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Speculative Fact #352: Robot Sex Dolls

2/11/2019

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At this juncture of the 21st century, we’re making huge strides in both robotic hardware as well as AI software.

Robot dolls, whether they’re intended as synthetic companions or sexual entertainment, are seen in various iterations in SF (the most recent notable examples are the pleasure model replicants seen in the 2017 film, Bladerunner 2049).

This old trope is quickly becoming a facet of our near future reality. It’s a sometimes taboo, awkward, and problematic topic. It asks controversial questions about the commodification of sex and how it intersects with the business of emerging technology. It’s made all the more complex as we consider the possibility of advancing AI, and the fear of reinventing exploitation.

            The robot sex brothels in Europe might seem like a novelty now, but there is no indication that this growing industry will lose steam. Rather, the robots are expected to lower in cost and increase in circulation as the technology improves. As they become mainstreamed, developers aim to make models as lifelike as possible – talking with their clients, laughing at their jokes, even performing daily chores like a domestic.

            We have an endless number of possibilities and concerns to experiment with as authors. Perhaps a hacker is compromising the androids’ programming – either to “liberate” them or to have them serve ulterior, nefarious purposes. Perhaps prostitution models are employed to blackmail or even assassinate high profile, wealthy targets during nights of debauchery. What if an android developed a mind of their own and didn’t’ want to serve the role they were designed to?

The emergence of this new industry could have implications about how future humans will treat sex, and where the human element in relationships figure in. Or don’t.


Jonathan Hernandez
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Speculative Fact #351: An Interstellar Encounter with Oumuamua

2/4/2019

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On October 19, 2017, our Solar System was visited by the first interstellar object that we could detect. Named Oumuamua (‘scout’ in Hawaiian), it gained almost immediate attention because its unusual traits. It has been the subject of debate and speculation, with some wondering if Earth had a near encounter (thirty three million kilometers – close by cosmic standards) with an alien spacecraft.

            The arrival of a mysterious object is frequently seen in SF, famously in the case of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic Rendezvous with Rama. In it, the titular object, dubbed Rama by astronomers, turns out to be not a natural body but rather an alien spacecraft with a hollow interior serving as a mini world.

            Like Rama, Oumuamua has some peculiar traits that make it stand out among its siblings. For one, it’s rather cylindrical (up to a kilometer in length with a height and width of several hundred meters). Although Oumuamua has been theorized by some to be some sort of cometary fragment, observations have not detected any of the associated outgassing.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Oumuamua is that it’s accelerating away from our system. The scientific community has several postulations to explain this behavior (one is that radiation from the Sun could be pushing it away like a solar sail), while the community of laymen and alien enthusiasts are having an explosion of enthusiasm and curiosity.  

The way that Oumuamua garnered attention – especially via social media – helped it work its way into the public’s mind. Astronomers remind us that several interstellar objects might pass through out System every year without being detected. And although it’s leaving us for good, the international space exploration community has not ruled out the possibility of future missions to the curious object.

Your story might take a curious case like Oumuamua’s and use it as a jumping off point. Maybe we do make a rendezvous, and maybe we’re shocked by what we find. Maybe this ‘scout’ was merely the first of many visitors, and a harbinger of something to come…

Jonathan Hernandez

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Speculative Fact #350: Sex Parasites

2/5/2018

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Parasitic lifeforms can affect their hosts in a number of strange (and sometimes even ghoulish) ways. They can alter the appearance or behavior of their hosts – even forcing them to do things that would otherwise be harmful (IE a fungus that turns ants into “zombies”).
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A curious species of barnacle (Loxothylacus panopaei) attaches itself to crabs, hijacking their reproductive organs and forcing them to bear barnacle larvae (male crabs are not immune). The parasites affect things such as the crab’s immune system and molting cycles as the larvae reproduce.
Things like sex, sexuality, and reproductive rights are hotbed topics. There are hosts of ethical dilemmas and questions that we can think of if a similar phenomenon were applied to human hosts.

In Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild, even human males can become a “mother” to alien lifeforms. They may, for whatever reason, actually prefer human hosts and turned us into a race of brood mares. What if a male was forced to reproduce or perform functions ordinarily assigned to another gender? What if a species would go extinct without a host? What if a human wanted to be the mother of an alien, and (if properly compensated) was able to turn it into a lucrative arrangement.   
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Jonathan Hernandez

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Speculative Fact #349: Reversing Death

10/9/2017

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Death, almost universally, is seen as something final and permanent. It’s blind, indiscriminate, and can’t be bargained with. It takes many forms and constantly haunts us. Despite all of our advances, it’s as unstoppable as time itself.
            Or maybe not.

