Fantastical Tech from Fantasy and Sci-Fi

an old podcast. That's a new version of an old podcast called Large Nerdron Collider, which we will talk about more at the end of this episode. But I thought it might be fun to bring Ariel onto my show. It is not her first appearance on Tech Stuff. No, we've talked about steganography and about our marine weapons before, so I feel like what we're gonna talk about today is a little bit of a revisit. Yeah, we're gonna

talk about science fiction and speculative fiction. Some of the stuff we'll talk about, you could argue, really falls more into the realm of fantasy than science fiction, but that all kind of gets lumped under the category speculative fiction. Uh, and we're gonna talk about some of the stuff that appears like the popular stuff that appears in speculative fiction, and then talk about what if any corollaries there are

in the real world. Uh, and if we see any technologies that are kind of like the baby version of the stuff we see in sci fi, or if we are leagues away from light years away, you might say, and yeah, and also we did, like we made an outline for this that we thought at first was you know, modest. It was. Yeah, it blew up. So we are going to go through as much of this as we can, but we're not going to turn this into a marathon length episode. We don't even know how long this is

going to go. It may turn out that this will be a two parter and I'll have Aerial back for part two. We don't we haven't recorded it yet, so the time travel spoiler alert doesn't really work. So I can't tell you how long it's going to be until we do it. Yeah, we could go back and insert something, but that's not really time travel. That's work. See, that's not time travel, that's just work. And I hate work,

you know me. So one of the things we wanted to chat about first is the role of technology in science fiction because obviously, you know, the two tend to go hand in hand, right. We tend to think of of science fiction and technology being integral to one another. That if you don't have at least some version of of high tech in your science fiction, it's not really

science fiction. Uh yeah, but I would I would say that to me, good science fiction starts with the story, the characters and the situations that they are in and how they handle those situations, whether for good or for ill, and that all the tech stuff, not the podcast, but the stuff what is tech, is sort of window dressing

for that story. And that when storytellers take the inverse of that, where the technology ends up playing the central role and the story and characters kind of take a backseat to it, I think of that as what I like to call bad science fiction. I tend to agree with you, Jonathan. I mean, there are occasions where I think that just the this scientific technology, the fantastical technology, and a story can be enough to make it fun. It might be a potato chip movie, but it can

be fun just to watch that. Pacific Rim is a great example of that for me, where like watching the Yeager's Interact is more of the story. To me, The story of the technology is more of the story than the people, and I still enjoy it. But at that point the technology is almost taking on a persona itself. Yeah. Yeah, And there is something to say about you know, spectacle, right,

Like spectacle can be entertaining. If it weren't, then we wouldn't have movies like Independence Day, right, all the big disaster films that are just pure spectacle for like an hour and a half. Um. And I don't mean to really turn my nose up at it. I just don't

think of it as being particularly artful. I think that if you have a really good story first, and then you you said it in a futuristic world, for one thing, that can give you enough distance as an audience that you can look at something that actually does relate very much to the way the real world works, but you've distanced it enough where you can think about it objectively without taking you know, the real world into account until

maybe much further afterwards. Like hands Handmaid's Tale I think falls into that category. Um, although you could argue Handmade's Tale has in more recent years become far more relevant. But you get where I'm going here. I think, yes, yes I do, but I want to talk less about Handmaid's Tale and more about handheld tales. So I want to start with I would say what is pretty integral

to a lot of science fiction, which is laser guns. Right, And we're not talking about necessarily a specific example here, just that laser guns or ray guns in general are kind of a kind of like the the stereotypical symbol of science fiction weaponry. Right, It's like the pep laser that's the go to for science fiction. Yeah, if we were to pick out specific laser guns, we'd be here

all day ever talking about them. So Jonathan, So instead of saying this is how laser guns work in science fiction, because every science fiction tends to at least have their own nuances to how their technology works, our laser guns realistic in real life, not in the handheld versions that

we see in science fiction. Because in order to generate a laser of sufficient energy capable of delivering a truly devastating blast, you would need such a large energy source that you could not fit it into a rifle or a pistol format. So one of the biggest challenges we have with technology today is that when it comes to energy storage and releasing energy, we are limited by physics, you know, and I mean we're limited by physics and everything.

But physics has has slowed that down. Like you you've probably heard of Moore's law aerial that's the idea that computers are technically, we boil it down to computers are getting twice as powerful every two years or so. But the problem with that is that energy storage doesn't follow that same trajectory, so we don't we don't get to a point where like, oh, the batteries of today are are twice as powerful, They can hold twice as much energy, and they can release it twice as as quickly as

the old batteries. That's not how batteries work. It's just it's an electrochemical process. You can't make it do more than what it physically is capable of doing. So that would mean that you would if you wanted to use like a laser rifle or a laser gun, you would likely have to have that connected to a larger power source, potentially one so large that you couldn't easily carry it, Like maybe you could have a back mount did type of power source that you could wear as like a backpack,

you wouldn't be able to carry much else. Uh. And even then, lasers wouldn't behave the way we typically see them in science fiction. Right. You wouldn't get a pew, you wouldn't have a noise at all. There'd be no reason to have a noise. You have a noise from maybe the person who got hit by a laser. So you wouldn't even have like a no no, no, It's it's like turning on a flashlight, right like or if you have a laser pointer, you don't get a noise with that. I mean you do with me, because I

supply it myself. I do the jum jum noises. But also you wouldn't get those distinct beams, like those those short blasts which we'll talk about again in in a second. I'm sure you wouldn't get those. It would be an uninterrupted beam, just as you would with you would get with a laser pointer. And assuming you don't have a lot of particulate matter or if it's a bright day,

you wouldn't even see the beam, right. You would see the spot where it hit the target, but you wouldn't see an unbroken beam unless there was like a lot of dust in the air, just like you wouldn't see lasers like in any of those those movies like a heist movie where they have to blow dust in the air so that they can see the laser grid and then someone in in a cat's suit will do flippy flips through it. Um. But yeah, that's so they don't they don't work the way they do in science fiction.

