The Science of Dune: Technology

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." First up, consider the real-life possibilities of water-recycling stillsuits, the Holtzman Effect and the war against thinking machines.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot Com. Hello, this is Edric, your gul navigator speaking,

(00:23):
just letting you know that we've begun our approach to
our minimal safe departure for our one way jaunt to
the planet Aracus. This is of course just a precaution,
as the Spacing Guild currently holds an impeccable record of
Holtzmann enabled space fabric distortion travel. And as always you
can rest assured that no making machine has taken your

(00:46):
life through its care, but rather the prescient Milange augmented
powers of the human mind. So set back, enjoy our
in flight presentation of mar deep conversations and our flight
attendant toward check in. Hey, you welcome to Stuff to

(01:10):
Blow Your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Joe McCormick, and uh, I want to thank a musician
or Raleigh Porter for that bit of music there. That's
the lack xoo off his two thousand and eleven album Aftertime,
released by Subtext Recording, and you'll find a link on
the landing page for this episode to learn more about
that work. But it's the title of this episode and
our our intro narration um UH Presents. We were, of

(01:34):
course talking about the Done universe in this week's episodes,
so we've probably heard us talking about Dune on recent
episodes of the show. I've mentioned several times that I've
been reading it. I finally finished reading it. I loved
this book. Yeah, I'm about halfway through my my reread
of it, and this I think this will be the
third time I've read it, and it's it's a book

(01:55):
that has a special place in my heart as well.
It's very straight inched to me that a book written
fifty years ago. That's one of the reasons we're doing
this is that this year in it's the fiftieth anniversary
of the publication of Done. That a book this old
can feel so fresh and imaginative. So much science fiction

(02:17):
is disturbingly familiar when you when you go to it.
I don't know. When I went into the world of Done,
I was constantly surprised by what I encountered. Yeah, it's
so unlike, you know, anything that had come before it,
and and and unlike. Even though it's it's had a
huge impact on the genre. Um, there's nothing quite like
it to this day. I mean, it's uh you have

(02:38):
this space age feudalistic society and it's full of you know,
you have profits, you have fabulous creatures, you have strange science,
strange technology that's changing the shape of life. Yeah. So
to describe the influencer in terms of the influenced, a
young person approaching Done today might want to think of

(02:59):
it as sort of like Game of Thrones in space.
There's a lot of political intrigue, yeah, but also with
with a lot of philosophical commentary. And I have to say,
this is the most ecological novel I've ever read. I've
never read anything as concerned with ecology and the conservation
of resources. Yeah, A tremendous amount of thought went into

(03:22):
the creation of this, this alien ecosystem, an alien ecosystem
that is not only intrinsically interesting, but but plays an
enormously important role in the plot. Right, So we're gonna
do two episodes about the science of Dune, talking about
the world imagined by Frank Herbert In in his novel
Dune and in the larger Done universe, but then also

(03:45):
real world parallels to this science and how doone has
influenced science fiction. Yeah, So we're gonna be discussing some
of the science fiction some of the actual science. But
one of the reasons that they that the sci fi
aspects of Frank Herbert's done, you know, continues to sate
so well is, first of all, it's set a tremendously
long period of time in the future, and he does

(04:05):
a great job about giving you some details but leaving
a lot of the details a bit ambiguous and unexplained,
and you're just sort of left to fill in fill
in the blanks in your own mind, right, and if
you know how sci fi fans work, they will fill
in those blanks. Yes. So two of our primary resources
here um are, first of all, a fabulous new publication

(04:27):
titled The Science of Doone, edited by Kevin R. Grazier
ps PhD uh. It's an unauthorized exploration into the real
science behind Frank Herbert's fictional universe. And it's a series
of essays all you know, by experts in their in
their field, planetologist, cosmologists, etcetera. It's a fabulous book. We'll
have a link to where you can pick up a

(04:48):
copy on the landing page. For this episode. We also
dug in a little bit into the Dune Encyclopedia which
came out in It's long out of print, but there
are used copies out there available for purchase. And this
was compiled by Dr Willis E. Nick Nelly and uh.
This also involved a number of different freelance writers and

(05:11):
and some scientists weighing in on not only the science
potential science underlying the details of Herbert so a Universe,
but also some of just the cultural aspect as well. Right,
it's got recipes for frem and flatbread. Yes, I was.
You pointed that out yesterday and I was very fascinated
by the topic. They're also lyrics to songs. There's as

(05:34):
well as some some some science into how say, you know,
sandworms or faith dancers may have worked. You know, thinking
about the recipe for frem and flatbread, I wonder why
the fremen would cook anything, because cooking is almost always
the cause of much evaporation and loss of moisture. Well,
perhaps they have a special oven, like a still oven

(05:55):
that cat captures all that moisture. Yes, so they seal
off the kitchen and no moisture can escape and then
you can cook. Yeah, indeed, that makes sense. Now, I
also just wanna don't want to preface here too that
they were dealing primarily with the nineteen novel Dune, with
some discussion of details that may pop up in Frank
Herbert's later novels. We don't really get into any of

(06:17):
the more recent works by by Brian Herbert. Brian Herbert
is of course the son of Frank Herbert, and he
continued the saga, did some prequels and a number of
legends of done books with with his collaborator. But I
have personally not read them. I know a lot of
people enjoy them, so um, yeah, we would love to
hear from anyone who who has read those books, who

(06:39):
has additional information they want to share based on their
enjoyment of that sort of continued universe. Right, But these
two episodes we're doing are going to be primarily the
first novel, Dune, and then our wonderful supplementary materials. Yeah,
the kind of stuff that I think, for the most part,
people even who haven't read the book might be familiar
with from either the of course, the Dave Lynch film adaptation,

(07:01):
Oh and we got to talk about that. Oh yeah,
the Sci Fi Channel mini series from several years back,
or just sort of the general cultural residents of the series. Um,
and we're gonna try and make sure it's not too deep.
So if you have little or no understanding of the
Dune Universe, we'll hold your hand through the stands. So
we mentioned it's going to be a two part episode.
This first episode today is going to be about primarily

(07:24):
the technology of the Dune Universe, and then the next
episode we do or we're going to try to focus
on the organic components, the biology and the ecology of
the Done universe. But before we get into the meat
of today's episode, I think we we should just give
a very very brief cursory plot synopsis to people who

(07:44):
haven't read the book but want to be able to
have a basic idea of what's going on. So what
happens in the novel Dune, Well, essentially you have a
space opera in which you have a galactic civilization spread
across various planets right right, and there is one precious
key resource in the universe that everybody wants and sort
of controls all trade, and that resources the spice milange.

