The Science of Dune: Biology

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Frank Herbert's "Dune," the game-changing 1965 sci-fi novel full of space-age feudalistic intrigue, rampaging sandworms and prescient mind drugs on a desert world. Even today, the work resonates with scientific wonder and philosophical intrigue, so join Robert and Joe for a two-part exploration of the science of "Dune." In this episode, explore the lifecycle of the sandworm, mentats and the power of the spice.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to blow your mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Disembarkation disembarkation notice to all passengers arriving

(00:23):
on Station Oracus. The Dune Planetary Tourism Consortium, funded by
the great generosity of the most noble House Hardconed, would
like to welcome you to Planet Aracus. Aracus is a
dry place. Please remember to conserve water whenever possible. It
is recommended that you do not venture outside without a
properly fitted still suit to recycle your sweat, urine and

(00:45):
vegal moisture. When traveling beyond the shield wall, remember always
to watchful where I'm signed by keeping the mind. The
three ahs, hissing, heaving and high energy discharge, A hissing
sound in the sand, heaving up with display sediment, and
high energy setting discharge from the dunes may all indicate
that the sand worm is here and the event of

(01:06):
worm signed. Do not activate shields and proceed immediately to
the nearest cave building or evacuation orn't thought or local
vendors and kiosks found throughout Station Iraqis are in the
best place to purchase steel suits, frank hits, and individually
packaged worm thumbers. And duty free prices. Please remember also
the spice must flow. Anyone suspected of sabotaging, inhibiting, or

(01:30):
interfering with spice production may be subject to penalties up
to and including lactatorial remuneration on gaining prime or personal evaporation.
Please enjoy your say among the dunes. Hey, he wasn't
a stuff to blow your mind. My name is Robert
Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is episode two

(01:51):
in our exploration of the science of Done, the science
of Frank Herbert's sci fi classic Done, which is celebrating
its fiftieth anniversary this year. Yeah, so if you missed
the first part, you should go back and listen to
that first part one where we talk about the technology
of doing, and we we talked about some important sort
of introductory materials to the universe of Done. If you're

(02:14):
not familiar with it, we highly recommend that you check
out that part first before you listen to this one.
But if you just want to get thrown right into
the middle, here we are. Yeah, last time we talked
about but Larry and Jehad, we talked about still suits,
We talked about order thoptors and a little bit about
the Holtzman effect, whatever that is. But yeah, this time

(02:35):
we're going to talk more about the the living science
of Done, about the biology and ecology of the planet Iracus.
And one of the coolest things about the Done universe
has got to be the sandworms. Yes, I imagine that
is one of, if not the key aspects of the

(02:56):
franchise that come to people's minds when they think of Doing. Yeah.
I So, I just finished reading this book a few
weeks ago, and I loved it. I absolutely adored this book.
As I said in the last podcast, it frequently struck
me as just amazingly fresh for a fifty year old book.
It's full of ideas that you don't encounter elsewhere. It

(03:17):
just felt very original and unique and different. But the
moment where the book really kicked into gear for me
was the first sandwarm attack. And this is when they're
going out to observe spice harvests. Correct. Yeah, So I
want to kind of put you the listener into the
moment of the sandwarm attack. So imagine you're one of

(03:38):
a group of twenty six spice miners working on a
patch of spice in the deep deserts. So you're out
there among the dunes. The heat is high, the sun's
bearing down on you. You've got your protective still suit on.
You're working the harvester machine, trying desperately to get this
spice going. And you've you've been at it for several minutes,

(03:59):
and over head there's this enormous cargo aircraft. I suppose
it would be some type of ornithopter with flapping wings, which,
as we discussed in the last last episode, doesn't make
a lot of aerodynamic sense, but okay, uh, And it's
called a carryall. It hovers nearby, waiting to lift you
off at a moment's notice, and preferably at the last

(04:20):
possible minute, to maximize the profits, because you've got to
get as much spice as you can. The spice is important.
The spice must flow, the universe needs it. But a
worm will come. The worm always comes it. Here's the harvester.
It knows where you are and the moment you start working,
it's on its way. Now. With proper precautions, you'll lift

(04:42):
off at just the right moment. You'll get the maximum
spice and you'll avoid the worm. But if you're not
able to lift off in time, you may notice a
hissing sound in the sand sliding, you know, it's sand
sliding against sand. In the background, you might a static
discharge in the air, and eventually you're gonna notice an

(05:03):
upheaval of sand is the worm rises to the shallows
of the desert. And then finally you see, and it's
probably the last thing you see, a great gaping circular mouth,
maybe up to eighty meters wide, emerging from the dunes,
spreading open, closing over you, and swallowing you and your
friends and your mining vehicle all in one bite. It's

(05:26):
quite a site, and as far as sound goes, we
do want to give a quick thanks to Chris Knife
double O seven. He's on band camp as Cheesy Nervosa.
Will include a link to his account on the landing
Bait for this episode. But he does a lot of
cool ambient tracks where he gets the ambiance from from
various sci fi properties, and so this was the track

(05:47):
that we used. Hear was Dune sand Worm Ride. Yeah,
so I love the sandworms. I love the sandworms scenes
in the book. When we first encounter sandworms in the book,
it's there merely as a threat. You know, this this
huge terrifying beast that lives in the desert. It's you know,
it's a gigantic snake eel worm type creature that it's

(06:09):
sort of like the monsters and tremors. You know. It
lives under Yeah, it lives under the ground. It can
hear where you are. You know, it might be hundreds
of meters long. They're so huge you can't fight them off.
There's no way to avoid them except to run. Yeah,
and I've seen it describe that that the Frank Herbert
sandworms are are kind of like dragons, and but but

(06:31):
not nearly in just the threat aspect. Not just a
monstrous dragon, but a celestial dragon, because they're ultimately the
gateway to wisdom. Yeah, that's true. Because I don't want
to spoil too much. But then later on in the book,
we learned that the desert dwellers of the planet Iraq
is the Fremen, have a more complex relationship with the sandworms.
It's not just you know, here's this huge, threatening creature

(06:53):
that we have to avoid. They have a sort of
a bit of a back and forth. I don't want
to say too much more, but it's really interesting, and
so I thought we should talk about the sandworm. What
is this organism as it's imagined in the Dune universe,
and how has this changed the way we think about
aliens and science fiction and what what analogies can we

(07:15):
make to real world life forms? Yeah, and for starters,
let's just go ahead and roll through what we know
from from Frank Herbert's books. And again it's one of
those cases where Herbert throws a lot of information at
you about how sand worms work, but then when you
add it all up right, you realize you don't know
key things. Um, here's what we know. The sand worm

(07:36):
or shy hallud I believe that is the fleming term
a creature. Again, you utterly unique to iraq Us, totally
tied to a complex life cycle on the desert planet.
Links exceed four hundred meters, width of a hundred meters
at the thickest point, perhaps as long as the thousand
meters in the deep isolated parts of the desert mouth.