Using stem cells, a team of researchers at a Philadelphia based company called Bioquark hope to bring brain-dead patients back to life in a trial later this year. The controversial process has drawn curiosity, skepticism, and criticism. Stem cell research has long been scrutinized under the lens of morality and ethics – something as sensitive as death echoes in all of our cultures and is often a taboo topic that many feel uncomfortable even talking about.
            Despite public perception, this will not immediately lead to some sort of zombie apocalypse. The long and complicated process uses stem cell injections and therapy to promote the growth of new nerve cells. The process also has a number of technical and legal challenges. Declaring brain death is a difficult task, and brain-dead patients cannot give informed consent.

This could be the beginning of a new treatment that might become commonplace in all hospitals. Cheating death, at least in some cases, could one day be as easy as tapping the right buttons on a keyboard.
        In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and H.P. Lovecraft’s short story “Herbert West – Reanimator,” the protagonists are archetypal mad scientists – hubristic, out of their depths, toying with natural laws they could never understand.
            Death is not only a topic that can lead to debates about morality, but invites metaphysics as well. Is brain-death truly death, and at what point does someone truly die? Is there a soul, and when does it leave the body? If it does leave the body, can it come back? What if brain-dead patients became fully aware after an experimental procedure, but the researchers didn’t realize it?
          In the novel Johnny Got His Gun, a maimed and invalid soldier must bang his head against the pillow in morse code to beg the nurses to euthanize him. What if, trapped in their own bodies, the patient’s conscious mind was unable to communicate with the outside world?


Jonathan Hernandez
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Speculative Fact #348: Weather Control

9/11/2017

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Major storms like hurricanes can be devastating and costly, both in terms of lives and damage to our infrastructure. Although futurists and speculative fiction writers have long dreamed about controlling weather, its unpredictability and sheer power and practically metaphors for the uncontrollable. With recent advancements and new data, scientists are again asking if weather control is in the realm of the achievable.
            Hurricanes are a complicated arrangement of factors like humidity and temperature. Based on simulations, a small change at the center of a storm can dramatically alter how fast, powerful a storm will become - and where they will ultimately hit. More ambitious and farfetched plans envision everything from massive dumps of cooled pumped water, patches of biodegradable oil slicks, and microwave beam satellites to create obstacles in the path of the storms (thus robbing them of their energy).
            In the future, averting storms could be as easy as monitoring a control panel and hitting a cancel button. Agricultural communities depend on weather, but would they benefit from the advancements or get left behind? Could a weather control system be used as a weapon? Could the manipulation of weather lead to an unforeseen chain of events or uncontrolled feedback loop as nature attempts to correct itself? The manipulation of weather could be an answer to many of our needs or the quickening of our ends.

 
Jonathan Hernandez

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Speculative Fact #347: Billionaire Bunkers

8/14/2017

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As the doomsday clock nears midnight, some are actively planning ahead. The survivalists take the nihilistic route and believe that a failure of government will come after a large disaster, and then the inevitable collapse of social order. Some of the wealthiest clients from Silicon Valley to Wall Street have caught the doomsday survivalist bug and are lining up to swap gas mask advice and buy large underground bunkers.
     A company named Vivos is leading in bunker construction, the sales of which have increased by 300% since Donald Trump was elected President. Some of these bunkers are planned with the long term in mind with schools, churches, and even a full time staff of servants.   
            In many ways, these billionaire bunkers are a statement about wealth and class in their own right, but that could be used in your story. Mood can help enhance a story – it could fuel tension between characters or inject emotions into your tale. The setting often shapes the narrative, so perhaps even a lush bunker may eventually feel like a claustrophobic tomb for the survivors.
           What if the only survivors of a coming apocalypse were part of an elite class? Will class still remain and drive social divisions? Could conflicts arise within the bunker on a smaller scale, mimicking the strife outside? What if it became a prison, and the pampered inhabitants could not find a way back out?


Jonathan Hernandez

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Speculative Fact #346: Colonization by Panspermia