(08:08):
It comes from one planet in the entire universe, and
that planet is a racous also known as Doune Yeah,
it's the stuff that really makes uh, ultimately travel between
planets possible. It makes the interplanetary economy possible. So everything
is hinging on this one precious commodity. It's kind of
the It's essentially the oil of the done universe, right,

(08:30):
and you can't get it anywhere else. So the characters
that come in on this story that there are two
main houses in the story. There's House of Tradees and
there's House Harconan. The Tradees are it's it's kind of
manniche and I guess the the Tradees are the good
guys and the Harconans are very very bad guys. Yeah,
I mean the Harconans are they're they're they're a product

(08:52):
of the environment to to a certain extent, but yeah,
they're they're pretty villainous. Yeah, and they are essentially competing
for roll of the planet that produces spice. And there's
a lot of warfare and backstabbing and treachery and double
crossing and and tests of loyalty. But ultimately the main

(09:12):
thrust of the story is the adventure of Paula Trades,
the young son of House of Trades, and his mother Jessica.
While they're learning how to live on the planet Dune
and eventually participating in a journey of cosmic discovery and
revenge and drugs. Like at the heart, it's such a quintessential,

(09:33):
like nineties sixties product, right because it's about a young
man who takes an allucinogen and then save the calaxies.
You know, I never thought of it that way, but
that's that's pretty much right. We'll get way more into
the drugs in the second episode, but today we wanted
to talk about the the technological theater of the Dune universe.

(09:57):
And I think one of the coolest concept that's created
in the book that that Frank Herbert comes up with
is the idea that this is a future scenario without
computers or robots. Right, yeah, it is a post but
Laryan jihad world. Uh So, basically, imagine that the singularity
has occurred. We have thinking machines everywhere that are caring

(10:20):
for is looking after us more of I tend to
interpret more it's like the beneficial aspects of of a
post singularity world in which your computers are not like,
you know, enslaving you and making you weren't work in
their salt minds, but they've just become such a ubiquitous
aspect of our lives, and eventually humans rebel against that. Yeah.
So there is in the past of this universe a

(10:44):
great war against the machines, and it's it's referred to,
as you said, by the name the but Larry and
Jihad from the name Butler, but Larry and Jihad. And
I like the idea that it invokes the concept of jihad.
So it's not just like in the Terminator movies where
there is a war for survival against the machines, or
maybe like you might find in the Matrix or something

(11:06):
like that, the machines take over, they decide they want
to kill us or enslave us, and we fight back.
There is there is that element, I think, but there
is also a deeper, more spiritual element, which is where
the concept of the jihad comes in. It's a physical struggle,
but it's also a spiritual struggle for the soul of humankind. Yeah. Indeed,

(11:27):
like some of the Herbert Frank, Herbert himself didn't really
give you a lot of details on you lift it.
You know, like a lot of the details in the
den univers little ambiguous, and you're helping You're left to
sort of um, you know, dwell on the philosophical implications,
but just a few quotes from the fictional tons, such
as the Orange Catholic Bible that play a prominent role
in the universe. Thou shalt not create a machine and

(11:49):
the likeness of a human mind, thou shalt not disfigure
the soul. And then this is a great line from
some of the appendix material uh in the sixty novel.
Then came the Butlerrian Jihad, two generations of chaos, the
god of machine logic was overthrown among the masses, and
a new concept sept raised man may not be replaced.

(12:12):
I've been thinking a lot about this um just in
my daily life, you know, about not even with like
thinking machines, but just the use of Facebook in your
daily life, you know, the the use of social media,
the use of all these gadgets. And so for me,
when I think of the Spottlerian Jihad, it's it seems
as much rebellion against that as it is against you know,

(12:33):
some robot with a with a laser gun. Sure, and
it's not unusual for our technology to change us, right,
I mean, it doesn't just make our lives easier it
changes the way we we prioritize things and the way
we we go about our lives. One way of looking
at this might be something like agriculture. I mean, that's
a technology that I think a lot of people would

(12:54):
argue fundamentally change the human animal Homo sapiens is not
the same anymore or after we invented agriculture. And you
could probably look at the rise of thinking machines of
computers and perhaps the same way it is changing us
in a very fundamental way. I mean, who knows what
that look like ten thousand years in the future, as

(13:15):
as the doone universe imagines, But it's doing something to
our brains. When we can have vast computational power, vast
power of storage of information, and as imagined by this
sort of singularity, future decision making power that we can
outsource two machines. Yeah, I just think of all the

(13:36):
things we outsourced already, all the things we no longer
bother to remember because the machine remembers it for us.
So yeah, like you said, your your interpretation of this
coming in, I agree with this about the butlery and jihad.
It having something to do with the way humans are
changed by our dependence on machines. So either way, we
end up with a situation in these these books, in

(13:58):
this world where we've kicked out the computers, which humans one,
the humans one. But now the humans have to do
all the things of the machines were doing beforehand. So
what do you do when suddenly, uh, you know, just
think about a business, so you can't depend on accounting
software anymore, you need what do you do? You have
to turn to the human mind to deal with all
that accounting. What do you do when it comes to

(14:18):
navigational concerns? I mean, even in our own lives will
become dependent on these like things like Google maps and
ways right to tell us how to get from point
A to point B. If we throw that out the window,
suddenly we have to look at maps. Suddenly we have
to know which way is north and south. It falls
to the human to know how to navigate. Yeah, and
it gets even tougher of course when you're in space.

(14:38):
So without the aid of advanced computer computation, Um, they
have to turn to human capabilities. Uh, and they have
to essentially breed and train uh, special classes of humans
to to to take on these varying taxing tasks, right,
and so some of these classes that you encounter in

(15:00):
the Dune universe, well, one of them, the most straightforward
upgrading of the human mind to replace computers would be
the mentats. There are several characters in the book who
are explained to be mentats. And this is pretty straightforwardly
a human computer. It's a person whose mind has been

(15:21):
trained and I think in some ways stimulated by drugs. Yeah,
they're constantly consuming some variation with some wine type like
SA sort of supercharge them. It's kind of like a
red bull. Yeah. It talks about their purple stained lips.
And these mentats really do in some ways fulfill the
function of computers. And otherwise they're sort of like advisors.