(07:57):
Diameter is probably about eighty ms, so when it's open
and lined with a thousand or more carbo silica crystal
teeth um. A typical worm consists of one to four
hundred segments, and each segment possessed its own nervous system.
Something to keep in mind for later. Now, what Herbert
didn't tell us. He didn't tell us whether sand mourns

(08:17):
lay eggs. They he didn't tell us if they're male
and female, how reproduction occurs at all. He didn't tell
us if it's a definitively if it's a vertebrate or
an invertebrate. He didn't explain the physics of how it moves,
and he didn't tell us what it eats. I would
be surprised if it's vertebrate, simply because I think of
vertebrate as a category belonging to Earth life. I mean,

(08:39):
I think it might have some kind of internal, you know,
rigid structure. But it's weird to think about those, you know,
those peculiarities of evolution that seems so ubiquitous on Earth.
We just assume their natural categories. But I mean, who
knows if a alien life form is likely to have
a backbone, right, And I think that ultimately, the like
the segmented nature and the independence of segments, tends to

(09:01):
imply something that is inherently invertebrate. But but again, he
doesn't draw a distinct line in the sand Well, then
to learn more about the sand worm, I think we're
gonna have to turn back to our old friends that
we mentioned in the last episode, a couple of books
that we used as resources. So one of these is
going to be The Science of Doune, edited by Kevin R. Grazier,

(09:23):
and then the other one is the Dune Encyclopedia, right right.
That one's compiled by Dr Willis E. McNelly, and that
came out in eighty five. It's out of print, but
you can still find used copies in various places. Um,
and I got mine online for like, you know, fifteen
or twenty bucks, so it's it's still out there and
it's not like an out of your reach collector's item.

(09:44):
In particular, that the explanations for sand worms from these
two books. From Done Encyclopedia, we have an explanation by
Maureen A. Shifflet, and Uh in the Science of Done
we have a sybil hetchel pH D's explanation from her
piece the Biology of the Sandworm. Now I'm actually gonna
start with the Dune Encyclopedia explanation from Marine Shifflet. Uh.

(10:10):
Shifflet goes ahead and defines both male and female sandworms
the ladder somewhat smaller than the males, with the secondary
segment of each worm containing its reproductive system, and she
posits that at age one thousand, because these are longer
than creatures. The female develops an egg sac in her

(10:31):
reproductive system, constructs a deep, massive nest, and then attracts
a male with rhythmic thumping. Now this is key because
in the in Dune we see people attracting or distracting
a worm by using a mechanical thumper. Right, yeah, that's
one of the technologies we could have talked about in
the last episode, but I guess we just didn't have time.

(10:52):
The thumper is a sort of you might think of
it as a defensive decoy mechanism out in the desert,
where if you want to draw off a sandworm, or
perhaps even attract a sandworm, you put this thing down
on the ground and it starts beating on the sand
to say come on over. Yeah, with a rhythmic pattern,
because if you you know, there's like the thing if

(11:15):
you gotta walk without rhythm, yeah, you know, unless you
want to attract the worm. So yeah. One of the
things that's frequently mentioned in the book is that if
you want to walk across the sand and not attract
the worm, you have to walk without rhythm. You have
to walk without any kind of uh cadence to your walk.
And I love how they bring up the fact that
this is so much harder to do than it sounds
like like the characters are just exhausted from trying to

(11:38):
walk without maintaining a rhythm of their gait. Right, And
so she ties this into the into the lifecycle of
the worm by saying that it's that kind of rhythmic
thumping but not only indicates something unnatural on the desert surface,
but perhaps the mating cry the mating call of the

(11:58):
female worm. So she says that then the male would arrive,
consumes the smaller female, just straight up eats the female
and then goes into a dormant state. And it's during
this state that the heavy duty spice fiber egg sac
remains intact and it's fertilized by the male's reproductive system.
And then when he wakes up, he's gonna spit that

(12:20):
fertilized egg sac out. What yeah, I mean, I've heard
of reproductive cannibalism, but what yeah, this is It's an
interesting uh uh. And again this is you know, her
taking Herbert's world and extrapolating on it and trying to
come with a scientific explanation for how it might work.
It's not this is not cannon by any means, but

(12:42):
it is interesting because we don't see sexual cannibalism occur
in nature that I can think of, where the male
eats the female, because generally the female is the species
and she may or may not eat the male after
he's served his purpose. But here we have the male
consuming the female. The Yeah, okay, I mean that just
makes me wonder if this almost would start to play

(13:04):
with the definitions of what counts as male and what
counts as female in a species. Yeah, I would. I
feel like I would feel more comfortable with this example
of the genders were reversed and the primary primarily the
sandworms are are female. But but you know, either way,
the the best example that comes to mind of something
close to this in the natural world would be um anglerfish,

(13:29):
where you have those great things. So you've probably seen
pictures of these from the deep ocean. They look like
movie monsters. Uh. They've got the crazy faces and that
they've got a little a little lit up fishing pole, right, yeah,
and those are the females. The females are the ones
we see pictures of the males um are essentially a tiny,
heat seeking sexual missile equipped with gigantic nostrils. Uh. All

(13:51):
they do is they swim out in search of a female,
and if he's lucky and most or not, they find
one and they bite onto her abdomen and hang on. Again.
These are the angler fish, real world organisms, nothing from
sci fi. And then there I'm looking. I just google. Sorry,
I looked. I just googled pictures of the male angler
fish attaching to the female angler fish. And it's pathetic.

(14:12):
It's you could go with that interpretation, because what happens
is not only does he bite on and hold on,
but their flesh grows together, their blood vessels connect, and
the male becomes a mere part of the female's body,
sustained by her systems. His eyes, fins, and some internal
organs all atrophy and just leave him as just this
fat flap of skin. This's this mindless thing on the female.

(14:34):
And this way, the male and his reproductive systems are
always there when she needs them, which is a necessary
adaptation in the dark, lonely world of the deep ocean.
That's fascinating. I've never read about this before. I was
really I ran across in the past year or two
and was pretty amazed by it. But that's certainly it's
the case where the male and female fuse into one.
And I guess you could interpret this consumption of the

(14:56):
of the female sand worm is more of emerging and
a consumption since there's not according to her model anyway,
there's not really any nourishment to be gained from the
worm eating the other worm. Okay, so this is where
we start getting into a more complex life cycle. So
bear with me, everyone, Um, when a male sum so,
the male sand word comes to vomits up that egg

(15:18):
case and he takes off the egg case. Eventually hatch
catches into a legion of sand trout sand trout sand trout. Yes,
and now these these this is where we're getting back
into um, into the actual canon of of of Frank
Herbert's sandworm biology, because these are very much a part
of the series. Yeah, there are sequences in Dune where character,

(15:39):
well at least one character I can think of, the
planetary scientist kinds. Uh. There may be other characters, but
not that I recall, at least kinds thinks about down
under the the dunes of sand, there are these massive
patches of life. Then there's moisture down there too, which
is sort of hidden from the surface, which is I
guess being trapped or used by these unicellular life forms.