So we couldn't, you know, take a laser engraver, laser etcher and turn that into a weapon. I mean you could do it gold Finger style. No, Mr Bonda, expect you to die. You can do it. Like the lasers are powerful enough, Like you can get a laser powerful enough to do physical damage like to I mean, we can use lasers to cut through stuff like steel, so we could clearly use it to do damage to a person.

It wouldn't be like that that's super quick flash. I mean heat still has to take time to transfer and and and have an effect. But you could get some vaporization, some plasma ification of of of a site, which it could also create a shock wave and that could do damage as well. So you could weaponize lasers, and in fact, the military has looked into it. We're mostly talking about like vehicle mountain stuff, right, not like hand held things. Okay, well, okay,

so no laser guns. But what about blasters? So blasters are guns and Star Wars they are part of They use particle beam energy uh, and and fire plasma bolts, so that's not laser light, that's plasma, which is different. Uh, you know, and maybe and then go into if it is possible can you adjust that? So could you stunn somebody with it versus killing them? All of which is possible with a Star Wars blaster? Uh? And then can you add different things to it to make them do

different things? For instance, a Star Wars blaster has super cheap red bolts or orange bolts that are a little bit are used for like training, or blue bolts that are used ionized and used for machinery disruptions. So how possible is that? So these are great questions because there's a lot to pack in here, right, the blasters and Star Wars. First of all, they're called particle beam weapons,

which already is kind of ridiculous. So the words particle beam tell you this is a beam of particles, and typically we talk about sub atomic particles, like you know, protons charged particles. Typically, although you could have a particle beam of neutrons, it's just harder to get it moving with particle accelerators. These used particle beams, but particle accelerators are pretty big. The large Hadron collider is more than

sixteen miles in circumference. The reason for that size is that it's using very powerful magnets to push charged particles in a circle to accelerate them near the speed of light. Now they are particles, they have mass, so they'll never get to the speed of light, and we'll touch on that again later too, but they get them up really super fast so that you collide them with another beam of particles that you have traveling in the opposite direction.

So think of two different beams of particles going in opposite directions around the circle. Their paths are not crossing. As you get that speed higher and higher and higher, and you're using very powerful, super cool magnets to do this, and then ultimately you direct them at each other and some of the particles collide, and that's where you get

these collisions that we then study. Well, if you had any way of making that into a handgun, we wouldn't need a sixteen plus mile circumference facility, right, you wouldn't be able to speed the particles up to any appreciable level using something again the size of a handgun that doesn't connect to some other larger power source. So again,

same power trouble that we had with the lasers. Now you also mentioned they fire plasma bolts, So if you're talking about using the particle beam to generate plasma, that's not the most efficient way to create plasma. Plasma is um ionized gas. It is the most plentiful form of matter in the universe. It's what our son is made out of. The s u n Ariel and I don't have any kids. Uh yeah, that it would be shocking to be and to Ariel to learn that we had

a son. Uh No, the sun it works, you know, it's it's made out of plasma and an ionized gases is powerful stuff. We'll touch on that again too. But making a b or a bolt of it and having that bolt stay coherent in other words, it maintains its bolt shape as it travels through toward its target. Uh, it's not really realistic either from multiple reasons. Plasma is a gas. So it's like if you. If you blow out air, the air expands outward as it leaves the

nozzle or your mouth or whatever. If you're blowing out air, you can't like blow so that a little bolt of air will hold its shape. You can get like interesting airgun type things that can create a sort of vortex effect that can travel much further. We've seen those in like you know, novelty stores and stuff, but you wouldn't

be able to really keep plasma together. As for the different colors, I think they're they're relating that back to lasers, and in fact, the laser color does tell you a lot about the energy level of the laser because you're looking at the spectrum of light, and the the further toward the violet side you get, the more energy those photons can have. So red is actually very low energy, Infra red is even lower. You get up to violet

and ultra volet you're getting into very high energy. You go beyond that, you start seeing you start to get to stuff like X rays and gamma rays, which are such high energy that if they if we're exposed to them for any length of time, they can ionize the atoms in our body. Then we can have real serious problems, like like problems with DNA damage and stuff. So there is something to that. As for the the blue beams, the ion cannon version of Star Wars using ions to

overwhelm machinery, there's something to that. UM. When you look at an electromagnetic pulse or e m P, that is something that can disrupt electronics. It's essentially overloading the electronic circuits and causes them to either fry so it's useless or shut down. And we see that kind of happen naturally, like when UM, when there's a solar storm. So it does make sense that blaster could in theory cause uh

explosion UM from vibrations and stuff like that. It sounds like, well, from imparting energy, I mean we really what you're getting too is imparting energy to a target and uh or in the case of of like the ion canon, the idea of overloading an electrical system, you're essentially you're essentially putting more juice into it than it can handle and