(15:43):
They're they're sort of the perfect computer human hybrid. They
can do computation, they can store vast amounts of information.
They seem to pretty much remember everything like that. They
do not ever forget any details, or at least as
far as I can tell from the first novel um.
But then also they are attuned to human nuance. It's

(16:04):
something that's not true the computers today. They might be
more replacement for the kind of you know, superhuman artificial
intelligence that we imagine in the post singularity world. Yeah,
and it's interesting too that they have kind of an
ethical guideline to them, and if you want one that's twisted,
you have to essentially it's like a jail broken iPhone. Yeah,

(16:25):
I want to order a sociopathic mentap. Yeah, in that case,
you have to go to the Relaxa and they will
provide you with one. And of course one of them
is a is a major character in the early goings
of the novel. Yeah, that's true. And then of course
there's the Spacing Guild. These are the individuals who handle
in your planetary travel, and this is a very complex,
dangerous arrangement. So you have Guild navigators, individuals who have

(16:48):
been specially bread trained and to varying degrees engineered to
make the kind of advanced navigational computations necessary to get
from planet A planet B without just popping out of existence. Yeah. Now,
we mentioned that the mentats rely on some kind of
drug that stains their lips purple. The Guilt Navigators definitely

(17:10):
rely on a drug, and that drug is the drug
we talked about of the opening spice, and that'll will
go more into the spice and the effects of Spice
in the second episode, but it's a key part of
their outlook of their abilities is not just this computational power,
but also sort of the ability to see the future,
which Spice gives them. Yeah, at least a very limited amount,

(17:31):
just so you can see where your various choices will
take you, and you can, at least in the next
few seconds, avoid the ones that will destroy you. Yeah,
and therefore sort of feel your way through the dark,
uh safely from point A to point B. Yeah. And
then there's a third group of these sort of advanced
humans that I think is is maybe the most interesting

(17:53):
of the three, and also the hardest to pin down
and define. But they're the Binni jesster It. So, the
main character of the novel Poul Traits. His mother is Jessica,
and she's a Binny jesser At trained woman. The Benny
jesser At are a female order of super smart, very perceptive,

(18:14):
highly trained priestesses of some kind who haven't they haven't
they have an aptitude for politics for one. Thing like that.
They are tuned into all the finer points of human
expression that we miss every day. There's sort of human
lie detectors. They can tell what people are thinking and
what they're gonna do by micro expressions on their faces,

(18:36):
tonal shifts in their voices, and that they command a
sort of supreme knowledge of the human animal and how
it works. And they play a fascinating long game too,
of manipulating mythology, um mnemonics and UH and culture to
their benefit. Yeah. One of the most interesting examples of

(18:58):
this that comes up in the novel is the of
them is it the called the Missionary of Protectiva, which
is this fascinating idea that the this order goes throughout
the galaxy, seeding planets with mythology that later members of
the order can rely upon if they're in a pinch.

(19:18):
So it says, if you went to every city in
the country you live in, spreading rumors about I don't know,
prophecies about someone who would come to your community and
save it from poverty and and and everything, and then
you tell all your friends exactly what to do to
fulfill those prophecies. Yeah. Yeah, So it's a FACTULSS fail safe.

(19:39):
And also they were going laying the grounds for future
manipulation uh. And of course at their heart they also
have a breeding program, Yeah, which has some I think
some creepy similarities to eugenics programs. Yeah, Andy, there's definitely
a eugenic vibe to it. They're trying to breed a
specific person what they call the quizstat's hat iraq um,
a term signifying one who can be many places at once.

(20:03):
I thought the translation of that term was the shortening
of the way. Yes, that right, Yeah, I believe, Yeah,
that is also invoked as well. But according to the
Don Appendix, in simpler terms, what they saw it is
quote a human with mental powers permitting him to understand
and use higher order dimensions. So they're trying they're essentially
trying to breed a superman tat, a human supercomputer with

(20:27):
from some precientabilities found in the Guild Navigators, but without
necessarily without the without necessarily having to imbue the spice. Yeah. Yeah,
So in a sense, they're trying to to get to
that next phase of evolution. Uh, in terms of human thinking,
the human thinking apparatus. I don't think you can make
evolution happen, just got await on it. They're determined them.

(20:51):
And then on top of that, you have the beneath
a Laxu who have continued to refine human form and function,
often in ways that push the envelope of a sceptabilities though,
and this you see that, you know, that post human conundrum,
like how much can you change a human and it
still be a human? Yeah? I love this aspect of
the universe, that it's so fresh and interesting that they

(21:13):
imagine a future without robots and computers, because robots and computers,
of course are ubiquitous and uh in science fiction, and
I think a lot of times with good reason, because
that it certainly does seem to be the trend in
human history is outsourcing all of our capabilities to machines
that can do them better or at least do them cheaper,
or I don't know, a greater scale. But here we

(21:36):
have human technology. It is really the wet ware future
universe where all of the things that computers used to do,
or even that you know they can't do for us
today but we only imagine they could do, are all
replaced by human perfection. Yeah, you know, and it all
makes me think two of our episodes in Techno Religion, right, so,

(21:58):
particularly some of the can ndrums of how do I
create a refrigerator that will operate in keeping with the
laws of the status. Right, You're you're having to advance
your technology, but do so within search certain religious frameworks
and religious guidelines. Right. Oh, yeah, because we don't want
to lose sight of that. It is dictated in the

(22:18):
Orange Catholic Bible. And it's not just that people sort
of frown on computers. The Bible says you shall not
do it, right, It's it's blasphemy to do this sort
of thing, so you have to you have to work
around it. Yeah. So the sort of upgraded advanced human
brain technology is a larger feature of the Dune universe,
and if we want to try to relate that to

(22:40):
real technology, I can't see that there's all that much
we could say about it, except that, of course people
can There are some people with exceptional mental abilities. People
can hone their their skills in certain areas. But I
don't know if there's a wine you can drink that
will make you a ment at And I'm doubtful we
will ever discover such a thing because I tend to

(23:03):
assume that the human mind is already operating probably a
pretty close to its capacity. I don't buy into this
whole like, you know, we only use ten percent of
our brains. No, yeah, yeah, that that tend to throw
that out the window when you start and also when
you start looking at like what makes an individual a genius?
You know, it's not just in nature, but it's also
in nurture. There are several different factors. And granted, I'm

(23:25):
sure that the manipulations of the big Bennie Jessa it
would involve both nature and nurture. But but still yeah.
But on the other hand, if we do want to
isolate specific capabilities of these people, say the capability of
the Beni Jessa to read micro expressions, I think that
very well could be trained in a person. Uh. And

(23:45):
then other things like the ability of a ment at
to recall vast amounts of information beyond what would normally
be accessible to the average humans memory. I think you
could compare that to what the really good people, the
memory athletes do, you know, like we talked about in
the memory Palace episode of people make these memory palaces

(24:06):
that like, how exactly does that work? Oh? That's of
course just using a different type of memory and invoking
spatial memory to to memorize say a list of terms
or a you know, or a table of information. Yeah,
So if you have a list of five hundred numbers
that you could never remember, well, what if you imagine
those numbers as objects that are kind of strange oriented

