important. It cools you. And this might not always be the case if you live in a very moist environment where

it's hard for the sweat to evaporate. But if you're in a place like Aracus, if you're in a desert environment and dry environment and you're sweating, that evaporation is bringing your temperature down right, I mean it's even taking place on just a you know, a very ambient level um. Failure to sweat leads to heat stroke in death and h It's Smith points out in his in his piece here the Golden Gal and gold Finger, he might remember

she's painted gold and then she dies. Uh. It's often uh, you know they're saying, oh, she's suffocated, but in reality, she would he says, she would probably die from heat stroke. I feel like I've heard a lot of disputes about whether that person who's got the full body paint job would survive or not. I think I've read people saying

that that wouldn't actually kill you. Yeah, I think I've seen people go back and forth on that as well, all of us missing probably the point that they just wanted to put up dead naked golden lady on the screen there. But but either way, if you enclose the entire body in a sealed suit like us, you're courting death in the form of heat stroke. And that's one

of the primary design flaws with a still suit. Even when inactive, the body has to dissipate about ninety wots of heat just to balance out the heat of your metabolism. So even if you're not who I'm sweaty, sweat is still an important process. Most of the most of the body heat arises from the liver, the brain, heart, and muscles, and uh it's dissipated through blood circulation at the skin

level along with the primary method of sweating. So even when passes sweat glands excrete excrete point six ms of perspiration per day, maximum rate one point five liters per hour. And it's also worth noting you see images of people throwing the hood back on that that's still superfood is essential. Yeah, in the movie, the hood is essential because your ekron sweat glands are all over the body, but they have the highest concentration in the forehead and the ecron sweat glands.

Those are the ones that are tied, uh, you know, exclusively to cooling, not to be confused with any that have hormonal issues. Yeah, so you said that. John C. Smith mentions that there are patents out for still suits. I tried to find an example of a still suit in the wild. I was looking around on the internet to see if anybody had made one. I didn't find one. I did find a Gizmodo article from July proclaiming in the headline quote the sweat to water purifier real life

dune still suit will save lives. Unfortunately, this was interesting but turned out to be kind of an exaggeration, so it referred back to a BBC article about this inventor named Andreas Hammer who he invented a device called the sweat machine, which was designed to reclaim and distill water from sweaty clothing through a process known as membrane distillation, and essentially the machine spins clothing in a centrifuge to

pull all the liquids out. So if you have a high efficiency washing machine, uh that it does the same thing, though maybe not to the same level of extraction as

the centerfuge. But the idea is that I have ficiency washing machine spins the wet clothes really fast to drain out all of the moisture, and then the clothes spend less time in the energy gobbling dryer, but in the sweat machine instead of the washer water, it's pulling out some salty, nasty sweat and then it distills that liquid by heating it and then circulating it between two membranes.

And basically the way the membranes work is that the membranes are hot on the sweaty side and cool on the other side, and this creates a vapor pressure differential that pulls water and only water, so not all of the other molecules, just the H two O molecules through the membrane and leaves all the other stuff on the other side. So they say that one sweaty T shirt typically contains roughly ten million leaders are about point three ounces,

which is about a mouthful of water. Okay, so this is your sweaty T shirt is a sip Okay, So it's a it's a a body water reclamation technology, but not something that you could actually using a suit, no, unfortunately, so you can drink it they say it's cleaner than tap water, and they even they cited one example of when they served the product of this machine to a bunch of people in the public at this event called the Gothia Cup in Gothenburg, Sweden. I looked it up.

That's like a football slash soccer tournament. Uh, And it's interesting. But looking at the setup of the machine, I can't really see how this could be incorporated into a feasible body suit. It's pretty big, especially given the necessity of the center fugere process to extract the liquid in the beginning. Like, you couldn't have the machine be part of a suit if it needs to extract the liquid from the suit.