it shuts down. UM. The word ion tells us that because ion is a charged particle, typically you're talking about an atom that has either more electrons than it would normally have to have a neutral charge, so it ends up having a negative charge or fewer electrons. So that means because there are more protons than electrons, you get

a positive charge. That's an ion. So ion Cannon tells us that this has to do with electricity, um, and that that's why it works on uh, robots and ships and shields and stuff like at but it's supposed to be harmless when it hits a person as for stunning

and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I guess it just works for the the needs of the plot, but there's there's nothing I can connect to, Like a lot of weapons that are marketed as quote unquote non lethal are really it just means that, uh in in the majority of cases, the effect of the weapon is supposed to be one that incapacitates the target and doesn't kill the target, but very frequently non lethal weapons can

lead to lethal consequences. Yeah. Yeah, Well it sounds to me then that Star Wars got the Bocaster a bit closer to something that could be done in reality, simply from the fact that it is much larger. It's very very heavy, although I don't think Chewbacca is sixteen miles tall to carry a sixteen. That would be very care you had had drink collector. Uh. You know, it uses

metal and it uses magnets to work. So the way that a boucaster works is it you cock, you cock the spring, and you push the trigger and it lets out of metal what is called a quarrels like a bolt or arrow. It covers it in plasma and then it gets pushed super fast through two magnets that are

at the end of the bocaster. So I'm guessing that that is a little closer to reality, even though I'm also guessing that you can't exactly coat uh metal bolts in plasma the type of plasma that we're talking about in real life. Yeah, yeah, you're exactly right. So, yes, you can use magnets to propel projectiles. I mean there are there are rail guns, railgun designs that use exactly that, right, the idea of using using magnetism to uh to pull and then perhaps push a projectile at great speed. So

there's nothing necessarily wrong about that. But as you allude to, the plasmas are a different matter. So again, unless you have something to contain the plasma or to hold it to the bolt, it would bloom and disperse immediately upon being fired, so you would have it just become this

puff of very hot gas. And of course heat dissipates very quickly too, so it's why like you can use a plasma torch without melting your face off, right, like people use plasma torches to to cut through stuff and heat.

That's because heat doesn't transfer through air that effectively. Air is not the best conductor for heat, So you would have this dissipate pretty fast, and it wouldn't stay around the bolts, so you wouldn't have that nice bolt that would go from the bocaster to the target unless you had some way of whole holding the plasma there, which would mean either it would have to be contained within the coral, which presumably would burst upon hitting its target,

so that the plasma would cause extra damage because plasmas do tend to burn very, very hot, or you would have to have some sort of electro magnets in the coral themselves to hold the plasma there. Because since the plasma is an ionized gas, and since it has free flowing electrons, it has an electric charge. So an electric charge means it also has a magnetic field, which means that with magnets you can actually contain a plasma. But I can't think of any way where you would do

that in a projectile. So while while there are certain basics that work, the actual implementation would not well, at least they got it closer. Even if they did then fudget to have Han so be able to carry and fire a boaucaster, I don't want to know what he did to get the grip strength to be able to do that. I think he must have just had a crazy mom energy, you know, like when the mom sees like the cars on top of her kid and she

lifts the car up. So Han just had crazy dog owner energy for Chewbacca, and nobody puts Chewy in a corner, all right, So that means that I'm guessing that Star Trek phasers also are not that realistic because they're also particle directed energy weapons, although they do have a steady stream as opposed to blasters which shoot the bolts. Yeah, so does that make them more possible? I mean, I

don't think it makes it more possible. I think it at least makes it less of a uh, less of a pupiu laser type thing than we typically see because it it does tend to be a steady beam, you probably wouldn't see the beams. Uh they You know, Star Trek is is infamous for attempting to justify its technologies with lengthy explanations, part partably because I mean there's a whole end street around writing technical books for the Star Trek universe. Same thing is true for Star Wars too,

But um, I'm I'm a treky. I'm not that much of a treky. Yeah. Well, and and it's it's also one that talks about things like um, like like actual phase, I mean phaser, depending on whom you ask. Phasers are called that because they're either a mixture of the words photon and maser, so which is the same as light and maser, which became laser. But now instead of saying light, it was photon, I guess because it sounded more science fiction.

E e e um. Photons are being the particles of light, and so you've got phaser or some people talk about the phasing the beam of the frequency of the laser. Now that would just mean that a phaser would be able to go from lower energy phases like on that red side of the spectrum, to higher energy phases on the violet side of the spectrum um but still not really possible. Again, we get back to that energy component.