(24:28):
in a room that you're familiar with. Some people can
use methods like this to recall things that we would
never normally recall. Yeah, but anyway, that's sort of the
the human technology and the broader universe of doing. I
think we should now zero in on the planet Done itself,
the planet Iracus, because the physical conditions on the surface

(24:49):
of this planet constitute a huge part of the struggle
of this book. A lot of the plot is just
based around the fact that this is a desert planet.
Water is extremely scares. People are constantly fighting to stay
alive and preserve moisture in a place where every single
drop of water wants to evaporate and disappear. Yeah. It's

(25:09):
like an extremely harsh life and it requires some some
rather ingenious, uh, cultural innovations, but also technological innovations. Yeah.
And I think one of the most interesting pieces of
technology we encounter in the book Dune is the still suits.
So what are the still suits? All? Right? So still
suit and this is something I imagine people are definitely
familiar with from the movies and and and again may

(25:32):
just be familiar with outside of having ever seen or
read anything doing related. But it's a second skin worn
by the deserted inhabiting Fremen of Iracus, and it traps
body moisture and recycles it through tubes, cooling the wear
and also preventing water loss. So they collect your sweat,
your urine moisture from your fecal matter, and then coils

(25:54):
it around you, cools you down a bit, and then
you drink it out of a little a little straw
in your mouthpiece. Yeah. So, if you've seen pictures of
kar McLaughlin with little things dangling out of his nose
in the desert, that's probably from the movie Dune. Unless
he did in another movie with stuff hanging out of
his nose in the desert, that's from the movie Dune.
And he's wearing the at least the David Lynch version

(26:14):
of what the still suit looks like. The fremen you
mentioned or these are sort of the native inhabitants of
the planet Iraqus. These are the people who are perfectly
adapted over many generations to life in this extremely harsh
desert condition. Yeah, and the Fremen they take their still
suit disciplined very seriously. They don't waste any water. They

(26:37):
keep their still suits on unless they're in a sealed
off place that can retain moisture. And it sounds like
a rough life, but it's also very interesting is described
in the novel because of course, what happens to you
in the desert without a still suit, well, you die.
And uh, it's we're told that if you're out there
unprotected in the desert, you can't last a full day

(26:57):
unless you have just a massive amount of water on hand.
It just burns you right out right. But if you
have the Fremen still suit, a proper frem And still suit,
not one of those city models, you can you can
actually limit your water loss to fifteen mili leaders a day.
And so so yeah, it's an invention of of necessity
by these uh, these Fremen who were former nomads that

(27:20):
you know says they were in sunny noahs, in sunny
nomads who popped around from planet to planet, evidently picking
up different technologies and uh and you know, material technology
along the way, which they then implement in designing the suit. Yeah,
and So there's a scientist character in the novel Dune
named Kinds lye at Kinds, who explains how the still

(27:40):
suits work. Yeah, and most and again this is another
example of Herbert giving us some details, perhaps in this
case a few too many details. This we'll get into,
but leaving a lot of the the the nitty gritty
stuff to the reader to to figure out. So Kins
tells us that is still suit as a micro sandwich quote,

(28:01):
a high efficiency filter and heat exchange system. So you
have a layer that touches the skin that's porous, and
perspiration passes through it, and it cools the body in
a manner to maintains the existing cooling process of the bodies,
which we'll get into that's key and problematic. And then
you have two additional layers on the suit that include
heat exchange filaments and salt precipitators. Uh, the ladder of

(28:26):
which is used to reclaim salt. Now why do we
call it a still suit? H? What does that mean?
It's just like a moonshine still distillery. Yeah, you're separating,
which is you know, all about separating different liquids. The
still up in the Appalachian mountains. Uh, that's all about
separating alcohol. But with the still suit, it's about separating

(28:46):
potable water from salt, h and other waste materials in
a wear's excretions. Now, what I immediately wonder when I
encountered this concept is, Okay, that sounds very interesting. I
under if something like that could be done in real life.
But one of the main questions is where does it
get its energy from? Like how how is this distillation

(29:07):
process powered? Because if you think of a still you've
got to boil things. You've got to be feeding energy
into the system to power the distillation process. What's going
on in the still suit? Well, according to two kinds
and ultimately according to front of carbon here, uh, it's
all due to body movement, especially breathing, and in this
and some ausomatic action, it's providing the pumping force for

(29:29):
all of this water. Uh. And again, as we'll get
into that that there are a lot of questions surrounding
how that would actually work. But then, of course, once
the water gets distilled, it gets filtered into these things
that they talked about in the novel called catch pockets,
which is great because then you just got a little
straw and you can just suck the water straight out
of your suit when you're thirsty. Yeah. Yeah, and um

(29:52):
used to be your p Now it's tasty desert water. Yeah.
And it and urine and feces are processed in your
thigh pads, which is a detail remember kind of sticking
on when I read this for the first time, like
back in junior higher high school. Yeah, they just mentioned
that so briefly. Yeah, because it also it makes it
makes you feel like you're you're probably constantly aware of
the like the poop cakes that are stored in your

(30:13):
in the thighs of your your pants. I'm like, Frank,
tell me more about the feces. I've got to know,
Like does it We were talking about this the other day,
Like does it? Like I was kind of imagining it's
it's kind of cleaning out of the filter on your dryer,
except every so often a freman has to stop and
remove this this flat cake of like super dry poop. Yeah.

(30:34):
I imagine it, for some reason as a powder. Okay,
I think that would make sense to Yeah, if you
if you've removed all of the liquid from it, I
guess it could pretty easily be disintegrated into a powder.
You can just sort of dust out the back of
your suit. Yeah, I can see that working. You just
drop your poop powder. And then again, if it's a powder,
you might be that you might easily inhale it. I
don't know. Speaking of breathing, that's another way your body

(30:57):
loses moisture. Right, every time you exhale your you're wasting
some precious water vapors going straight out your nose, that's right.
And that's why on the still suit you breathe in
through a mouth filter and you breathe out through the nose,
and then you have that little nostril too. That's supposedly
reclaiming moisture. From your explanation, and that's pretty much it, right,
I mean, Herbert doesn't give us all that much detail

(31:18):
and exactly how the still suit works, despite how important
it is in the novel, that's right. So it we
have to turn to uh two expert commentators to figure
out exactly how it might work and how it maybe
doesn't work based on our current technological understanding. Okay, is there? Uh?
Should we should we go first to the dune Encyclopedia
or the science of dune. Um? I think we're gonna

(31:39):
go to science of Dune first, because I think this
has the most robust explanation, and then the and then
the doing encyclopedia potentially fills in some some gaps. So
the still suit article wasn't by the editor Grazier, but
was by a different guy. Yes, NASA engineer John C.
Smith wrote this one. UH. The top tackles the topic
at some length in the piece still suit UH. He

(32:01):
points out that we've seen a lot of still suit
patents over the decades since the release of doone, but
they all kind of muck up the thermodynamics, and the
thermodynamics are really one of the sticking points here, um
he made. Ultimately, he maintains that if you take a
strict literal interpretation of Herberge writing the still suit quote
probably would not work and most likely would cook the

(32:23):
wear like a croc pile. Yeah, that's awesome, you know.
And yet we can we can certainly envision technological advancements
that would make a still suit possible in the future.
And and since we're talking about a sci fi realm
thirteen thousand years in the future, that's certainly time enough
for various UH technologies and especially meta materials to come online.

