This is the Way the World Ends
March 27, 2019 § 1 Comment
After watching Interstellar for class, one student asked what we thought might have happened to all the animals. We know that the characters in the movie only eat corn, with no meat in their diets. A different student suggested that that was because livestock is one of the least cost and energy-efficient ways to consume calories. So, we can pretty safely assume that there aren’t many farm animals left. But what about other animals? Unfortunately, they probably aren’t around in that world, either.
About a week ago, National Geographic published an article about a whale that was found with 88 pounds of plastic in its stomach. Glossing over some of the more gruesome details, the whale had essentially eaten so much indigestible plastic that it could not eat anything else. Whales hydrate using water in their food, so the animal actually died of thirst before it starved. Either way, humans are clearly at fault.
In Interstellar, there is understandably a strong fixation on how exactly humans are going to rescue themselves from a depleted Earth. The film’s trailer is captioned with the statement, “Mankind was born on Earth. It was never meant to die here.” That’s great and all, but what about all the other species? Odds are they weren’t meant to die here, either. In Christopher Nolan’s version of the future, it takes the prospect of humans starving or suffocating to make people take action, but other animals are already facing that fate. It’s not as far off as we like to think.
Sci-fi has always examined the different ways the world might end: nuclear apocalypse, mass plague or epidemic, alien invasion, and so on. Eco-disaster is a recent contender in the genre, but right now is probably the most likely. Being wasteful is second nature to us at this point, and it’s a habit few are willing to work at breaking.
Although it’s not really a science fiction movie, I want to talk a bit about The Lorax. In it, the company O’Hare Air literally sells people breathable air because there were no trees left to produce oxygen. While the movie aims to teach children the dangers of mistreating the planet (and possibly the dangers of capitalism?), adults can learn from it too. According to Business Insider, coral reefs produce 85% of the air that we breathe, and they’re dying at an alarming rate. Sure, we didn’t cut them down to make sweaters like in The Lorax, but overfishing and pollution is having the same effect: we’re running out of air.
So often, science fiction writers and directors build worlds that are glossy and clean and high-tech. Instead of being overrun with dust and tumbleweeds, they’re full of flying cars and skyscrapers. I can’t speak for you, but I’m pretty certain I know which kind of future I’d want to live in. But, utopian futures really don’t seem likely at this point. That’s not to say that sort of innovation isn’t possible—technology is progressing at an exponential rate. I just have a hard time believing that all of the technology in fancy sci-fi cities is powered by sustainable, green energy. I think it’s a lot more likely that we’ll keep on wasting resources like we always have until the world implodes.
Another children’s movie, WALL-E, warns against this very problem. In the film, humans have made some remarkable technological advancements. They have robots for practically everything, holograms in everyday use, high-functioning AI, and most impressively, the technology to sustain the entire human race in outer space for decades. However, all of this progress was made with no regard for the planet. The whole reason that humans moved to space in the first place was because had to evacuate the world they’d polluted. Their lifestyle, while high-tech, destroyed the planet.
However, a lot of sci-fi universes ignore the problem of climate change completely. Take The Hunger Games, for example. The main character comes from a district whose whole purpose is to mine coal. As in, they’re still using coal, which is responsible for almost 70% of carbon dioxide emissions from the US annually. I realize that there are some much darker implications of the Hunger Games universe, but come on. We dream of cities like the Capitol but ignore the fact that, without a solution, we’ll run out of time long before we have the technology to make them a reality.
Although it might not be particularly glamorous or flashy, climate change has tropes like WWIII or resurrected dinosaurs beat on one front: it’s happening right now. Instead of some fiery, instantaneous, or rapid death, it seems like our society is headed for a slow, drawn out finish, where we’ll be painfully aware of all the time we had to stop it.
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-Jayne Cook
Sources:
https://www.businessinsider.com/new-studies-show-oceans-losing-oxygen-rapid-coral-bleaching-2018-1
Free Will vs. Fate
March 27, 2019 § 2 Comments
Was it your choice to read this article? A single decision selected from an infinite pool of possibilities, placing you on a course completely dictated by your own conscious power of reason and choice? Or was this just another stepping stone in the endless stream of causality? An inevitable result of each and every event up to this point, all leading to your eyes, reading these words?
After listening to Ted Chiang’s lecture on time travel, I was struck by the ramifications of his discussion of free will versus fate. Without repeating his entire lecture and boring you with the possibilities and impossibilities of time travel according to physics (which I admittedly did not entirely comprehend, being only a humble humanities student), this debate hinged on a fundamental question which has long existed in religion, philosophy, literature, and, indeed, science: do we determine our own course in life, every moment of every day?
According to the free will argument, arguably every decision is vital to the creation of the universe each and every day. With each decision made, an infinite number of doors open, and an infinite number of doors close. This is consistent with the theory of multiple realities or world lines, in which diverging possibilities are carried out according to ever-expanding, individual blueprints for life. Science fiction stories such as “Ten Sigmas” by Paul Melko and the television series Steins;Gate are emblematic of this process of split worlds with new possibilities and results according to both paths chosen and forsaken. As a result, believers in free will would posit that it is possible to change the past through time travel, as we could simply alter a single decision to create a cascading effect throughout the present and future (the butterfly effect applied to time), a common trope in science fiction.