So I don't really begrudge them a cool headline referring to a still suit, but the comparison doesn't really seem app to me. But it is an interesting invention nonetheless, And of course sweat is not the only way the body wastes precious moisture. As if H two O, we're just cheap and abundance. As we mentioned already, you got to take into account of urine. It's water. The rest is metabolic waste, salts, organic materials. You can drink a little lot of it and feel okay, and some people

even claim therapeutic benefits. But it's ultimately like cutting your kidneys out of the waste removal process if you just keep guzzling urine. Uh. So you have to take the waste out. And of course this is also a very real area of of waste processing technology. Sure. Yeah, reclaiming water from urine is something that happens in space all the time, for example, so shipping water to space is really expensive. We talked about the costs of of getting

cargo into orbit before. Uh it's hard to put an exact figure on the cost per pound to lower th orbit today, but traditionally around estimate they used to give was ten dollars per pound. We don't know how much it costs today, but it's expensive. Um And you know that great feeling you get when you've just been doing strenuous exercise and then you sit down and drink a

whole glass of water at once. Astronauts the I s s have to exercise all the time to mitigate the effects of bone and muscle density loss that you experience in microgravity. UM. So, without reclamation efforts, that refreshing glass of water you get right after an hour on the treadmill is gonna you know, that might be a ten thousand dollar glass of water. Who knows. Uh. So instead of constantly shipping up new water, the crew members on

the I S S rely on in UH. It's called the Environmental Control and Life Support System, or the e c l s S, and that has within it water reclamation system. So when the astronauts exhale some hot moist breath on each other, the habitat can recycle and reclaim it. When the astronauts p or spit in the sink during

oral hygiene routines, the station can capture that water. In a space dot Com article I read about this, the author Denise Chow said that without the recycling system UH, an average of roughly ten thousand pounds of water per crew member would be quired from Earth each year to keep the station properly functioning. So it's it's kind of being in space is kind of like being on Iraqus. Like you know, it's it's very it's mighty precious. You've

got to hang onto it. And so there have been a lot of efforts at research for reclaiming water for space missions. Early space missions like the Apollo missions came up with solutions like electrolytics, silver ion generators, and apparently these could disinfect drinking water. They would like remove bacteria from the water without having to dump a bunch of bleach or other chemicals in there. Uh. And then today the I s S uses a more complex filtration system

that's got three steps. It's basically got a a filter step that gets out particles and junk from the liquid, and then they push it through a semi permeable membrane that has these substances and in it that that pull out organic materials. And then finally they have a catalytic oxidation reactor and that kills bacteria and it takes all the other organic compounds out of it. But of course that's at the space station level. Is still not a suit.

Could you shrink it down to the individual level? Sort of, but not exactly so uh. NASA scientists have equipped at least some astronauts headed for the is S with test demonstrations of personal sized water purification bags that don't drain energy like the large scale recycling systems, but instead depend on this process known as forward osmosis. Generally, this concept

is called the forward osmosis bag or fob FLb. Yeah, and so forward osmosis takes place when you've got two liquid solutions separated by another one of these semi permeable membranes. One of the liquid solutions is a lower concentration that this is probably gonna be your dirty water, and then one has a higher concentration, and that's this electrolyte filled solution, which I think is like gatorade or or something pretty

much along those lines. And then the water flows now truly from the lower concentration solution to the higher and the semi permeability of the membrane means that it allows water molecules to pass through, but not larger molecules or objects like bacteria and proteins. From what I can tell, NASA is still investigating how well and under what conditions

these devices work. I read a Wired report in that said that they hadn't been able at that time to prevent urrea, which is a waste product that you find in urine, from getting through in the osmosis bag. But apparently a Japanese TV crew member decided to try some of the product of the forward osmosis bag. Despite the despite that warning, and he said it tasted like capri son.