(32:46):
To enable it. Right. Well, okay, well maybe we should
look at this one energy loss source at a time.
So let's think about sweat first. Sow does something really important.
It cools you. And this might not always be the
case if you live in a very moist environment where
it's hard for the sweat to evaporate. But if you're
in a place like Aracus, if you're in a desert

(33:07):
environment and dry environment and you're sweating, that evaporation is
bringing your temperature down right, I mean it's even taking
place on just a you know, a very ambient level um.
Failure to sweat leads to heat stroke in death and
h It's Smith points out in his in his piece
here the Golden Gal and gold Finger, he might remember
she's painted gold and then she dies. Uh. It's often uh,

(33:30):
you know they're saying, oh, she's suffocated, but in reality,
she would he says, she would probably die from heat stroke.
I feel like I've heard a lot of disputes about
whether that person who's got the full body paint job
would survive or not. I think I've read people saying
that that wouldn't actually kill you. Yeah, I think I've
seen people go back and forth on that as well,
all of us missing probably the point that they just

(33:51):
wanted to put up dead naked golden lady on the
screen there. But but either way, if you enclose the
entire body in a sealed suit like us, you're courting
death in the form of heat stroke. And that's one
of the primary design flaws with a still suit. Even
when inactive, the body has to dissipate about ninety wots
of heat just to balance out the heat of your metabolism.

(34:12):
So even if you're not who I'm sweaty, sweat is
still an important process. Most of the most of the
body heat arises from the liver, the brain, heart, and muscles,
and uh it's dissipated through blood circulation at the skin
level along with the primary method of sweating. So even
when passes sweat glands excrete excrete point six ms of

(34:34):
perspiration per day, maximum rate one point five liters per hour.
And it's also worth noting you see images of people
throwing the hood back on that that's still superfood is essential. Yeah,
in the movie, the hood is essential because your ekron
sweat glands are all over the body, but they have
the highest concentration in the forehead and the ecron sweat glands.
Those are the ones that are tied, uh, you know,

(34:55):
exclusively to cooling, not to be confused with any that
have hormonal issues. Yeah, so you said that. John C.
Smith mentions that there are patents out for still suits.
I tried to find an example of a still suit
in the wild. I was looking around on the internet
to see if anybody had made one. I didn't find one.
I did find a Gizmodo article from July proclaiming in

(35:18):
the headline quote the sweat to water purifier real life
dune still suit will save lives. Unfortunately, this was interesting
but turned out to be kind of an exaggeration, so
it referred back to a BBC article about this inventor
named Andreas Hammer who he invented a device called the
sweat machine, which was designed to reclaim and distill water

(35:40):
from sweaty clothing through a process known as membrane distillation,
and essentially the machine spins clothing in a centrifuge to
pull all the liquids out. So if you have a
high efficiency washing machine, uh that it does the same thing,
though maybe not to the same level of extraction as
the centerfuge. But the idea is that I have ficiency

(36:00):
washing machine spins the wet clothes really fast to drain
out all of the moisture, and then the clothes spend
less time in the energy gobbling dryer, but in the
sweat machine instead of the washer water, it's pulling out
some salty, nasty sweat and then it distills that liquid
by heating it and then circulating it between two membranes.

(36:22):
And basically the way the membranes work is that the
membranes are hot on the sweaty side and cool on
the other side, and this creates a vapor pressure differential
that pulls water and only water, so not all of
the other molecules, just the H two O molecules through
the membrane and leaves all the other stuff on the
other side. So they say that one sweaty T shirt

(36:45):
typically contains roughly ten million leaders are about point three ounces,
which is about a mouthful of water. Okay, so this
is your sweaty T shirt is a sip Okay, So
it's a it's a a body water reclamation technology, but
not something that you could actually using a suit, no, unfortunately,
so you can drink it they say it's cleaner than
tap water, and they even they cited one example of

(37:07):
when they served the product of this machine to a
bunch of people in the public at this event called
the Gothia Cup in Gothenburg, Sweden. I looked it up.
That's like a football slash soccer tournament. Uh, And it's interesting.
But looking at the setup of the machine, I can't
really see how this could be incorporated into a feasible
body suit. It's pretty big, especially given the necessity of

(37:29):
the center fugere process to extract the liquid in the beginning. Like,
you couldn't have the machine be part of a suit
if it needs to extract the liquid from the suit.
So I don't really begrudge them a cool headline referring
to a still suit, but the comparison doesn't really seem
app to me. But it is an interesting invention nonetheless,

(37:51):
And of course sweat is not the only way the
body wastes precious moisture. As if H two O, we're
just cheap and abundance. As we mentioned already, you got
to take into account of urine. It's water. The rest
is metabolic waste, salts, organic materials. You can drink a
little lot of it and feel okay, and some people
even claim therapeutic benefits. But it's ultimately like cutting your

(38:14):
kidneys out of the waste removal process if you just
keep guzzling urine. Uh. So you have to take the
waste out. And of course this is also a very
real area of of waste processing technology. Sure. Yeah, reclaiming
water from urine is something that happens in space all
the time, for example, so shipping water to space is
really expensive. We talked about the costs of of getting

(38:37):
cargo into orbit before. Uh it's hard to put an
exact figure on the cost per pound to lower th
orbit today, but traditionally around estimate they used to give
was ten dollars per pound. We don't know how much
it costs today, but it's expensive. Um And you know
that great feeling you get when you've just been doing
strenuous exercise and then you sit down and drink a

(38:57):
whole glass of water at once. Astronauts the I s
s have to exercise all the time to mitigate the
effects of bone and muscle density loss that you experience
in microgravity. UM. So, without reclamation efforts, that refreshing glass
of water you get right after an hour on the
treadmill is gonna you know, that might be a ten
thousand dollar glass of water. Who knows. Uh. So instead

(39:21):
of constantly shipping up new water, the crew members on
the I S S rely on in UH. It's called
the Environmental Control and Life Support System, or the e
c l s S, and that has within it water
reclamation system. So when the astronauts exhale some hot moist
breath on each other, the habitat can recycle and reclaim it.