That's a big part of it. But also that Star Trek just relies very heavily on techno babble they do, but I will say they do have it's a phaser. Their phasers do go from low to two stunned to disintegrate. Uh and and they also do account for in star in Star Trek um that energy pull. So for instance, the cannons that they would put on their ship, because they got all kinds of phaser phaser um weapons and devices. They can put a wrap in a race which shoot

multiple phasers. So a phaser cannon which could be rapper fire regular would be bolted to the ship and would pull from the warp core to channel power. We aren't going to get into warp cores yet, but at least they accounted for that need of a large power draw, right right. Yeah, It's not like you put into D cell batteries and the back of the Enterprise and somebody

can start blasting the klingon burder prey. That's a good point. Yeah, So that that at least is something that is that is realistic in the sense that you would need to have a sufficiently powerful power source to tap into in order to generate and then um, you know, fire multiple times, this this powerful beam weapon. They also do use their phasers for things like drilling and heating, which we do know that lasers can do for those purposes. Yeah, yeah, yeah,

so a little bit closer to reality. They also have that you can track the nadium particles back to the phaser. Um, is it possible to track particles of a plasma burst or a laser back to what fired it? I mean no, Like, I don't know what you would be tracking, because again, plasma being an ionized gas. Uh, you know you would. I guess you could try and see if you could detect whether or not a specific gas was present in

an area. But you're typically talking about a pretty small amount of gas in comparison to the gas that's in whatever environment you're in, if you're in a room or heck, if you're outside, forget it. So also like Star Trek, you know, they're using these these fictional particles, which helps, I mean, it really helps for you to explain your science, how your science fiction technology works. If you make up the stuff and stuff that's making it work, so that

that also it plays a big part in it. But yeah, there's not any way that I can think of about how you would trace that back so that you would say, ah ha, I have found the phaser that killed Colonel Mustard in the study. H I could be wrong about that, and I can't think of how it would work. Well, then I'm gonna I'm gonna give up up on this train of thought. But I do have one more handheld projectile kind of handled, one more projectile weapon. But I'm

gonna hit you with I would I would suspect. First of all, I beg you not to hit me with that projectile weapon because okay, I'm a delicate man. And also I can't wait to hear it. But first, let's take a quick break. Okay, so I've been waiting. I'm not going to hit you with it. I throw it at you. Is that better. So there's this device called a weirding module. And this is a real corner case one, but I know it's one that you liked because you

like done. It is in the movie version of Dune, not the book version of Dune, mainly because the director of the movie version did not want to have Kung Fu on sand for his movie, so he replaced the Betty Jesser at Martial Art the weird Ing Way with the Weirding Module, which is a sonic sound based weapon uh that uses specific sound turns specific sounds into attacks. For instance, the name of the hero in the story what dbs as as in a you know, we get

the tradees uh freeman name yes, yes uh. And so in the books they do use some some sonic technology in the later books for detecting people underground and crowd control and things like that. But what about this this sonic weapon that can that can break rocks that can break Because in the scene where they first show it off the the protagonist has one of these and the modules look really weird too. There are these things that mount on like the hand. It doesn't look like you know,

it's not like a gun shape. Um. But he uses it to destroy a a an obelisk of rock after other people have uh kicked it, punched it and tried

to cut it and then yelled at it. Um. And then he shows, I mean when I kick in punch rocks, it doesn't do much either, right, So he he uses it to show that that it can convert the sound of his voice into a something powerful enough to shatter the rock um And just as a little side note about the martial arts thing, you know the martial arts in the book, It allows people to essentially teleport very short distances, they can move faster than they would physically

be able to, and appear on a different part of a person and punch them. And Lynch did not know how he could possibly pull that off and make it look good in the post matrix world. Uh, I think it's entirely possible. So I suspect we'll see that in the upcoming movie. I I suspect so as well. You haven't watched the trailer for it, but I haven't seen that in the trailer I have seen. I've seen teasers. Maybe I haven't seen the specific trailer that that. So

there's a trailer that shows the weirding way. There's a trailer that shows somebody's head or hand or some part of their body vibrating at like a ridiculous speed. I'm gesturing like you can all see it on audio, but I can tell you that she was, in fact making her hand vibrate faster than the I can see, uh, largely because her web. So the weirding module using sonic signals as a weapon. This is not that far off from things that we actually have. We do not have

anything that could shatter a rock obelisk like instantaneously through sound. However, Uh, sound is a physical phenomenon. So when we hear sounds, what we're hearing are there's fluctuations in air pressure, and those fluctuations affect our ear drums, and then we we interpret that we experienced that as sound. Right, so we're

all we're talking about vibrations. So you are talking about stuff moving and while that stuff is just air, and air has very low mass, you get enough air moving that low that you know, enough of it is enough to do massive things. Otherwise tornadoes wouldn't be a problem, right, I mean air can air can do some serious damage if it's moving powerfully enough and there's enough of it. Uh. That being said, the something that's directed as that would

be very difficult to do. But you can create directed beams of acoustic energy, and in fact, we do have materials that do this UM and they have been used in weapons. The long range Acoustic device or l RAD is an example of that that was developed by the military.

The original purpose was to outfit naval ships with these what what amounts to a very powerful, very directed speaker, and you can point the speaker at a target, and because of the way the sound waves emerge from the speaker uses the special approach where the center of the speaker is very much directed at a target and the outside of the speaker puts a an out of phase sound signal to keep the central part focused. So it's

almost like a laser, you can. You know, usually sound waves spread out from their point of origin and they diffuse, so it's broadcast. This is more directed, and it was originally meant as a way to communicate to another boat that is far away that you don't have radio communication with,

so you can say turn away or whatever. Or you can use an alarm and use it as a deterrent, because you could use an alarm in the range of human hearing, make it really loud, really uncomfortable, pointed at say a boat of pirates, and deter them from coming towards a ship. And we have since seen various police forces outfitted with these as well and have used them, uh to um notorious effect on things like protests for

a method of crowd dispersal. But the problem is that these l red devices can can put out sound at a decibel level high enough to ruptu your ear drumps, and if you are in the direct path, it can be enough not just to burst your ear drumps, which means you're deaf, it can also cause disorientation and nausea