6/5/2017

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The human desire to explore and settle new homes is not restricted to Earth.  As we continue our search for habitable worlds we are also thinking of ways to get there. Our dreams are curtailed by reality – space is vast and traveling to even the nearest stars require a vast amount of time.
            Instead of trying to blast our way across the stars in one lifetime, some plans imagine a longer process. Sleeper and generation ships imagine a crew either in suspended animation or with successive generations serving as its stewards.
           Another vision proposes having frozen embryos on a kind of “seeder” ship to deliver the settlers. While there are still many unknowns and technical hurdles in the way (setting aside for the moment the ethical questions and philosophical debates which we love so much), recent research is taking us closer to making this old SF thought experiment a reality.
            A Japanese team sent freeze dried mouse sperm up to the international space station to see how it would react after nine months. One purpose of the experiment was to determine how resilient DNA is in the face of intense space radiation. Although some damage was done, the sperm still proved healthy enough to fertilize mouse eggs which became viable embryos.
            Fleets of seeder”ships might bring frozen sperm/egg or embryos to life sustaining worlds in the future. It might be used to colonize planets or as a back-up plan to avoid human extinction. Will machines serve as nannies and surrogate parents for the first babies born on alien worlds? If we ever learn how to “upload’ and download our consciousness like software can we grow duplicate bodies and transmit our minds to other worlds? What if humans accidentally seed a planet that already has intelligent life on it?


Jonathan Hernandez
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Speculative Fact #345: Beyond Silicon – Pimp My AI

4/24/2017

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Ever since computers became tasked with more complicated feats, futurists and speculative fiction writers have imagined new ways to use them. As we stare into the future we wonder about artificial intelligence and the looming technological “singularity.”
Writers often make use of a literary McGuffin called computronium - a kind of programmable matter that could be used to build newer and more powerful computers. This hypothetical material might replace the silicon in processors, the memory disks and cards– the entire computer itself could be composed of the stuff.  As research looks at the possibility of quantum computers, attention is given to a curious particle called an anyon - a particle that has “memory.” In theory a mass of the particles could collectively accumulate memory and computing capacity.
In stories such as I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison, a powerful computer is the antagonist. In stories like The Last Question by Isaac Asimov, a computer is an ostensible ally. The Deep Though supercomputer in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy is a humorous take on the old trope of the powerful, artificially intelligent supercomputer. Whatever version best suits your story, a fresh, flashing sounding name with some cutting edge science behind it might be just the thing to spice it up.


Jonathan Hernandez

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Speculative Fact #344: Who Wants To Live Forever?

4/3/2017

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The idea of immortality has tempted us even back in the days of myth and continues to tantalize us in modern speculative fiction. It is littered with examples ranging from the fantastic to more rooted, with characters like Peter Pan, The Highlander, and Robert Heinlein’s Lazarus Long.    
        Research on an anti-aging enzyme called nicotinamide mononucleotide (NMN) showed results with lab mice in an experiment in Australia – with human trials not far in the future. This healing enzyme is also closely related to a suite of new drugs aimed at combating Alzheimer’s, Diabetes, and others diseases. It could be that humanity is finally approaching immortality.
      If you are skeptical, cynical, or looking for ways to introduce conflict in a story with such a theme, perhaps you can explore less utopian aspects of this technology.
          What are the social and economic ramifications? Would such a drug only become readily available to the wealthy? Could immortality become a statement of achievement in itself and a status symbol? Wouldn’t the Earth become overpopulated and stripped of its resources if nobody ever died? What if world leaders and influential minds never died? What if despots and dictators never did either?


Jonathan Hernandez
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Speculative Fact #343: Death by Alien Probe

3/13/2017

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As more extrasolar planets are discovered (and more of them looking terrestrial or even earthlike), the odds of finding alien life seem promising. Given the hundred billion plus stars in our galaxy, and the hundreds of billions of galaxies in our universe, there may be uncountable civilizations out there.
            However, if the universe is swarming with life, and if a significant percentage of that life is intelligent, why is the universe so quiet? This is the essential conundrum behind the Fermi paradox; the observation that while intelligent alien life may be statistically or even astronomically high, it is utterly devoid of signs of life.
                There may be a number of reasons behind this great silence. It could be that humans haven’t been listening long enough or know what to look for. Civilizations could have fell in their infancy after the intelligent species went extinct. They might have killed themselves in a planetwide war or got wiped out by asteroids. One eerie possibility is that something or someone is out there culling the numbers.
            Speculative fiction often depicts unmanned alien probes sent to explore space and seek out signs of intelligence. One, the so-called Von Neumann probe (named after the mathematician John Neumann) self-replicates in order to seed itself throughout the universe. One popular and less friendly variant of the alien probe concept has also become a trope. After finding proof of intelligence (usually through some kind of test), a doomsday weapon type of probe could promptly annihilate that life – leaving one less intelligent race in the universe. An interpretation of the concept was central to the Berserker series of Fred Saberhagen.

            The creators of such a probe could be as advanced as they are cruel. Perhaps the protagonists rush to answer a series of riddles like the mythical sphinx in the hopes of getting a reward. Maybe it’s armed with an array of powerful and advanced weapons that the military thinks they can disarm and reverse engineer. Perhaps it even has some form of intelligence and, at the zero hour, spares its target out of sympathy.

Jonathan Hernandez
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