(39:41):
When the astronauts p or spit in the sink during
oral hygiene routines, the station can capture that water. In
a space dot Com article I read about this, the
author Denise Chow said that without the recycling system UH,
an average of roughly ten thousand pounds of water per
crew member would be quired from Earth each year to

(40:02):
keep the station properly functioning. So it's it's kind of
being in space is kind of like being on Iraqus.
Like you know, it's it's very it's mighty precious. You've
got to hang onto it. And so there have been
a lot of efforts at research for reclaiming water for
space missions. Early space missions like the Apollo missions came
up with solutions like electrolytics, silver ion generators, and apparently

(40:25):
these could disinfect drinking water. They would like remove bacteria
from the water without having to dump a bunch of
bleach or other chemicals in there. Uh. And then today
the I s S uses a more complex filtration system
that's got three steps. It's basically got a a filter
step that gets out particles and junk from the liquid,
and then they push it through a semi permeable membrane

(40:48):
that has these substances and in it that that pull
out organic materials. And then finally they have a catalytic
oxidation reactor and that kills bacteria and it takes all
the other organic compounds out of it. But of course
that's at the space station level. Is still not a suit.
Could you shrink it down to the individual level? Sort of,

(41:11):
but not exactly so uh. NASA scientists have equipped at
least some astronauts headed for the is S with test
demonstrations of personal sized water purification bags that don't drain
energy like the large scale recycling systems, but instead depend
on this process known as forward osmosis. Generally, this concept
is called the forward osmosis bag or fob FLb. Yeah,

(41:36):
and so forward osmosis takes place when you've got two
liquid solutions separated by another one of these semi permeable membranes.
One of the liquid solutions is a lower concentration that
this is probably gonna be your dirty water, and then
one has a higher concentration, and that's this electrolyte filled solution,
which I think is like gatorade or or something pretty

(41:57):
much along those lines. And then the water flows now
truly from the lower concentration solution to the higher and
the semi permeability of the membrane means that it allows
water molecules to pass through, but not larger molecules or
objects like bacteria and proteins. From what I can tell,
NASA is still investigating how well and under what conditions

(42:17):
these devices work. I read a Wired report in that
said that they hadn't been able at that time to
prevent urrea, which is a waste product that you find
in urine, from getting through in the osmosis bag. But
apparently a Japanese TV crew member decided to try some
of the product of the forward osmosis bag. Despite the
despite that warning, and he said it tasted like capri son.

(42:41):
So there's your your free ad for capri Son. A
more recent work I found on the it's a NASA
research report from that mentioned the fact that these osmosis
powered devices works slower in microgravity, and they're testing ways
of solving that problem. But okay, so sweat you're in
kind of gross but at least basically liquid. Are we

(43:03):
ready to talk about feces? Uh? Well, we are in
the podcast. With the larger concern is that we're really
not as a civilization. UM. Feces is of course water.
The rest is undigested food bacteria. But but there's water
in there, water that is ideally worth reclaiming. But we've
actually seen far fewer studies regarding fecal water reclamation. Though.

(43:28):
The thing is, of course this takes place as does
urine water reclamations, sweat, recular reclamation, whatever, via the natural
water cycle on our on the planet itself. Now. In
his um say, Smith points to a University of Colorado
study on water recycling for a MARS mission that found
that reclaim water would be minimal from from specs uh,

(43:51):
and that they'd also have to factory in quote psychological
concerns unquote for the crew and so in in this yeah,
and this we get back to the psychological contagion inherent
in any water reclamation effort. And uh, I mean, I've
I've blogged about this in the past. You have to
be able to wrap your mind around the the fact

(44:13):
that the water you're drinking used to be urine or
used to be part of poop when really, I mean
you can essentially say any water you drink was you
may have been poop at some point in the past,
may have been dying almost certainly, right. But but yeah,
you have to deal with you know, how is the
how is the user in that experience working out? And
it's uh, it's it's interesting because it could be done. Uh,

(44:38):
and we we just haven't faced to die or enough
circumstance despite the fact that we're talking about a trip
to Mars here um. Interestingly enough, in the book Packing
for Mars by Mary Roach, she mentions that NASA scientists
at one point we are actually pondered recycling fecal matter
into food, but they never pursued it at all, just
because of that ig factor. And part of this Sushi

(45:00):
lays out it. You have at the time, you know,
or especially early on in the space program, you have
the very sort of cowboy mentality of the you know,
the x uh uh test pilots who are becoming astronauts,
the explorers, and then you have the scientists, and the
scientists are are are more inclined to to present some
out there notions such as what if you could eat

(45:22):
portions of the spaceship. That was another idea that came
on eating What if the like the insulation itself was food,
or you know, making small cakes out of out of poop,
and of course the astronauts themselves we're not going to
go for that idea on any level again, due to
the psychological contagion inherent in fecal water reclamation. That's so gross,

(45:42):
I gotta admit. I mean, it's one of those things
where I wonder if there's an equivalent to the mentor
the Benny jesserat the Guild navigator, the person who has
upgraded their mental faculties to escape the factor it's an
iculis human the person who eats poop with no qualms. Yeah,
I mean, you know, I guess again it just comes
down to are you in a dire enough condition and

(46:04):
aracous is that is that environment? Now Smith coming back
to sweating itself though, uh Smith has a real problem
with the idea that the suit would allow your normal
sweat process to to carry on um because because as
we'll discuss, it's not just a matter of water leaving

(46:26):
your body and now you're cool um. You need an
evaporation to take place, and he doubts that quote near
normal evaporation process would even be possible in a still
suit for UH. For organic cooling to take place, sweat
must go through a phase change from a liquid to
vapor in order to remove heat and cool the skin.
So it's an endothermic process, and moving sweat away just

(46:50):
whisk wicking it away, as with specially designed workout garments,
that just merely makes your skin dryer, not cooler. That's
why so called wicking fabric u which use a passive
capillary action to move sweat from your skin to the
outer surface of your workout garment. They help you stay
warm during cold weather workouts. You're interfering in the natural

(47:12):
cooling process, not not level because it's not skin tight,
not completely, but it's still preventing sweat from doing what
it does. And I think anybody who's ever worn a
scuba suit outside of the water in the sun for
an amount of time can probably attest to that. You
can you can overheat really quickly in that environment because