So there's your your free ad for capri Son. A more recent work I found on the it's a NASA research report from that mentioned the fact that these osmosis powered devices works slower in microgravity, and they're testing ways of solving that problem. But okay, so sweat you're in kind of gross but at least basically liquid. Are we ready to talk about feces? Uh? Well, we are in the podcast. With the larger concern is that we're really not as a civilization. UM. Feces is of course water.

The rest is undigested food bacteria. But but there's water in there, water that is ideally worth reclaiming. But we've actually seen far fewer studies regarding fecal water reclamation. Though. The thing is, of course this takes place as does urine water reclamations, sweat, recular reclamation, whatever, via the natural

water cycle on our on the planet itself. Now. In his um say, Smith points to a University of Colorado study on water recycling for a MARS mission that found that reclaim water would be minimal from from specs uh, and that they'd also have to factory in quote psychological concerns unquote for the crew and so in in this yeah, and this we get back to the psychological contagion inherent in any water reclamation effort. And uh, I mean, I've

I've blogged about this in the past. You have to be able to wrap your mind around the the fact that the water you're drinking used to be urine or used to be part of poop when really, I mean you can essentially say any water you drink was you may have been poop at some point in the past, may have been dying almost certainly, right. But but yeah, you have to deal with you know, how is the how is the user in that experience working out? And

it's uh, it's it's interesting because it could be done. Uh, and we we just haven't faced to die or enough circumstance despite the fact that we're talking about a trip to Mars here um. Interestingly enough, in the book Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, she mentions that NASA scientists at one point we are actually pondered recycling fecal matter into food, but they never pursued it at all, just because of that ig factor. And part of this Sushi

lays out it. You have at the time, you know, or especially early on in the space program, you have the very sort of cowboy mentality of the you know, the x uh uh test pilots who are becoming astronauts, the explorers, and then you have the scientists, and the scientists are are are more inclined to to present some out there notions such as what if you could eat

portions of the spaceship. That was another idea that came on eating What if the like the insulation itself was food, or you know, making small cakes out of out of poop, and of course the astronauts themselves we're not going to go for that idea on any level again, due to the psychological contagion inherent in fecal water reclamation. That's so gross,

I gotta admit. I mean, it's one of those things where I wonder if there's an equivalent to the mentor the Benny jesserat the Guild navigator, the person who has upgraded their mental faculties to escape the factor it's an iculis human the person who eats poop with no qualms. Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess again it just comes down to are you in a dire enough condition and

aracous is that is that environment? Now Smith coming back to sweating itself though, uh Smith has a real problem with the idea that the suit would allow your normal sweat process to to carry on um because because as we'll discuss, it's not just a matter of water leaving your body and now you're cool um. You need an evaporation to take place, and he doubts that quote near normal evaporation process would even be possible in a still

suit for UH. For organic cooling to take place, sweat must go through a phase change from a liquid to vapor in order to remove heat and cool the skin. So it's an endothermic process, and moving sweat away just whisk wicking it away, as with specially designed workout garments, that just merely makes your skin dryer, not cooler. That's why so called wicking fabric u which use a passive capillary action to move sweat from your skin to the outer surface of your workout garment. They help you stay

warm during cold weather workouts. You're interfering in the natural cooling process, not not level because it's not skin tight, not completely, but it's still preventing sweat from doing what it does. And I think anybody who's ever worn a scuba suit outside of the water in the sun for an amount of time can probably attest to that. You can you can overheat really quickly in that environment because

it's making such close contact with the skin. When I was watching the David Lynch Dune movie, I was looking at those actors and thinking like, wow, that looks really hot. Yeah. I mean apparently these were these were thin latex body suits, and of course they were not functional still suits, so they were having to deal with without with overheating, you know,

falling out from the heat. Uh. And interestingly enough, Patrick Stewart has apparently gone on records saying it's the the us comfortable thing he ever wore for for any kind of a film or TV project. And this is from the guy who you know who had to wear that awful Starfleet uniform. Um. I was not aware of this, but apparently they call it the the Picard maneuver. If you watch it enough, you'll see that he's always tugging down on the garment to keep it from riding up.