(16:02):
And in this case we're talking twenty by six centimeter
unicellular organisms. But that's a big cell. You know, alien world,
different laws, right, um. But but yeah, their water scavengers.
So the idea here is that they're traveling out, they're
collecting water, they're bringing them back, according to UM to
this model anyway, to the nest site, and they're sequestering

(16:24):
the water. And here the water mixes with excretions from
the pre spice mass uh. And here the C t
U C two builds up as a byproduct, and this
eventually results in a spice blow explosion. And this is
very much a part of the books, where eventually the
pressure builds up and it blasts that precious spice melange
that's produced uh somehow by this sand trout nesting water

(16:49):
sequestering action blows it up to the surface where people
can say, hey, there's some spice there, let's go get
it all right, all right, So but it's not only
people that want to come get the spice that also
attracts the sandworms, which get into um. And at this point,
according to Schifflet, the sand worms enter a pre metamorphic
stage during which surviving sand trout joining bodies, and as

(17:09):
metamorphosis sets in properly, each sand trout, also known as
a little maker among the fremen, becomes a segment of
a conjoined body that becomes a small sandworm. So again
we see conjoined bodies coming into play. Uh. And this
is this is certainly part of of Herbert's original model
for the sand worm. So this is fascinating because the

(17:31):
sand worm and that sense, it is sort of a
composite organism. Yes, very much so. Um and this this play,
I don't want to give any spoilers, but this also
plays out in rather unique and mind blowing ways in
the sequels. Okay, so how long does it take for
little sand trout joining together to become the gigantic shi
hlud like we see in the book? You know, before

(17:52):
they're they're a big sand worm out in the desert
over over a thousand years. Because it's going to take
that long corners. Shifflet here to segment for the segments
to take on. Uh, you know, the different properties such
as the tooth head, the reproductive system. If you're going
by her model, and during this time of environmental conditions
are not met, then the underdifferentiated segments can revert to

(18:15):
san trout. So it's kind of like those jellyfish that
can that can reverse age, right, can revert to the
earlier life form stage if things aren't going well. Yeah,
I like that detail that she throws in. And finally
the a sexual juvenile warm develops and it's twenty to
thirty long, and this is the form that fremen eventually

(18:36):
capture and drown to produce spice essence. More about spice
in this episode later that's coming up. Uh, most juveniles,
according to Shifflet, would become females, but it's possible that
it's possible that the environmental absence of a male is
what results in male development. In the book itself, we're
told that each male has a three four hundred kilometer

(18:57):
territory that it defends against at worms, and she has
a really interesting bit about how that combat would work.
How do the worms fight each other? If they're just
they're huge worms with big circular mouths. Well, she draws
on a on a on a detail that we'll discuss
in a minute. Um, but I guess let's go ahead

(19:19):
and hit it. How does someone ride a sandworm? Ah? Yes,
Well this is something we learned about later in the
book and it's very interesting. So the sandworm, like the
sandworms like we mentioned, have these segments on their bodies.
They have sort of scales that protects their soft, fleshy
inner tissues from the you know, the harsh exterior realities
of Aracus and all the sand So a Fremen who

(19:41):
is who is hopped up on spice and ready to ride,
will go out into the desert with some hooks and
attract a sandworm using a thumper, And if the sandworm
comes by at the right time, the fremen writer can
get the hooks under one of the sandworms outer plates
or these ales segments, whatever you wants, yeah, and then

(20:04):
pull it back. And what that does is exposed the
sandworms inner tissues to the external elements. Obviously, the sand
worm does not like this and says, oh no, and
it rolls over to protect the exposed part of its
body from the sand, and in doing so can lift
the rider up onto its back. And then once you're

(20:25):
going like that, the sandworm refuses. It doesn't resubmerge into
the ground while it's got a part of its body
exposed like that, because it doesn't want sand to get
in there and hurt it. So you can essentially ride
this sandworm around as long as you want until it's
just exhausted and collapses, as long as you've got the
hooks pulling back the plate. Right, did I describe that

(20:48):
about right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's that's perfect. And and
so in shifflet trying to understand like what its teeth
are for, she draws on this detail and says, well, uh,
what happens when two males are are getting to combat
over territory. They're using those teeth to pull back each
other's segments, essentially wrestling that way. And uh, because again

(21:09):
sand gets in there, it's gonna irritate the flesh. And
she posits that in extreme cases this could result in
a viral infection that could kill a worm, but generally
the loser breaks away, So, uh, yeah, just grappling with
each other, exposing each other as inner flesh by pulling
back with the teeth and eventually forcing one of them
to give up and break. Yeah, and a lot. It's
like in nature on Earth, a lot of territorial disputes

(21:31):
between you know, angry males of species. They don't always
end in death. They just one of them is like, okay,
I give up. Yeah, if you can have it, you
can eat all the females in this region that you want. Um. Finally,
a word on diet from Shifflet. Her theory here is
that the sand worm is a true autotroph that's an
organism that's able to to form a nutritional organic substances

(21:53):
from simple inorganic substances such as carbon dioxide. In this case,
the sandworm is producing all of the nutritional needs from
inorganic compounds on the planet's surface. The energy for this,
she says that it it drives the synthetic reactions to
completion just by by traveling across the sand, which causes
an electrostatic charge differential, which we do see in the

(22:16):
books with a whole You know, you see that you
already mentioned the static charge that tells you that a
worm is approaching and uh. Incidentally, she also uses this
as an as an explanation for one water would be
fatal to a sandworm, and that it would cause the
electrons to discharge abnormally. Yeah. Now, obviously it can't be
that any massive water is fatal to a sandworm because

(22:38):
there there is some tiny amount of water on Iracus.
But it sounds like a large amount of water will
kill a sandworm, right, And it gets into that whole
segmented thing because it's it's mentioned in the book that
to really kill a sandworm, like to straight up kill it,
it's so big. And since each since it doesn't have
a central nervous system Sinich, each segment has its own
nervous system, you would have to just nuke the whole

(23:00):
thing with one of your your handy house atomics that
you're not allowed to use anyway. Wow. Yeah, um so
uh yeah, it's a it's kind of a complex life cycle.
Uh and uh it's it's summed up in this brief
bit from the appendix to dune. Now they had a
circular relationship little maker again, that's our our sound trout