and and I mean some severe health effects. So while we don't have a sonic weapon capable of breaking you know, a statue just by blasting some sound at it in a second, we do have things that can do some pretty serious damage. And if you tune a sound wave to the resonant frequency of a substance, meaning that when the sound hits it, it's hitting it at a frequency that the substance naturally already vibrates that then it'll start to amplify that vibration. You can make a sub since

break apart that way. That's how we see like opera singers breaking crystal glasses. It's the same sort of idea, but again, uh, it's a little more complicated than wearing a glove and humming in it and having it blasts apart of rock. Yeah, it makes sense that l rads can can cause some damage to people because when I punch and kick people, not that I do, that causes damage more than me punching and kicking rocks. Um, So it seems like doing is the closest to reality as

far as projectile weapons. But I'm going to go back to Star Wars because they're losing so far in the reality Wars. This will really help them catch up. So I'm gonna I'm gonna veer off from projectile weapons because obviously they're losing there. What about handheld weapons, specifically a lightsaber?

It's a plus. It's a plasma blade, listen, I know, powered by a Khaiber crystal which is actually both organic and inorganic for anybody who doesn't know, which is probably like two people to the force as well and and attuned to the force. Yeah, so if you're the dark Side, you can force it to do your will, but it might make like it might make the crystal bleed, or it might make you go insane like Darth Vader had

crazy visions from it um. And it works in conjunction with the power cell and modulation stircuits and an energy greate and a blade emitter shroud and in a mitter matrix and a hilt activator. So you need the force to use it, but you still need a little button to activate what the goodness of well, I mean, so they're pretty customizable. But is that possible? Uh No? But

um no, with some No, with some qualifiers. No, with some qualifiers, because you can make something that can do stuff that a lightsaber can do, but it is not a lightsaber in the sense of Star Wars. Now, to be fair, Star Wars I think falls into kind of a fantasy science fiction. It's it's it's more of a fantasy than than hard size fi. Uh. We've already talked about plasma and how that's an ionized gas and it diffuses after a while. But what you can do, um is, well,

you got a couple of options. There's actually these guys that do incredible videos, Hacksmith Industries. I don't know if you've ever seen their stuff Aerial Yeah, I have. I think I think I know where you're going with this. They've got a couple of different versions of lightsabers that they have built over the years, and one of them involves having a metal rod that that comes out of a hilt and then they use a means of heating up that metal rod to the point where it's glowing,

so it's hot enough to cut through stuff. And in that case, you're like, well, it glows like a lightsaber. It can make contact with another lightsaber like a lightsaber, and it can cut through stuff like a lightsaber. And it can cauterize like a lightsaber. It can cauterize like a lightsaber. That's true. However, it can't extend or retract.

I mean it's a it's a solid piece of metal um and uh and and you when you turn it off, you gotta wait a while before that blade is you know, not so hot that it would make wood just burst into flame if you touched it to it. So then they made one that they called more of a plasma lightsaber. I take a little issue with that terminology, but only a little. And they used a nozzle so that they could inject oxygen and I think propane together to create a mixture and they and it lights and it creates

a very controlled flame that is more or less lightsaber shaped. Um. They can even control the color of the lightsaber by adding in different stuff into the mixture, because when you burn different stuff, you get different colors of flame, right, So unlike a lightsaber, where it's the kyber crystal that makes the color. The word saber, which I guess could be also additives to the crystal. I mean the the Sith were known for having synthetic crystals, which were the

red ones, at least in some versions of Star Wars Lawer. Uh. There are a lot of different versions of Star Wars Lawyers, So it's I don't even know what's cannon anymore. So, um, but yeah, the the the blade that they made was I would call it more of a fire than a plasma. I mean, granted, it was hot enough where I'm sure it was it was a plasma in that sense, but it wasn't like electrified or ionized gas in the sense of what a plasma typically would be. But it was

hot enough to cut through metal. It could uh you know, it could extend and retract. The only thing that it can't do that a lightsaber can do, as we've seen the movies, is if you had two of them and you swung about each other. Uh, they would not have like made contact, Like you wouldn't have a physical contact where you'd feel that feedback they might combine into one enormous flame, which would be terrifying, but they would not

behave as a lightsaber in that sense. Yeah, I know that lightsabers can make contact the weapons that lightsabers can make contact with, or the items that lightsabers can make contact with other than like a certain kind of animal and a certain weave of fibers, which are actually used another weapons and tools to combat that is energy conducting weapons. So it sounds like the weapons that conduct energy are the ones that can kind of make contact with the

lightsaber without just being cut in half. It doesn't sound like either of these would be affected at all by now. And also, one other thing I was going to mention is that I could have allowed, because you know, Star Wars has magic, and it's the force, the forces magic, Right, I could have allowed that a lightsaber only holds its form because of a Jedi using the forced to keep the lightsaber in that form, right, Because which is why you need the trade, because otherwise it would be the

other issues that we've had with you. The whole idea of plasma is that it blooms so quickly after being released unless you have some sort of powerful nozzle to keep it in the right shape. However, we know that's not the case because Han Solo picks up a lightsaber to cut open the belly of a tonton and Han Solo does not have a command of the force. So we know that you can you can use a lightsaber even if you're not a Jedi. Uh, it's just not