So anyway, the bottom line here, um, is that the skin level layer of the steel suit would need to be a highly thermally conductive layer that allowed evaporated cooling to take place um again, perhaps via some as yet uninvented meta material. And yet even then, the humidity in the skin level porous layer would need to be high humidity, which could in theory, merely just escalate the whole situation more perspiration, more heat, and according to John C. Smith,

the suit would have to self dehumidify as well. So and in order for all that water vapor to become liquid again so that you could drink it, you'd have

to have condens fation occur. And for this phase change to happen, which is an exothermic process, you need to have a cool layer such as you know, a cold glass on a hot day and you see that, you know, the moisture form on it, and there's no mention of refrigeration in the suit, but it would be necessary as far as we understand the process for that phase shift to happen. Man, that just sounds like a mess. Yeah,

that's the thing. It seems like it would be af You don't have a clear understanding of how sweat works and how how how cooling works, and indeed how cooling systems work. It seems like it would be a simpler mechanism, but it's not. Yeah, and now, of course refrigeration does exist. So perhaps it's just a question of how much bulk do you want to incorporate into your suit? Yeah, I mean, can you fit some manner of heat pumping there a

free youngcompressor? Um. You know we have we have firefighters to use like blue ice packs near the skin to keep their body from overheating. But would that make sense at all in a water scarce environment? And then uh, and then you also have to any of these system

would also involve more power. Uh. And all we have to go on is that it's powered by motions of the body, especially breathing, and according to to Smith here, that would not be sufficient to power the suit given our current progress on motion generated power, even if we augmented it with solar power, which again, as if he because you want to travel by night on aracus um, we you just end up again not being able to keep up with with the energy requirements for the suit.

So that's what Smith has to say more recent commentary. But if we look to the Dune Encyclopedia and the entry written by Christine Watson. She stresses the use of still cloth based on the principles of cryogenics of a cryogenics separator that she says used on a number of worlds to draw oxygen and other gases from the planet's happmos here. So here we see a you know, a futuristic meta material explanation. And as for cooling, she says

that the tubes contained air. At the beginning of the suit cycle, the air pressure built up by the pumping action of the wearer's breathing and by heel pumps. At a preset pressure, the air was released into a holding chamber in the suit's hood. This sudden release cool the air by the Jewel Thompson effect, and the cool air was drawn back into the system and again through the suit,

dropping the temperature of the separating layers. And that Jewel Thompson effect, by the way, that's the temperature exchange of a gas or liquid when it is forced through a valve or porous plug while kept insulated so that no heat is exchanged with the environment. I gotta be honest, I didn't follow that. I mean I had I had to go at it a couple of times. So Basically it comes down to the fact that the hood would be kind of a an essential air bladder for the

suits cooling system. So imagine the steel suit. Imagine com mc laughlin in the steel suit, but with kind of a balloon hood portion. Man that makes mud deep a little less a little less cool looking if he's got a balloon head. Yeah, I would think so. So again, you have to kind of talk it up to say, however the steel suit works. It evidently involves some materials and technologies that we haven't quite figured out in this

ancient day and age. Now, another interesting technology do you see on Iraqis and also elsewhere in the worlds of done the use of ornithopters of aircraft that fly via flapping wings. Yeah. So we are told that the power of house tradees on their home planet of Caladan before they move to the desert planet of Irakus is air power. They're an air force power, kind of like you might think of the United States on the sort of military geopolitical world stage, that the power is concentrated in the

ability to strike from above. But their way of striking from above is not much like anything we would commonly use on Earth technology today. It is like something we would commonly see in the biological world. So of course birds fly by flapping wings, insects fly by flapping their wings. It seems like a perfectly normal way to get around.