(23:22):
to Priespye spice mass little maker to shah Haloud shah
Haloo to scatter the spice upon which fed microscopic creatures
called sand plankton, which we'll get into the sand plankton
food for shah Haloud, growing, burrowing, becoming little makers. Now
that of course is a little complicated, and we'll get

(23:43):
into that. Because here it seems like how can one
does it? Sounds like one part of its own life
cycle is also part of it is also it's part
of its diet. That's bizarre, all right, And this brings
us to biologist civil hetchel PhD sum Science of Dune explanation,
which uh is also really interesting and I think gives

(24:05):
us our best comparison to real world biology. Okay, so
first of all, she she she zooms in on the
whole idea that san trout produce oxygen deep underground, as
mentioned by Kinds in the novel. But they need an
energy source to produce oxygen, and since photos, since theist
is out of the question because their underground, right, the

(24:26):
best candidate is, of course de hydrothermal vents. That's how
we see it working on Earth, right, Okay, so one
could interpret the san trout as the producer of milange,
and that's then certainly Herbert doesn't really say exactly like
it's just sandworms are key to the production of spice. Mlehunch,
but I don't know exactly how it goes happening. But

(24:47):
of course we don't want them to go extinct, right,
So Hetchel deposits that just as san trout scavenge and
herd water, they may also tend a milang producing fungus.
So in this case then it's not actually any part
of the UH of the sandworms life cycle that produces

(25:07):
the spice, but they are harvesters of spice, right. She's
theorizing that they would sequester stashes of water around these
hydrothermal areas, and this would cause the spice fungus to grow. UH.
And in our world, plants, bacteria, and fungi produced the
majority of exotic compounds, such as psychedelic compounds, so this

(25:27):
would make extra sense, right, the secondary compact pounds that
synthesized for protection by a particular fungus. And of course
there are examples of animals on Earth that actually do
practice farming, I mean animals other than humans. Right. The
example here would be, of course, the leaf cutter ants.
And that's the comparison that that civil Hetchel makes in
this UH. In this piece. The leaf cutter ants are

(25:50):
of course a number of species that are found in
the America's and they cut tree leaves. They drag them
to an underground growth chamber and they keep it moist
to gold, cultivate guy on the leaves, um, and then
they so they so basically it breaks down like this.
They bring leaf cuttings back to the colony along well
worn forest roads and paths. We've probably all seen video

(26:11):
or images of this, you know, very very visual. Um.
They filter out the bad cuttings, they hand the good
ones off to their farmer ants. Then they munched the
leaf cuttings down into a fine mulch. Then they grow
the delicious fung guy on that mulch, lay some eggs
in it, and enjoy. They dragged the depleted leaf cuttings
to the dump chamber along with all the dead ants
and dead fungus. So the crazy part about this and

(26:35):
ultimately kind of sci fi uh sounding thing about the
leaf cutter ants is that they gave up hunting and
gathering fifty million years ago and they became farmers, and
they they discovered the technology of agriculture before we did.
They did, and not only before we did, before we existed, right.
They not only did they find this substance, but they

(26:55):
essentially domesticated it, and it's grown extinct in the wild,
like it's no longer something that they can go out
and get. So the analogy here would be imagine if
leaf cutter ants, uh could grow to become giant leaf
cutter ants that can eat a city. But also if
the fungus that the little leaf cutter ants grew in
their colonies created a drug that lets you see the future. Yeah. Yeah,

(27:21):
imagine all those leaf cutter ants vultronning up into a
larger organism over the course of a thousand years. Um.
And I do also want to know that it's it's
also kind of like a caveman movie in that when
a winged male prepares to leave leaf cutter cutter ant
colony to found a new colony, they have to take
a sample of that precious fungi with them, because again,

(27:41):
it doesn't exist in the wild anymore. I was continually
fascinated by that. Um, we're completely at the mercy of
the ants. If we want this fungus exactly, and of
course we don't want it, but they require it completely.
It's key to their their their life. But back to
the sandworms. Okay, so we don't know exact actually what
sand plankton and sand trout are supposed to eat, but

(28:03):
maybe they eat spice, uh and it and it, but
you know, but it wouldn't make sense. Hetchel argues for
the creature to both create and consume spice, so the
fungus again makes more sense from from that analogy as
well for that comparison as well. So she well, I
mean I wonder you could look at depending on what
you mean by create, you could look at an example

(28:24):
like honey in a bee colony. You know, the bees
don't create the honey, but they sort of they process
the honey. Yes, And I think that would be an
apt analogy here for the milange as well, that the
kind of is a created element um. So she argues
that sand trout communities um are essentially like a combination

(28:45):
of leaf cutting, ant nest and hydrothermal vent community and
in this case, sand plankton and sand trout would subsist
on living spice, fungi and bacterial mats that grow around
the events. She also presents the notion that sand trout
or essentially a sexual and they might sub this as
clone communities for quite some time at least until the
build up of carbon dioxide from their farming efforts trigger

(29:06):
sexual reproduction and also triggers that spice blow the results
from the build up, and then that that would scatter
the newly produced sandplankton. So then the sand worm comes in.
It wants to eat up that spice, and in doing
so it disperses the offspring across vast distances, because of
course sandworms have those large spread out territories. That makes

(29:27):
sense with some Earth earth life too. You can think
about seeds that spread by growing in fruits that predators
want to come and eat, or maybe not predators you'd
call them. I guess they're predators of the plant. They
come and want to eat the fruit, and then they
take the seeds with them wherever they go afterwards. So
now she also goes on in this piece. She has

(29:47):
some some thoughts on size constraints of enormous organisms. If
you want to read about that, do check out the
book to check out her peace, but we're not going
to go into them in this podcast. So one of
the things I've already mentioned that I really loved about
doing is that it's the most ecologically conscious novel I've
ever read. It's it's a novel that really has interesting

(30:09):
thoughts about ecosystems and about resources in ecosystems, like how
resources get used and conserves, specifically water and spice, and
then also about how organisms feed into one another and
create ecosystems. There's actually a section in the book where
the planetary scientist and ecologist Kinds has visions of his father,

(30:31):
who is also an ecologist and lived among the Fremen
on the dune planet, and the vision of his father
says a couple of interesting things. He says, the more
life there is within a system, the more niches there
are for life. Life improves the capacity of the environment
to sustain life. Life makes needed nutrients more readily available.

(30:54):
It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous
chemical interplay from organism to organism. And I think that
makes a lot of sense because whenever you imagine a
a rich, thriving ecosystem on Earth, it's one that already
has a lot of life forms succeeding in It is
kind of counterintuitive from a resource competition or evolutionary perspective.