recommended because they're so dangerous. You know, you probably cut off your belt loop and your leg. Okay, so not lightsabers. But what about vibra weapons, So like vibro swords, vibro blades, things like that that use high speed sonic vibrations to

make a weapon more deadly. Through a vibro generator in the hill to it's sense sonic pulses that makes it vibrate and kind of like and even though they have serrated vibra weapons, it kind of makes it to me like the ultimate serrated weapon because it hits you and it causes mass destruction because of that vibration. So we don't have weapons like this, but we do have tools

that do this. It's absolutely a viable technology because when you think about it, the sonic vibrations, those vibrations, like if you think about a tool like a saw. The way a saw works is that you drag the saw back and forth across whatever it is you're cutting, right, band saw, handsaw, reciprocating saw, any of those things. Um, that that's that. That's that cutting action that can help you cut through various materials. A vibrating blade is essentially

doing a saw motion. It's just doing it in very very fast succession, and it's doing very small you know, uh, full length motions. It's not going as far out as like a band saw, wood or something. Um. We do have these. There are ultrasonic knives. These ultrasonic knives are typically used for is like crafting. You don't use them for attacking enemy soldiers or something. Crafting sounds more fun. And also it can be a doggy dog world among crafters.

I mean, those makers can can get mean. So in those cases, it's used for stuff like cutting through rubber or plastic, uh not typically the harder materials, but it's really good at cutting through softer materials without having to

worry about the blade being super sharp. Like the blade needs to be sharp enough to to make a cut, but it doesn't have to be like razor sharp in order to be effective because the ultrasonic frequencies are providing the mechanical action that makes up for a lack of sharpness on the part of the weapon or in this case, the tool. Now, ultrasonic knives also typically how are connected

to a base station of some sorts. So you've typically got like a a little control station, and then you have a wire that goes to the knife and that provides the the energy needed to vibrate it. You've got a transducer in there, that's what is actually converting electricity into the vibrating energy you need to uh to create those ultrasonic vibrations. But otherwise, I mean, like the principle is sound. Again, you run into the issue of needing to figure out where you put your power supply in

order to run this for any appreciable length of time. Um. Even with the the lightsaber thing we mentioned earlier with the the Hexmath Industries, they had a backpack connected they called it a proto saber, which is in Star Wars law as well. But they had a backpack that would

hold the fuel that would feed into the lightsaber. And even then it was only good for about five minutes of operation if you wanted to use it for more than that, you had to hook up you know, another like fuel tank of oxygen and a fuel tank of propane in order to do any appreciable work with it. Same sort of thing. When you're getting to the energy sources for something like this, you would still have that issue.

It would it would drain a battery pretty quickly if you're talking about a uh an ultrasonic transducer that could vibrate a significant blade for a decent amount of time. So, but it's there's nothing, there's nothing wrong about the premise. Okay, Star Wars, good on you. You've got something almost kind of sorry, right all right, so, uh we haven't. There's another weapon that does have a power source, albeit it's an art reactor whip lash yeah yep from Iron Man.

Wiplash from from Iron Man to or the comics uses uh an iron Man mark arm to make yeah to to make his his armor. And also these electric whips that are electromagnetic whips that are made from the copper wires of the electro magnetic motor that powers his suit. So could you make copper wire electromagnetic whips? I mean you could make up that you could du a wheel and make them spring loaded. And I wouldn't recommend it, um because I mean, essentially what he's using our live

wire electric wires as whips, right, dangerous stuff. Uh. So it's you could have. You would have to have very high voltage going through them to do any significant damage the way you see in the movie, Like it's essentially gotta behind the voltage to again plasma, I fi the air that's immediately around the whips, because that's what it looks like. It looks like it's got a plasma sheath around it. So, Uh, these would have to have an incredible amount of juice coming from them, which is where

you get that arc reactor. Uh. The arc reactor that Iron Man uses, at least in some sources, is said to be able to provide three giga jewels per second of electricity, which is essentially a maniature fusion reactor. The nuclear reactors that we have today that we use for electricity are fission reactors. They split atoms, fusion reactors fuse atoms together. They are incredible, entirely possible. We have some

fusion reactors, uh that are research facilities right now. The problem with fusion reactors is it takes so much energy to get that reaction started that the energy you get out from running the reactor is less than what it took for you to start it. So imagine like it took you ten times as much energy for you to start an electric mower as it would for you to

cut the grasp by hand. You would sit there and say like, well, yeah, I've got a device that cuts my grasp, but it actually is more work to start it than it is for me to cut my hand. Um. Same or a thing with fusion reactors right now. But if we can ever solve that, it would be a massive help to uh to our energy needs. That being said, it's also something that runs super hot, despite the claims of cold fusion, So having it as something that operates

your heart not recommended you die. Um So you probably wouldn't even want to really wear it. You wouldn't want to be near it. You would want a lot of shielding with like active cooling systems between you and it. But moreover, it wouldn't be strong enough. You can't make something that small. You can't make it at all right now. You can't make something that small, which means you don't have the energy source you would need to be able

to create that incredible effect. So again, it's something that looks cool in movies but is not practical. Uh, and certainly not possible in the implementation we see in the film. So, um, I'm sad that whiplash gave me whiplash, not not at least without you said protection force fields, So, force fields and force shoots. I look forward to talking about this, but first I'm going to take another break. All right. Just before the break, Aerial, you said something about force shields.