But there's a reason our airplanes don't do this. Ornithopters can be built, you can make a machine that stays in the air by flapping wings, but it is not a very practical way to move heavy cargo or passengers. That's right, and and certainly that's what you see utilized in the dune universe, like sweeping down, swooping down to pick up you know, mobile spice factory off of the

sands before a worm can get to it. According to Dr James Usherwood of the University of London's RVC Structure and Motion Laboratory, uh, this is one area of design, you know, where nature doesn't quite nail it. And this is kind of ironic because in the field of biomimicry, we see in a lot of cases we can turn to nature and say, well, how did nature evolve to solve this design problem? And oftentimes there they have a really elegant Nature has a really elegant solution. I'd say

that's especially true on the very small scale. Biomimicry becomes more and more powerful the smaller you go. In uh In an essay titled a Flying and Walking Learning from Nature and this was published in the book seventy Great

Mysteries of the Natural World, which I highly recommend. Um Usherwood points out that a slow flying pigeon requires up to four times the power an equivalent helicopter would need, and hovering is even worse, resolving in pitiful amounts of lift for the amount of energy exerted, each pump of the wings requires yet another burst of energy, and it all adds up pretty quickly. That's why hummingbirds have the highest energy expenditure of any warm blooded animal, ten times

that of a human. There perpetually on the verge of starvation. Uh and and and sometimes I have to actually go into kind of suspended animation to deal with these these energy costs. H and all the time, you know, consuming colossal amounts of nectar to keep up their little sugar water vampires that cannot be sated. Yeah, so you know, we you know, looking back, you see early aviation pioneers who toyed around with flapping wings, generally with the disaster's results.

But you do see scientists that have been looking into it's used for micro air vehicles or m a v s, and these are tiny robotic aircraft that depend on biomechanical flight designs. Uh. And the funding typically comes into play, you know, for obvious surveillance purposes. Right, some sort of tiny robot with buzzing, flapping wings that you can use to spy on somebody. Now, what is the appeal of that over just like a tiny quad rotor drone or something like that. Is it just that it would look

like an insect? I think so? And I think also there is that that biomimicry attractions saying if it's if it's flight at a small scale, then perhaps, uh, perhaps there is an advantage in drawing on real world comparisons. But overall we are not going to see passenger planes

with flapping wings. And uh. I was looking at a U. S. Army Research Office report from two thousand five, UH that ALT was weighing in and saying that when it comes to m a v s, you're looking at enormous manufacturing challenges, inefficient energy usage, and dependence on less under good understood small scale physics. So at this point in time, even

small ornithopters seem out of reach. Yeah. Now, if you want to just cheat and invoke some science fiction magic, you might say that the ornithopters have something to do with other technology present in the Doune universe, like like suspensers.

I noticed you putting a note here, right, yeah, yeah, And this draws us right into another important technology they were going to spend less time on because there's there are fewer answers, and that is the Holtzman effect that enables faster than light travel, It enables personal shields, and enables just ubiquitous use of anti gravity suspensers that I mean, you know, the main character of one of the main characters, Vladimir Harconin, uses it to float around and suspend his bulk.

But you also see mentions of just you know, here's a suspenser enabled chair in a room. If you watch any scene from the movie and not the whole moving not the whole David Lynch movie, go watch the scene where where Vladimir harcon And floats up in the screams, I will have the spice. That's pretty good. But anyway, I thought this is also a really cool technology as

imagined in the books, specifically with application to the shields. Now, there are personal energy shields imagined in the Dune universe, and you've probably seen all kinds of science fiction that has shields, you know, like a shields up, you know, you put them up around the spaceship and they deflect incoming weaponry, projectiles, energy beams. But these are personal shields that are often imagined. Well, actually they're There are large

scale shields, and there are personal shields. But you might like click a button on your belt and suddenly a shield comes up around your body. Somebody tries to run and stab you with a knife, they will be deflected by the shield. And so the solution to this creates a very interesting combat dynamic that people talk about in the book, where people engaging in knife fight with shields activated have to come up with ways of trying to move their knife very slowly towards the enemy because a