(31:17):
Places that have a lot of competitions seem like they
they should be harder to survive in. But life creates
ways for other life to thrive, and this is sort
of part of the problem with Aracus as it's imagined,
unless you you imagine it terraformed and seated with other
life forms, as some characters in the novel do kind
of imagine. I think primarily they talked about, let's plants,

(31:40):
some grasses and you know, and settle the dunes. It
doesn't seem to have enough biodiversity to be very hospitable
to life forms. And uh, in addition to the sandworms.
Like what life forms are described as inhabiting Aracus, Herbert
mentions some scavenging birds and a few other carrion eaters

(32:01):
and some kind of scrubby plants. But I got the sense,
I don't know what you thought about this. I get
the sense that a lot of these animals that are
described as inhabiting Aracus are imports from human settlement. I
don't know what you thought. That's that's the sense I
got as well. They're like the scavenging birds have certainly
evolved over over time to to thrive on Aracus, Like

(32:25):
they're there's you know, they're far more conscious. They can
basically hear water, you know, miles away, but that they're
essentially a terrestrial product, while the sand worm is is
entirely alien. So I don't know, maybe somewhere in the
if it's in the sequels, or if I missed it.
In the book, Herbert does talk about other life forms
native to Aracus, but I can't think of any examples

(32:48):
where I remember him talking about that, And and I
wanted to ask the question, if we imagine that the sandworm,
at the various stages of his life cycle, were the
one and only organism native to a planet, is something
like that possible in reality? Can you have a one
organism ecosystem? Yeah, even if it's a really complex organism

(33:08):
like this one. I was trying to find examples of this.
I found one. Actually I think you found it first.
But in two thousand and eight there were reports that
the first known single organism ecosystem had been discovered, and
this was miles under the earth in the moment, I
apologize if I'm pronouncing this wrong, Momponing gold mine in

(33:32):
South Africa, and it was a bacteria called de sulfur
Udis audax viator, it was a rod shaped bacterium, and
it makes its living in a very remarkable way. It
doesn't need sunlight and it doesn't need any prey organisms,
so it lives down there by itself, and instead it
puts together the organic molecules it needs by access only

(33:56):
to water, carbon, and nitrogen in the ground and using
energy from According to this Lawrence Berkeley Lab source I
read on this, hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive
decay of uranium. So this is a it's surviving on
chemicals created by radiation in the ground, almost two miles

(34:19):
under the ground. This is essentially about as close to
an alien microbe as I've ever heard of on Earth. Yeah,
it's pretty it's pretty far removed from our traditional ecosystem model. Yeah,
and so I just thought that was fascinating. But another
way of thinking about it is, if you imagine way
way back in time two I don't know situations of

(34:41):
a biogenesis on Earth, you probably at least have to
imagine that there are some periods in the history of
life where there was only one organism um and then
and then of course we got a branching ecosystem. So
that again makes me wonder if you could naturally have
a planet where there's really only one type of organism there,

(35:03):
it seems like the natural course of biological evolution is
to diversify. But another way of thinking about this that
that occurred to me is that what if it is
the case that the sandworm and its various stages of
life is the only major organism alive on Iracus and
it wasn't always that way, So it could have been

(35:27):
a planet rich with life that has essentially been conquered
by a single invasive species, Like there's one organism that
destroys all eco diversity on the planet. I can say, Okay,
I can see that being the case too. Yeah, where
you end up with just a sandworm only ecosystem because
it's that dominant species in this environment. Yeah, I mean,

(35:49):
one wonders how sustainable a system like that would be.
That Uh. And then of course, if you want to
think about other parallels to the sandworm in reality, you've
of course got the Mongolian deathworm. Ah. Now the Mongolian
death worm is not real though, right, maybe not to you. Well,
I didn't know if maybe I've missed a new study
where the occasionally you see an expedition to to to

(36:11):
find it. No, as far as I'm aware, no one
has ever discovered the Mongolian deathcorm. But if you're not familiar,
you should. I bet you've written a blog post about that.
I don't know if I've ever really covered Mongolian deathworm. Um, no,
I haven't run a crud. You have something called a
sandworm that lives in beach sand, but of course that's
an entirely different scenario. Yeah, that's unfortunate, Okay, Robert, Yes,

(36:36):
imagine yourself at a party with some hip young people
who start passing around the hottest new designer drug. It
is the spice Melange. And Herbert never is exactly clear
what the spice in the book looks like, but I'm
going to try to imagine it here based on a
scene from the movie and a description quote I read

(36:57):
from a from a sequel. Uh, It's it's a little
glass or box. And then inside the box there is
some orange mass. It almost looks like a like an
evacuated insects shell, you know how, like when the cicadas
leave their shells behind after they mold some stuff like that.
It's kind of brownish orange. And then you press down

(37:20):
a little piston to crush some of this stuff in
the glass, and an orange liquid strains out and it
smells like cinnamon. And you can drink it right up,
or you can add it to food or beverages, or
have it transformed into a gas if you're a guild
navigator in a tank. But it's going to be doing
some weird stuff to you. Yeah. And if you're in

(37:41):
Iraq in uh, Dennis, And if you if Iracus is
your home and you're not pretty to a lot of
outsider food coming in from other worlds. Uh, it's just
gonna find its way into your diet. It's just an
ambient part of of water and food on the world. Yeah.
And if you're not careful and you keep taking too

(38:02):
much spice, you may begin to see the future and
become fatally addicted. Yeah, and your eyes will turn blue
despite the fatal addiction. There's something kind of appealing about
the way they describe some of the spice consumption in
the novel. Yeah. They mentioned having, you know, having a
cup of spice coffee. Uh so I think there's some
spice cakes that are mentioned here and there. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah,

(38:22):
you're like, yeah, I would kind of like that a
nice uh, you know, a nice consciousness expanding cup of
coffee as opposed to this, you know, these Red Bull
and Simuda cocktails that I keep going. So characteristics of
the spice in the book, which very according to the
person taking it and the intake level, would be some
of the following. First, I should say that it's core

(38:44):
the spice is described, I think is an awareness drug
and that it changes perception and consciousness. Now, the first
major feature described is that it's the geriatric spice. It's
when taken in small quantities over long periods of time,
it extends your lifespan. And that's something we probably should
have mentioned more earlier on. Like, that's another reason that

(39:07):
iraq Is is the center of the universe, because not
only does the spice enable interstellar travel, uh, it also
allows the wealthy people to extend their lives. Right. Once
you're a feudal lord and you've conquered all your enemies
and you've secured a place in the in the power
structures of the universe, what's the next thing you need.
You've got to live forever, right, So it does that.

(39:29):
And then another effect of it is that it stains
your eyes. Taking spice will will cause blue tinting of
the eyes, not just the iris is but the whole eye.
It's a mind expander. It grants heightened awareness. In some
cases it allows prescience or limited omniscience. I don't know
if limited omniscience is a phrase that makes any sense.