Are you Are you thinking about stuff like the bubble? Yes, force shields, force fields, whatever you want to call it, barriers made of plasma, energy, other particles, usually without mass, to either contain mass or keep mass out, or to contain energy or to keep energy out. They work in so many ways, in ways that are are amazing and largely impossible. Sadly. Um, yeah, because for one thing, like like some of the force fields we see, they can

protect against anything, right, energy or physical. It just bounces off. I can't think of anything that would be able to do both. Uh. That being said, there are certain things

that that are akin to a force field. Like you could argue that the Earth's magnetic field is kind of like a force field, because the magnetic field is what helps protect us against certain charged particles that get ejected by the Sun. And these charged particles have the potential to do some pretty serious damage to us if they were able to get to us. But through a combination of our atmosphere, which also serves as sort of a force field, and the magnetic field of the Earth, that

doesn't happen. Now, what can happen is that we can get bombarded with uh energized particles that we will then actually see as a result here on Earth. Because you've heard of the Aurora borealis, right, Yeah, when we get hit by those sort of energized particles, you can get

some really spectacular aurora. In fact, in years past when we've had particularly eventful solar events, there have been aurora's reported as far south as like Texas being in which normally, you know, you can only see them if you're in the really the northern part of the globe, like you know, up in Canada. What that's doesn't feel that far north

to me. It's pretty far north from where we are areal but that also makes me feel like raising Dion is almost could maybe hypothetically be accurate because everybody got their powers from an Aurora borealis. I mean if that were the case, though, then you might get your powers next time you pass really close to your fridge if you happen to have a lot of permanent magnets attached to it. Uh don't. I mean I get a lot of powers whenever I passed by my fridge. It's called

the power of making yogurt disappear yogurt. All right, Well, I don't have any more weapons. Well that's okay. I mean we can talk about a couple of of non weapons sci fi gadgets, and like we said, we have a lot of these. We know that this is a long episode, so well, let's just do a couple more aerial and then after that we'll regroup and see if we would like to do a part two to this

sounds good. Well, then if we're only going to do a couple, I'm going to focus on one of my favorite properties, Doctor who uh exactly uh and doctor who is very very famous for a sonic screwdriver, which is kind of like a miracle multitool um. You know, each doctor creates their own or time Lord and some people who are not even doctors have created that them with certain technological help. You know, they're only really thwarted by wood or deadlock seals, which are also very very vague.

And the occasional hair dryer can thwart a sonic screwdriver. That's dr ten um, and they can. So I'm gonna start there, because even though the sonic screwdriver has grown to be this massively powerful, tiny little tool, the original was a tool that just was a beam of ultrasonic sound that would uh cause something to vibrate, like let's say a screwdriver. It would vibrate to loosen the screw and then use directional waves to turn the screw sonic screwdriver.

That was the original form of the sonic screwdriver. That seems it could also have an ultrasonic energy lance to use as a soldering iron, but that seems a lot more plausible than this thing that can self repair and send out homing signals to find missing parts. So yeah, very basic sonic screwdriver, the basic sonic scoogever you described it is interesting, Uh, creating the specific directions is a bit of a challenge, though not impossible, and we have

seen people use sonic waves to do incredible things. There's a thing called acoustic levitation, and it's exactly what it sounds like. It's using sound waves to make an object float uh And it's it's entirely possible because again, when you think about what sound waves are, it's really the fluctuations of air pressure. It's vibrating air molecules, uh. And if you vibrate them in a specific way, you can

achieve some pretty incredible results. Getting back to that resonant frequency idea, if you were to be able to detect what the resonant frequency of a specific surface was, and then you were able to replicate that at a uh an amplitude of volume high enough, you can make that thing start to share, make itself apart. So in some ways this kind of works like you could create a vibration powerful enough or at the really at the right frequency to cause something to shake itself to pieces. That's

entirely possible. You would first have to figure out what that resonant frequency is, and a lot of stuff like is be kind of tricky to figure that out, whether or not you could amplify it enough to to do enough of damage to it as another question, but at least on that basis of the idea of using sound waves to move stuff that's legit using everything else I

don't know. Yeah, well, and that also takes out the whole thing of sonic screw drivers don't work on wood, which occasionally they did, because yeah, no, that's that's entirely true, Like there's no reason it wouldn't work on would at least for that purpose, Like wood takes vibration really well actually so uh yeah, that that honestly makes no sense from the perspective of this is working on ultrasonic frequencies

if it's truly a sonic tool. Um, it's funny because we really think of it in storytelling terms as a d O sex makina, that idea of the god in the machine. This is the the get out of jail free card that lets our hero get out of a

seemingly impossible situation. The writers have written our hero into a scenario where they can't figure out any other way to get them out, so they have to use a tool that magically lets them out of that unless but you know, once you create that, you can't make the genie go back in the bottle, right, so now the genie is out of the bottle. That's why you have the deadlocks. So now you yeah, and and and the hair dryers just whenever you whenever you need it to

not work, then you just throw something in there. So it's it's it's a two well that does whatever the plot needs it to do, and it doesn't work whenever the plot needs it to not work, just like superhero characters. You get the eternals. All right, So I'm just gonna do one more piece of technology from Doctor Who. And don't worry. I know this one doesn't exist, but I guess my curiosity is whether we have anything that works similarly. So Doctor Who uses psychic paper, explain what that does? Uh,