quickly incoming knife will be deflected by the shield. But if you can stab ever so slowly, you can go through the shield gently, and then you can you can penetrate the person's skin and make them bleed. Yeah, so the defensive technology requires an entirely well, not entirely, but a different style of martial arts. So we we don't

know a lot about the Holtzman effect. In the books UH, it's described as the negative repelling effect of a shield generator UH and a suspenser is the secondary low drain phase of the Haltzmann field generator, and it nullifies gravity. It nullifies gravity within certain limits prescribed by relative mass

and energy consumption. So in this we we have no choice but to turn to the Science of doone and the writings there of planetary scientist Kevin R. Grazier, who also edited and along he also worked with physicist Diggests Seeger on some of this and UH. As they point out, much of the whole Holtzman situation is unexplained. In the later books, we do learn that that guild highliners, the big spaceships travel the stars by the quote compression or

warping of space time in conjunction with mass neutralization. And as a planetary scientist again Kevin R. Grazier points out UH in cosmic oregonomy, that's the piece in the science of DONE UH. If the mass of a spaceship could be nullified, then the relativistic effects of high speed space

travel could be reduced. So essentially it's talking about all right, if you could turn, if you could simply dampen or nullify the mass of an object, then that would enable you to to cheat in various respects in terms of acceleration in spacetime. Uh also Grazier and Uh and Seeger opposit that the Holtzman field is an energy s meaning shield. Perhaps it screens the mass of an object from the rest of the universe. Lowering the mass of an object

would also lower the force of gravity on it. Lowered enough and you just float around up in the air. And as for space travel, theory and observations of general relativity indicate that spacetime can be curved and warped, and perhaps it can even be folded and compressed. So again the classic examples, you have a map, right, and you fold the map, and then you just poke a hole through point A and point B, and now you have the whole right, the tessaract testsaract example, the event arise

an example. UM, do you thus shorten the distance between two points, meaning that faster than light acceleration and all the problems they're in might not even be necessary. In the Dune books. We don't know much more beyond that, other than the process is dangerous and costly. You really need a number crunching power of an advanced computer to handle it all. But in the Dune universe it all falls to human minds enhanced by spice, all right, So

that's pretty out there science fiction. I think I'd have to say the same thing about the energy shields as that relates to the whole Simon effect. I I can't think of any example, uh, And I wasn't able to find any example of a real energy shield in the world that would successfully deflect incoming matter like that, especially

not without harming the person who was wearing it. I mean, you can imagine wearing a huge magnet of some kind that, you know, if somebody tries to shoot a bullet at you or something like that, might be able to deflect it if it's powerful enough. But I mean, at certain points you're getting into levels of energy that make the

proposition ridiculous. And so if you're imagining an energy shield like they have, maybe the closest thing I've seen would be propositions of energy shields like ion shields around spaceships to prevent incoming radiation, but I don't even know if that's really viable. Yeah, it's definitely less down to Earth compared to the still state. So there you have it, some of the techno alogy to do, not all of it by any means. We just decided to draw in

a few examples that we could discuss here in the podcast. Uh. And again, we're gonna do a second episode and we'll get into the biology of doing a bit where we're definitely going to discuss sandworms in detail. So UH, as we lead out here, we're gonna enjoy another track from Raleigh Porter. This is X again off the two thousand eleven album Aftertime, released by Subtext Recordings. There's a link on the landing page, but you can learn more about

his work at Raleigh Porter dot com. Uh. In the meantime, check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where you will find all of our podcast videos and blog posts, as well as the links out to our social media accounts. And if you want to get in touch with us about your favorite fact about the June Universe or any feedback about these episodes, you can email us at blow the Mind at how Stuff Works dot com For more on this and thousands

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