(39:53):
It allows you to have some knowledge beyond your physical
time and place, and the ability to see some ass
spects of the future or aspects of the present removed
by distance, or to share communal awareness, sort of collaborating
across aspects of mind with others. And they often make
geographic comparisons in the book, So it's like looking into

(40:15):
the future is kind of like looking across the landscape.
And depending on your circumstances, you might be kind of
standing in a like a shallow basin and you can't
actually see that far. Other times it's flat. Other times
maybe you're on a hill, and it depends on your
prescient availabilities how far can you see? Yeah, And then
of course the negative that the downside I alluded to
earlier is the addiction. When you take it in large quantities,

(40:37):
you will get addicted to it, and if you stop
taking it, you will die, that'll happen, and unfortunately so.
The idea of a drug that expands consciousness is certainly
something you find in many cultures writing, including our own.
You know, lots of people believe things like hallucinogens like LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, mushrooms, uh,

(40:58):
and the Iowa oscar brew which I think the chemical, uh,
the active chemical and that is d m T right. Yeah,
And so under various circumstances, people have suggested all these
drugs not only provide euphoria and sometimes sensory hallucinations, but
they actually provide access to information or knowledge about reality

(41:21):
that is not otherwise available to people. One of the
most common claims you hear is the sort of transcendence
journey you might call it, where the hallucinogen gives the
user a mental vantage point from which he or she
claims to see a deeper reality or to now understand
that our day to day experiences are not all there is.

(41:43):
I'm sure you've encountered this before. Oh yeah, And of
course it's and that's key to most religions too, that
you have at the heart there's a deeper understanding of reality,
um that you have to uncover Yeah, and I think
that's interesting. I think the the hallucinogen comparison despy is
perhaps quite on point because in a two thousand five

(42:03):
book called Mycelium Running by the American mycologist Pulse statements,
that's a person who studies fungus. Uh. The author claims
that Frank Herbert, Well, I should just read this quote.
It says uh. He says that Frank Herbert was apparently
an enthusiastic mushroom collector himself who came up with this
great system for for growing chantrelle mushrooms in a way

(42:27):
that people hadn't realized how to do before, by creating
this spore slurry in a bucket. But anyway, he says
of Frank Herbert. Frank went on to tell me that
much of the premise of Dune, the magic spice spores
that allowed the bending of space tripping, the giant worms,
maggots digesting mushrooms, the eyes of the fremen, the cerulean

(42:51):
blue of psilocybin mushrooms, the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors,
the Binny jess Er. It's influenced by tales of Maria
Sabina and the Sacred mushroom culleds of Mexico came from
his perception of the fungal life cycle, and his imagination
was stimulated through his experiences with the use of magic mushrooms.

(43:13):
All right, well, then that that certainly matches up with
with what we see in the book. And again bearing
in mind that this is you know, rising out of
nineteen sixty five and mid sixties and and uh and
a lot of the counterculture movements that were taking place there,
and the and the roll of drugs and hallucinogens in
that subculture. Yeah, yeah, certainly, though one thing about that
that was weird. I googled the psilocybia mushrooms and they

(43:36):
didn't look blue to me. I don't know. Yeah, maybe
there's sometimes I have seen have not. Yeah, they look
like mushrooms to me. I've never noticed a blue one. Anyway.
To go back to the science of Dune, the writer
Carol Hart, PhD has a great essay about the spice
milange and the science of Dune, and she makes some

(43:56):
really interesting points comparing the spice to hallucinogens like the
ones I mentioned above, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, uh ayahuasca, and
there are the following changes that you can notice that
are similar. One would be changes to the eyes. The spice,
it seems, causes a more permanent kind of change with
the blue tent, but hallucinogens like LSD and ayahuasca typically

(44:19):
cause an extreme dilation of the pupils. She also notices
suspension of time right, ecstaticus, an ecstatic and sometimes frightening
sense of communion with others, out of body sensations, loss
of self and merger into a oneness, euphoria, death, rebirth, experience,

(44:40):
vision slash, hallucinations, and prescience and life changing realizations. And
I think this is one of the most interesting things because,
like like I said earlier, a lot of times people
take hallucinogens not just with the idea that I'm going
to see something interesting, but they take it with the
idea that they're learning something about the true nature of reality.

(45:01):
They're getting access to facts and useful information. She says,
for example, for the Amazonian shamans, ayahuasca allowed the soul
to leave the body, to search out the explanation for
illness in the individual or problems threatening the community, and
to decide the course of action. Yeah, I I remember reading,

(45:21):
uh some words from Buddhist Alan Watts, who is also
part of You Know the certainly a name during the
sixties and seventies, and he was commenting on the on
the views of psychedelic drugs in the counterculture, and he
compared them to the use of a telescope or microscope
that it's something that you you know, you put your

(45:43):
eye to the telescope of the microscope to learn something
about reality, but then you also have to re engage
with reality. You have to put the telescope or the
microscope down in order to to take those lessons and
apply them to life. Yeah, another really interesting parallel with Dune,
I think is that the effect of the drug, whether
you're talking about real hallucinogens or the spice in Dune,

(46:05):
is not just a product of the drug. It's not
just here are the molecules in the drug and what
they'll do to you, but there are there are a product,
a sort of combinatorial product of the drug acting on
body and the preparation that the user has experienced. So
it's about preparation, it's about departure. States. Some people will

(46:25):
take acid, take LST and just mess around and have
some weird experiences and don't learn a whole lot from it.
Some people might have bad trips, some people might have
what they would consider to be transcendent experiences. And I
think there are a lot of people who throughout the
years have been advocates of controlled hallucinogen use, who lament

(46:46):
the fact that it's taken for kicks. Yeah. I mean,
we look at some of the current research, and we're
finally seeing a lot more research into psychedelics uh these days.
For a while, it was such a taboo area, you know,
really kind of poisoned by uh the more you know,
extreme aspects of the counterculture in the way that it

(47:07):
it gained coverage in the media, we're finally seeing it
being an area that can get funded and and and
be studied. Uh. And there have been some some really
fascinating looks into how the right levels of hallucinogens combined
with appropriate priming, uh, you know, preparation for the experience.
Uh and as well as sort of after uh exploration

(47:29):
of what they felt, it can be used to help
terminally ill patients as they prepared to die. It can
be used in in various therapies that even addiction therapies UH.
So so Yeah, the priming, the purpose, really the ritual
of it is essential. I mean, I imagine a number
of our listeners can think of, you know, some individuals
they've come across before that, at least on the surface,

(47:51):
looks like they are gaining nothing of value from their
experimentation with psychedelics. And and then on the other hand,
you know, there are cases where you know, this particular
thinker claims to have had some sort of profound insight
um intellectually or creatively while trying one of these substances. Yeah. So,
as Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, once wrote, he

(48:14):
said special internal and external advanced preparations are required. With them,
an LSD experiment can become a meaningful experience. So I
think he was one of those people you're you know,
who recommended the preparations that go into making yourself ready
for the mental journey of expanded consciousness. If you don't

(48:35):
put the preparation time in, it doesn't work. And we
see this in the novel Dune because people consuming lots
of spice react to it in very different ways. You
get the sense that when Paula Tradees starts taking lots
of spice and then has his moment of expanded consciousness
begins to see the future, begins to have you know,
heightened awareness and pressions and limited omniscians. It's all because

(49:00):
of the things that have gone into making Paul who
he is. It's not just like he got a really
strong hit of it, you know. So it's the fact
that he's been trained in the Benny jesser At Ways
that we talked about in the last episode in the
mint At Ways, all this that went into making him
who he is also made the expanded consciousness what it was.