psychic paper works with fractal lines and weak minds. Doesn't work on William Shakespeare though, No two, he's not a weak mind, apparently to project what the holder of the paper wants the viewer of the paper to see onto the paper, which means if you're not particularly strong minded, you're not used to using the psychic paper, you don't

know you're using psychic paper? Could I mean that you're just putting out whatever random thoughts you're thinking that the other person can see, and that's a whole another can of worms. But for the purposes of this conversation, do we have anything other than the power of suggestion that works similar real? Get ready, because I think I'm going to surprise you with this one. Uh, I'm ready. You've heard of brain computer interfaces, but explain them to me,

just just for funzies. So, a brain computer interface is exactly what it sounds like. It's a it's a way to connect a brain with a computer system, and typically it involves invasive surgery, like implanting electrodes into the brain of the person who's going to use it. So when we talk about implementations of this, it's usually with people who have lost mobility. They don't have control of their limbs um, and it's a way to try and extend their mobility and their intend indens by creating a way

to interface with computers and robotics just using thought. So we started working with these technologies and have made some really interesting progress. And it all involves training the person to use the technology and train the technology to work with the person to get the output that you want. Um. And so we have started to see this relationship between thought and computer systems that uh, it's not quite the

same thing. Obviously, it's not the using of suggestion to implant uh an idea and to the thoughts of people. It's using thought to control technology. However, there have been some early experiments that are still in the very early phases of using brain to brain communication with a computer system as the intermediary. So in other words, you get to people who have these brain computer interface UH surgeries and they are attempting to send meaningful information to one

another without ever speaking. They may not even be able to speak, and we still have a long way to go with that, but there's some interesting promising results to that, which could mean you could reach a point where one person could potentially implant a thought into another person. There's something else that I want to talk about if we do a part two to this that involves a different technology that it talks about mice and fiber optic lines

and the implanting of false memories. Uh, these are all possibilities. That's that's a little frightening, but it does mean that like if I pick up some psychic paper or this technology paper, let's paper that can take down these brain wave thoughts that I'm sending to it, that it's not gonna if I'm unbeknown start spill like my dirty laundry and crazy thoughts to the world because I'm holding it.

Unless I've also had this brain interface. It's not something like we're not gonna magically developed telekinetic or telepathic powers. There's nothing like that. The power suggestion is a real thing. Um you know, it's it's it is. It is possible to reshape people's memories so that to them it seems as though they're remembering something that really happened, when in

fact the whole thing was fabricated. We've seen that happen where you know, if you just repeat something enough times to someone, it gets to a point where in their brains it's as if that actually has happened, right Like that is something we see that with uh, you know, brainwashing techniques too. But it's nothing as as sudden as glance at this piece of paper that otherwise will appear blank. However, to you, it's going to seem to be whatever it is I want you to see, right, We can't can't

do that. But the again, the elements are there where we start to see potential corollaries in the real world. It's just not going to appear as the exact implementation that we see in Doctor Who, which is a shame because everything else in Doctor Who factual. You know, I was gonna say, look, Doctor Who is two for two on possible, so vaguely possible, vaguely possible in the thinnest slice of possibility. Uh. In my mind, Doctor Who wins

the Today's Conversation doing better than Star Wars. Right now, we've got We've got a lot more of these. Actually, in fact, I'm looking right now through our outline and we we haven't even touched on some of the stuff that we've got in our outline where we can come back and do another one. So Arial, if you're game, I'd love to have you back. I would love to do well. Something else we want to talk about before we sign off is that show that we're launching. It's

launched today. You can find it on the I Heart Network. You can also find it wherever you get your podcasts, and it's called The Large Nerd Drawn Collider. Uh Ariel want to give a quick background on what that show

is all about. Sure, so this show started as my brain child, where it was actually a video series where we would take some of the geeky things that Jonathan and I love and mash them up and kind of figure out what that world would look like, not making any scientific technology, uh discoveries of our own, sci fi technology, discoveries of our own, but a lot of fun. Nonetheless,

video production is so much work. We eventually decided to make a podcast sister to it, and I heart picked it up, and so now we can share all that geekiness with you. We talk about current geek news. We talked about current geek topics, discussions like, uh, the Goonies effect, where do you love a movie because it's good or because you watched it when a kid? Why don't other

people love that movie? Things like that, And then we do take those properties and we mash them up and we give you pictures on what those shows are properties. The first few episodes are live right now, so you can check those out. You can go and subscribe and listen to those shows. Um, I promise not all of them have me singing in them, but a couple do and it's amazing and you do not want to miss it.

So that that is something really exciting. I hope you guys check that out and Ariel, thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show. I look forward to us continuing this conversation. Uh, thank you for having me going to talk about a lot more sci fi gadgets and technologies and what you know, how they work within their mythical universe versus how would it or if

it would even work in our real world. We've got a whole bunch of stuff like space travel and various types of mythical materials, everything from adamantium to myth role. I think that might be a quick fire appe. Yeah. I mean, like obviously, if you say, like does this really exist and I say no, that's that's pretty fast. But we can talk about we can talk about what does make these materials special and are there any real world materials that share those same kind of qualities but

not not as exotic sounding. We don't have myth role, but do we have something that is like myth role that kind of thing, and we'll we'll cover all that in the next episode. If you guys have suggestions for future topics for text stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. That's the best place to get in touch with me. That would be text stuff hs W. That's the handle, and thank you guys so much for listening, and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text is an I

heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.