(47:33):
it's making such close contact with the skin. When I
was watching the David Lynch Dune movie, I was looking
at those actors and thinking like, wow, that looks really hot. Yeah.
I mean apparently these were these were thin latex body suits,
and of course they were not functional still suits, so
they were having to deal with without with overheating, you know,

(47:53):
falling out from the heat. Uh. And interestingly enough, Patrick
Stewart has apparently gone on records saying it's the the
us comfortable thing he ever wore for for any kind
of a film or TV project. And this is from
the guy who you know who had to wear that
awful Starfleet uniform. Um. I was not aware of this,
but apparently they call it the the Picard maneuver. If

(48:15):
you watch it enough, you'll see that he's always tugging
down on the garment to keep it from riding up.
So anyway, the bottom line here, um, is that the
skin level layer of the steel suit would need to
be a highly thermally conductive layer that allowed evaporated cooling
to take place um again, perhaps via some as yet

(48:36):
uninvented meta material. And yet even then, the humidity in
the skin level porous layer would need to be high humidity,
which could in theory, merely just escalate the whole situation
more perspiration, more heat, and according to John C. Smith,
the suit would have to self dehumidify as well. So
and in order for all that water vapor to become

(48:56):
liquid again so that you could drink it, you'd have
to have condens fation occur. And for this phase change
to happen, which is an exothermic process, you need to
have a cool layer such as you know, a cold
glass on a hot day and you see that, you know,
the moisture form on it, and there's no mention of
refrigeration in the suit, but it would be necessary as
far as we understand the process for that phase shift

(49:17):
to happen. Man, that just sounds like a mess. Yeah,
that's the thing. It seems like it would be af
You don't have a clear understanding of how sweat works
and how how how cooling works, and indeed how cooling
systems work. It seems like it would be a simpler mechanism,
but it's not. Yeah, and now, of course refrigeration does exist.
So perhaps it's just a question of how much bulk

(49:38):
do you want to incorporate into your suit? Yeah, I mean,
can you fit some manner of heat pumping there a
free youngcompressor? Um. You know we have we have firefighters
to use like blue ice packs near the skin to
keep their body from overheating. But would that make sense
at all in a water scarce environment? And then uh,
and then you also have to any of these system

(50:00):
would also involve more power. Uh. And all we have
to go on is that it's powered by motions of
the body, especially breathing, and according to to Smith here,
that would not be sufficient to power the suit given
our current progress on motion generated power, even if we
augmented it with solar power, which again, as if he
because you want to travel by night on aracus um,

(50:21):
we you just end up again not being able to
keep up with with the energy requirements for the suit.
So that's what Smith has to say more recent commentary.
But if we look to the Dune Encyclopedia and the
entry written by Christine Watson. She stresses the use of
still cloth based on the principles of cryogenics of a
cryogenics separator that she says used on a number of

(50:44):
worlds to draw oxygen and other gases from the planet's
happmos here. So here we see a you know, a
futuristic meta material explanation. And as for cooling, she says
that the tubes contained air. At the beginning of the
suit cycle, the air pressure built up by the pumping
action of the wearer's breathing and by heel pumps. At
a preset pressure, the air was released into a holding

(51:06):
chamber in the suit's hood. This sudden release cool the
air by the Jewel Thompson effect, and the cool air
was drawn back into the system and again through the suit,
dropping the temperature of the separating layers. And that Jewel
Thompson effect, by the way, that's the temperature exchange of
a gas or liquid when it is forced through a
valve or porous plug while kept insulated so that no

(51:27):
heat is exchanged with the environment. I gotta be honest,
I didn't follow that. I mean I had I had
to go at it a couple of times. So Basically
it comes down to the fact that the hood would
be kind of a an essential air bladder for the
suits cooling system. So imagine the steel suit. Imagine com
mc laughlin in the steel suit, but with kind of
a balloon hood portion. Man that makes mud deep a

(51:50):
little less a little less cool looking if he's got
a balloon head. Yeah, I would think so. So again,
you have to kind of talk it up to say,
however the steel suit works. It evidently involves some materials
and technologies that we haven't quite figured out in this
ancient day and age. Now, another interesting technology do you

(52:12):
see on Iraqis and also elsewhere in the worlds of
done the use of ornithopters of aircraft that fly via
flapping wings. Yeah. So we are told that the power
of house tradees on their home planet of Caladan before
they move to the desert planet of Irakus is air power.

(52:32):
They're an air force power, kind of like you might
think of the United States on the sort of military
geopolitical world stage, that the power is concentrated in the
ability to strike from above. But their way of striking
from above is not much like anything we would commonly
use on Earth technology today. It is like something we

(52:55):
would commonly see in the biological world. So of course
birds fly by flapping wings, insects fly by flapping their wings.
It seems like a perfectly normal way to get around.
But there's a reason our airplanes don't do this. Ornithopters
can be built, you can make a machine that stays
in the air by flapping wings, but it is not

(53:16):
a very practical way to move heavy cargo or passengers.
That's right, and and certainly that's what you see utilized
in the dune universe, like sweeping down, swooping down to
pick up you know, mobile spice factory off of the
sands before a worm can get to it. According to
Dr James Usherwood of the University of London's RVC Structure
and Motion Laboratory, uh, this is one area of design,

(53:38):
you know, where nature doesn't quite nail it. And this
is kind of ironic because in the field of biomimicry,
we see in a lot of cases we can turn
to nature and say, well, how did nature evolve to
solve this design problem? And oftentimes there they have a
really elegant Nature has a really elegant solution. I'd say
that's especially true on the very small scale. Biomimicry becomes

(53:58):
more and more powerful the smaller you go. In uh
In an essay titled a Flying and Walking Learning from
Nature and this was published in the book seventy Great
Mysteries of the Natural World, which I highly recommend. Um
Usherwood points out that a slow flying pigeon requires up
to four times the power an equivalent helicopter would need,
and hovering is even worse, resolving in pitiful amounts of

(54:20):
lift for the amount of energy exerted, each pump of
the wings requires yet another burst of energy, and it
all adds up pretty quickly. That's why hummingbirds have the
highest energy expenditure of any warm blooded animal, ten times
that of a human. There perpetually on the verge of starvation.
Uh and and and sometimes I have to actually go
into kind of suspended animation to deal with these these

(54:42):
energy costs. H and all the time, you know, consuming
colossal amounts of nectar to keep up their little sugar
water vampires that cannot be sated. Yeah, so you know,
we you know, looking back, you see early aviation pioneers
who toyed around with flapping wings, generally with the disaster's results.
But you do see scientists that have been looking into