(49:21):
You can see that in contrast to another character in
the novel that Twisted mint At. Do you call him
Pider or Peter? Um always read At as Peter, but
Pider might be more accurate. They call him Pider. In
the David Lynch movie, I'll call him Peter. Peter Duvrees,
the the bad Mintat who works for the evil Harconan's
uh he. They say he takes huge amounts of spice too.

(49:43):
He's just gobbles it like Candy, can't get enough of it.
But he does not seem to have this same type
of expanded awareness that Paul has from extended spice use
and it seems to be that it's it's because of
different types of preparation going into the experience. Yeah. I
mean the other example, of course, the Guild navigators who
have been engineered uh in bread to to pilot these

(50:07):
spaceships uh while using the spice. So they consume the
spice in order to safely navigate folded space and as
a celestial mechanic. John C. Smith points out in the
Science of doone, UH, there's a quantum physics tie in here.
So eight years before the publication of doone, physicist Hugh
Ever the Third proposed a radical interpretation of quantum mechanics

(50:28):
that everything that can happen does happen, and each possible
action spawns a new universe. This is what's known as
the many worlds theory. Every time there's an indeterminate quantum event,
the world the universe branches off into separate realities. It's
the very thing that the Bores referenced with the Library
of Babble, that this library would contain not only all books,

(50:51):
but all possible books. So taking the spies here would
have allowed the navigator to at least see the immediate
path of the ship in many different multiverses. Uh, and
then safely, you know, choose the safest path. UM. And
interestingly enough, there is kind of a real world tie
in here, because according to a nineteen seventy three studied

(51:14):
compiled by the RAND Corporation for the US Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency or DARPA, UM, there was a Soviet
plan to launch psychics into orbit. Quote how how much
should we how much space should we put in this report?
I mean, maybe a grain of salt, I'll read the
quote here. Regarding precognition, we found only one unverified report

(51:39):
by a Soviet investigator that a program was being planned
to train astronauts to quote foresee and to avoid accidents
in space. It was clear from the context that he
was referring to pre cognitive process. So I don't know, Uh,
if they did look into it, obviously didn't work out.
But this was a time when you know, the stakes

(52:01):
were high in the Cold War. So if there was
a possibility that there was something to some sort of
paranormal uh situation, you checked it out. Yeah, why not
training a bunker full of psychics? Yeah? The same The
same Rand Corporation report also mentioned UM that there was
a test into psychic communication by sacrificing a litter of

(52:23):
baby rabbits on board of on board of Soviet submarine
what and the idea here was that the mother rabbit
located on the surface might receive psychic signals from the
dying young. So again, uh, this is all unverified, but
but it seems possible based on some of the other
reports we've heard about both the US and Soviet investigations

(52:44):
into the potential use of paranormal effects. You know, one
of the things that's interesting to me about the role
of spice in the Dune universe is that it posits
a world in which the entire universe is completely dependent
on a resource or that essentially produces effects similar to
things that are taboo in our culture that not only

(53:08):
do we you know, not depend on as a society,
but we try to stamp out and say that's not okay. Yeah, Like,
essentially everyone in the book seems to be taking some
sort of um performance enhancing substance. If it's not milange,
then it's the uh you know, they're taking simuda, or
they're taking the I can't remember the name of it,

(53:30):
but that wine that the mentense drink, which I believe
is supposed to be derived from the same source as
Samuda the Purple staind lips. Yeah, so everybody's just cranked
the gills on something because you can't have been on
the thinking machine. You got to depend on the human mind.
So maybe you could say that if we had to
get rid of our computers, there would be I don't
know less opposition to recreational drug use. Maybe. So all right,

(53:55):
you know, we're running out of time here, and I
don't know, we might even have to cut this part,
but I do want to mention the beneath a lack
Sue face dancers before we close out. These are characters
that you did not encounter in the book because they
don't show up until book too, and then play an
increasingly important role moving on. But as we mentioned, UH,

(54:17):
I think in the first episode that many, if they
lack su this is a group, this is like a
faction in the Doing universe that are really involved in
trans human post human um machinations. They're changing the human form, UH,
engineering new people UH to UH to survive in this
post singularity, you know, Postbutalian Jahad world. And so they're

(54:42):
doing things like like essentially engaging in cloning, the producer
of these ghoula's that play an important role in the
later books where a dead individuals brought back as a clone.
I like the sound of that. Yeah, they're the they're
the faction that creates the twisted uh mentats we've already discussed.
And then they also have these face dancers who are
known and feared to spies and assassins um and they're

(55:06):
essentially their shape shifters. They can change their their face,
their appearance, um, their their voice, everything to resemble another
person um and and so they you know, give them
unparalleled acting ability. They serve as entertainers throughout the galaxy
and UM and they're also key at the Laxu diplomats

(55:27):
and conspirators as and as well as just core members
of their society. So uh. There, there's actually a couple
of cool articles about how this might work, essentially, how
a shape shifting humanoid might work as an organism. Uh.
The first uh and the primary one I want to
mention comes to us from the Dune Encyclopedia, and this

(55:51):
is from contributor Walter E. Myers, and he very much
in envisions face dancer biology, a shape shifting biology as
a complex creation of raining, breeding, embryotic manipulation, genetic team
current tinkering, and surgical augmentation. So basically throwing all of
these various everything, we got everything we got at creating
this shape shifting creature. So I'm not going to go

(56:14):
through the entire entry because it's a he has a
lot of details that he throws out, but here are
the high points. This is what you need. Key alterations
include selected breeding for appropriate physicality and muscle control, because
you're gonna need muscle control to shift the face around
and shift everything about. Embryotic stimulation of overdeveloped back muscles

(56:35):
and hyper elastic spine for height control. The embryotic manipulation
of the bodies a psylamic sacks, altering their position and
allowing them to serve in the voluntary inflation of artificial
tubes that are implanted after puberty, thus allowing conscious body
size alteration, so essentially bladders in the body that allow

(56:58):
you to just fill up his needed childhood augmentation of
facial structure replacing certain facial bones with elastic cartilage, coupled
with extensive training to allow total manipulation of facial features.
Cellular embryonic manipulation to allow conscious control of scalp temperature.
In this help temperature, because this would be used to

(57:19):
allow the color manipulation of artificial liquid crystal hair follicles
that are later planted like individually. Genetic manipulation to enable
the conscious formonal control of eye pigment, fetal manipulation, and
surgical augmentation to produce male genitals that are retractable within
a vaginal cavity for visual ginger swapping, so they wouldn't

(57:41):
actually be able to change sex, but they could sort
of retract the genitals into a cavity as if they
were the landing gear of an airplane. Training and surgery
to enhance deferential muscle and autonomic nerve control. Uh So,
in other words, a face answer by this definition would
been extremely complex product uh and no mere human subspecies.