(55:05):
it's used for micro air vehicles or m a v s,
and these are tiny robotic aircraft that depend on biomechanical
flight designs. Uh. And the funding typically comes into play,
you know, for obvious surveillance purposes. Right, some sort of
tiny robot with buzzing, flapping wings that you can use
to spy on somebody. Now, what is the appeal of

(55:25):
that over just like a tiny quad rotor drone or
something like that. Is it just that it would look
like an insect? I think so? And I think also
there is that that biomimicry attractions saying if it's if
it's flight at a small scale, then perhaps, uh, perhaps
there is an advantage in drawing on real world comparisons.
But overall we are not going to see passenger planes

(55:48):
with flapping wings. And uh. I was looking at a U. S.
Army Research Office report from two thousand five, UH that
ALT was weighing in and saying that when it comes
to m a v s, you're looking at enormous manufacturing challenges,
inefficient energy usage, and dependence on less under good understood
small scale physics. So at this point in time, even

(56:09):
small ornithopters seem out of reach. Yeah. Now, if you
want to just cheat and invoke some science fiction magic,
you might say that the ornithopters have something to do
with other technology present in the Doune universe, like like suspensers.
I noticed you putting a note here, right, yeah, yeah,
And this draws us right into another important technology they

(56:30):
were going to spend less time on because there's there
are fewer answers, and that is the Holtzman effect that
enables faster than light travel, It enables personal shields, and
enables just ubiquitous use of anti gravity suspensers that I mean,
you know, the main character of one of the main characters,
Vladimir Harconin, uses it to float around and suspend his bulk.

(56:52):
But you also see mentions of just you know, here's
a suspenser enabled chair in a room. If you watch
any scene from the movie and not the whole moving
not the whole David Lynch movie, go watch the scene
where where Vladimir harcon And floats up in the screams,
I will have the spice. That's pretty good. But anyway,
I thought this is also a really cool technology as

(57:12):
imagined in the books, specifically with application to the shields. Now,
there are personal energy shields imagined in the Dune universe,
and you've probably seen all kinds of science fiction that
has shields, you know, like a shields up, you know,
you put them up around the spaceship and they deflect
incoming weaponry, projectiles, energy beams. But these are personal shields

(57:36):
that are often imagined. Well, actually they're There are large
scale shields, and there are personal shields. But you might
like click a button on your belt and suddenly a
shield comes up around your body. Somebody tries to run
and stab you with a knife, they will be deflected
by the shield. And so the solution to this creates
a very interesting combat dynamic that people talk about in

(57:56):
the book, where people engaging in knife fight with shields
activated have to come up with ways of trying to
move their knife very slowly towards the enemy because a
quickly incoming knife will be deflected by the shield. But
if you can stab ever so slowly, you can go
through the shield gently, and then you can you can

(58:18):
penetrate the person's skin and make them bleed. Yeah, so
the defensive technology requires an entirely well, not entirely, but
a different style of martial arts. So we we don't
know a lot about the Holtzman effect. In the books UH,
it's described as the negative repelling effect of a shield
generator UH and a suspenser is the secondary low drain
phase of the Haltzmann field generator, and it nullifies gravity.

(58:43):
It nullifies gravity within certain limits prescribed by relative mass
and energy consumption. So in this we we have no
choice but to turn to the Science of doone and
the writings there of planetary scientist Kevin R. Grazier, who
also edited and along he also worked with physicist Diggests

(59:03):
Seeger on some of this and UH. As they point out,
much of the whole Holtzman situation is unexplained. In the
later books, we do learn that that guild highliners, the
big spaceships travel the stars by the quote compression or
warping of space time in conjunction with mass neutralization. And

(59:24):
as a planetary scientist again Kevin R. Grazier points out
UH in cosmic oregonomy, that's the piece in the science
of DONE UH. If the mass of a spaceship could
be nullified, then the relativistic effects of high speed space
travel could be reduced. So essentially it's talking about all right,
if you could turn, if you could simply dampen or

(59:45):
nullify the mass of an object, then that would enable
you to to cheat in various respects in terms of
acceleration in spacetime. Uh also Grazier and Uh and Seeger
opposit that the Holtzman field is an energy s meaning shield.
Perhaps it screens the mass of an object from the
rest of the universe. Lowering the mass of an object

(01:00:06):
would also lower the force of gravity on it. Lowered
enough and you just float around up in the air.
And as for space travel, theory and observations of general
relativity indicate that spacetime can be curved and warped, and
perhaps it can even be folded and compressed. So again
the classic examples, you have a map, right, and you
fold the map, and then you just poke a hole

(01:00:26):
through point A and point B, and now you have
the whole right, the tessaract testsaract example, the event arise
an example. UM, do you thus shorten the distance between
two points, meaning that faster than light acceleration and all
the problems they're in might not even be necessary. In
the Dune books. We don't know much more beyond that,

(01:00:47):
other than the process is dangerous and costly. You really
need a number crunching power of an advanced computer to
handle it all. But in the Dune universe it all
falls to human minds enhanced by spice, all right, So
that's pretty out there science fiction. I think I'd have
to say the same thing about the energy shields as
that relates to the whole Simon effect. I I can't

(01:01:07):
think of any example, uh, And I wasn't able to
find any example of a real energy shield in the
world that would successfully deflect incoming matter like that, especially
not without harming the person who was wearing it. I mean,
you can imagine wearing a huge magnet of some kind that,
you know, if somebody tries to shoot a bullet at
you or something like that, might be able to deflect

(01:01:29):
it if it's powerful enough. But I mean, at certain
points you're getting into levels of energy that make the
proposition ridiculous. And so if you're imagining an energy shield
like they have, maybe the closest thing I've seen would
be propositions of energy shields like ion shields around spaceships
to prevent incoming radiation, but I don't even know if

(01:01:51):
that's really viable. Yeah, it's definitely less down to Earth
compared to the still state. So there you have it,
some of the techno alogy to do, not all of
it by any means. We just decided to draw in
a few examples that we could discuss here in the podcast. Uh.
And again, we're gonna do a second episode and we'll
get into the biology of doing a bit where we're
definitely going to discuss sandworms in detail. So UH, as

(01:02:15):
we lead out here, we're gonna enjoy another track from
Raleigh Porter. This is X again off the two thousand
eleven album Aftertime, released by Subtext Recordings. There's a link
on the landing page, but you can learn more about
his work at Raleigh Porter dot com. Uh. In the meantime,
check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That
is the mothership. That's where you will find all of
our podcast videos and blog posts, as well as the

(01:02:38):
links out to our social media accounts. And if you
want to get in touch with us about your favorite
fact about the June Universe or any feedback about these episodes,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
Stuff Works dot com For more on this and thousands
of other topics. Is it how Stuff Works dot com

(01:03:02):
two two