(58:04):
But this is just one take. We also have a
take from Sandy Field in her essay Evolution by Any
Means on Dune, and this is from the Science of Dune,
and she goes into a lot of a lot of
these sort of highly evolved human models that we discuss here,
but she posits that the face dancers mimic their targets
through conscious migration of body cells. So in order to

(58:26):
swiftly change form a face dancwer, we need to wreck
reorganize its skin cells, h muscle, aature and skeletal elements,
a feat they might accomplish through the the dissolution and
recombination of the cell to sell bonds that hold the
tissue together. Now, how might the the lax who have
accomplished this. Here's what she had to say. Quote the

(58:48):
concerted action of newly created hormones selected genetically by the
the laxo over many generations could act to allow different
cell types to move when prompted by neurological signals. Face
dancing then could be a genetically derived ability to generate
specific hormones at will which allow for the concerted movement
of skin, muscle, bone, and other cells to new locations

(59:10):
to create the appearance of another person. So there you go.
I mean, I I appreciate that as a as a
great attempt to explanation. I somehow don't feel like a
creature like that could exist in reality. I mean, certainly
you can imagine some types of uh, you know, chameleon
type elements like changing pigmentation and when we see octopuses

(59:33):
and stuff that have a remarkable ability to change their
external appearance at web will, But the moving of bones
and things like that, that sounds impossible to me. Yeah.
I I do love the the rigor in both of
these examples, because one takes a very um, you know, genetic,
cellular hormonal approach, and the other is a very more

(59:56):
of a varied approach, but also all into just post
humans ibrenetic tinkering. And I guess in reality you could
create a model that is a combination of the two,
maybe draw in some biomimicry by looking to the world
of of the of the octopus or the cuttlefish and saying, well,
how could you create those same sort of flesh effects
in a humanoid creature. Well, here's something I would say.

(01:00:17):
I don't know to what extent they have shape shifting
precision in the books, but I would I would buy
this creature more if it could make basic changes to
its body, but but not sort of target a particular
individual like I, you know, can look now exactly like
Robert Lamb as opposed to just I can look different

(01:00:39):
than I normally look. Yeah, yeah, it would, And I
think in the books. It's laid out that it depends
on how long they study a target. So if they
study you, know, they just sort of glance at you,
would be like a very rough version, but they would
ideally want to uh study you in earnest for a
few days before replacing you. Yeah, all right, so there

(01:00:59):
you go. We're we're out of time. Uh that's the
biology of dooe. But before we go, Robert, I gotta
ask you about David Lynch movie. I've been burning to
talk about this. No, I mean, I read the book
and then I watched the movie, and there's so much
to like about the movie actually, because it's got great
sets and costumes. Some parts of it are truly weird,

(01:01:20):
uh in ways that are really fun and exciting, and
other aspects of it are just incomprehensible. I watched it
with my wife Rachel, and I constantly had to explain
things because the movie does not make sense on its own. Yeah,
it's it's been a long time since I've seen the movie,
though I did last night. I rewatched the intro material

(01:01:43):
that was on the TV airing of it, where they
have the the still illustrations and some narration to set
up the world. Uh, yeah, I agree. There's there's so
much that doesn't work in the films and ultimately led
to it being a kind of a train wreck. But
then there's so many elements that are there well done.
Like some of the casting is just weird, some of
the casting is just spot on. The costumes are amazing,

(01:02:06):
some of the visual takes on the world are just perfect.
But it just doesn't all come together. Yeah, you know,
I I think Doing could be a really great animated movie. Yeah, Like,
imagine if Miyazaki had had taken it on, you know,
because you have the ecological elements that he's all, you know,
it's the president, his work. Oh man, that's a thing

(01:02:28):
that I think was really lacking, and at least the
version of Doing that I saw. Now I heard that
there there are shorter There's a shorter version and a
longer version. I'm not sure which one I saw. Uh.
If there's a shorter version, I cannot imagine it because
the version I saw left out so much explanation it's crazy.
But but yeah, the one thing that really seemed left

(01:02:49):
out of the movie is the ecological themes of the book.
All the concerns about water, about about how to survive
in the environment. I mean, this is a this is
a key part of the book and it's you know,
maybe one out of every three pages is primarily about water.
And this is just not the case in the movie. Yeah, indeed,

(01:03:10):
And that's you know, ultimately a you know, a large
thing to be missing from the finished product. On the
other hand, the movie does have I don't know if
you remember this from the movie, but the strategically inserted pug.
Oh yes, how how C Trades has a pug? Yeah,
and if you mentioned this, I saw the plug shows
up in the still illustrations for the TV version intro.

(01:03:33):
So it's got Jurgen proc Now standing there with his
his beard in his uniform holding a pug. There's also
a scene of Patrick Stewart as Gernie Halleck fighting a
battle and he's got the pug in his arms. Yeah.
I do not remember I in my reread of the book,
I've not come across the pug. Sure they added that
they're pug at tradees is not in the book. They

(01:03:56):
added the pug, They adding the added the weirding module.
Um few other things they add and then left out
some some key things as well, so there you go. Well, hey,
I know that a lot of you out there have
comments you would like to add on the Dune universe,
on the Dune movies, on some of this uh uh,
some of the possible science behind the biology behind the

(01:04:17):
technology that discussed in the other episodes, and we would
of course loved to hear from you. As always, check
out our home page Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Uh,
and you also want to check out the landing page
for this episode that will include links out to these
books that we've mentioned too related articles, as well as
where you can find some of the music that we
featured and uh. And indeed, as we close out here,
we're gonna be listening to the track Aracus by musician

(01:04:40):
Raleigh Porter Office two thousand eleven album Aftertime released by
Subtext Recordings. Uh. There'll be a link to that on
the landing page for this episode. But you can also
learn more about him and his work at Raleigh Porter
dot com. And if you want to get in touch
with us about your favorite aspect of the Dune novels
or the Dune movies, or your least favorite aspect, or
just tell us what should think about Dune or give

(01:05:01):
us feedback on the episode. You can email us at
blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com. For
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