The notion that each second our lives splinter, closing off possibilities and opening up new ones, creates a crushing sense of both worry and personal responsibility. If this is my current reality, then what accumulation of decisions, all my own, have led me to this point, for better or for worse? Consider all the time you have either “wasted,” or the moments you most regret. What could you have done instead? How much better could we all be right now? How much worse? When considering all of the consequences of the actions we have taken, and have yet to take, it becomes abundantly clear that humans are indeed condemned to be free…
If you subscribe to that belief.
On the flip side of the debate is the issue of fate, notably discussed in Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, to name only a couple of the science fiction stories which deal with this oft discussed theme. According to the fate argument, our decisions are inevitable, a product of each and every inevitable event up to this point. Things could only have happened the way they have occurred, and everyone and everything fulfills a role like an actor/actress in a play, carrying out their lives according to an unfolding script. However, there is an important distinction that exists within this belief. Fatalism and determinism are not the same thing. Fatalism holds that the stream of causality exists independently of mankind, and we are dragged along by its currents. Determinism holds that humans are an equally important component of the stream of causality, unfolding our lives in step with the unfolding phenomena and events of the universe at large. Believers in either of these paths would support the idea that time travel, while not necessarily a fruitless endeavor, would be incapable of changing the past. Wormholes would only be for watching the past transpire.
At first glance, this is an equally daunting, if not more depressing, reality than one in which free will exists. If all of our decisions are predetermined, then what point is there in living? What point is there in any decision I make? A fatalist would plainly answer that there is no point (the more depressing side of this dichotomy). But if you are a determinist (like Ted Chiang or Dr. Louise Banks), then every action you take is meaningful because you are fulfilling a role and helping craft reality as it molds into its inevitable form. After all, it is not as though you are experiencing each moment of every day as a bystander to your own life. You are still making those choices, crafting your narrative. If anything, some decisions become more meaningful because of the way in which they shape reality and the memories and emotions they create and carry (think Dr. Louise Banks choosing to have a child, despite knowing they will inevitably die).
These questions of fate and free will provide extensive food for thought on time travel, religion, and personal philosophical and existential considerations. Growing up in a heavily Mexican, Catholic family, I have been often tortured between my theological upbringing, which demanded radical acceptance of personal responsibility and sin, and my subsequent exposure to scientific/philosophical/literary elaborations on fate, which painted a starkly different picture. Amidst this inner turmoil, I have yet to find an answer to this question. Perhaps it is due to my own shortcomings. Perhaps I am not meant to find out. Only time will tell.
-Cruz Castillo
Ted Chiang AI Talk Highlights: Singularity?
March 25, 2019 § 1 Comment
In his talk last Monday here at Vanderbilt, Ted Chiang joined a panel to talk about the future of Artificial Intelligence. He spoke about what A.I. means for humanity, and contested the possibility of the singularity (a.k.a. the technology explosion that occurs when computers begin programming smarter computers, with those smarter computers programming even smarter ones).
In his words, we humans desire A.I. systems that will be “smart, but not outsmart us, autonomous but reliably subservient.” In other words, we need multifunctional A.I. but not multifunctional agents.
However, he cautions us that, even if a general A.I. Overmind were to be achieved, we humans may not necessarily see immediate drastic improvements. This is because, as Ted Chiang points out, most of our pressing problems are not really technology problems. Rather, they are economic or sociopolitical problems. For example, if we assume the crisis of pollution/climate change is real, we as a species are already quite aware of how exactly to solve it. Unfortunately, building the political will to rejigger our economy is hard, which is why we choose not to. If an A.I. Overmind tried to force us, most of us would (rightly so) rebel.
But could this Overmind come into being? Ted made an impassioned argument against singularity by bringing us humans as an example. He posits that, while we have had some very intelligent people born in the past, they have failed to create additional smart people, much less more people smarter than them. The comparative conclusion would then be if humans created smart robots, these smart robots may not necessarily be able to create a smarter robot.
How then, has humanity advanced? He argues that while individuals can’t seem to create smarter people, individuals have helped the species as a whole get smarter. This species learning occurs through the invention of physical and mental tools that are passed down through the ages. For example, the invention of Arabic numerals was an incredible improvement in storage reduction and efficiency, allowing our puny human brains to be able to better conduct arithmetic than they could with, for example, Roman numerals. In other words, civilization, not individuals get smarter. The biggest “beneficiary of Calculus was not newton, but society.”
While I agree with Chiang’s perspectives, I do see many flaws in his reasoning against the possibility of a Singularity.
First, procreation and parenting can be quite effective when it comes to helping to add smarter people to the world. The reason why we don’t have a ton of supergeniuses wandering the Earth is because, unlike a hypothetical robot tasked with creating an even smarter clone, we humans may prioritize other things. We may care about our mate’s attractiveness, physical strength, or character over their raw intelligence. We might not even care about reproduction at all.
Second, teaching is highly effective. Chiang never defines how exactly we’re supposed to measure raw intelligence, but he by fiat argues teaching doesn’t actually increase intelligence much. However, I would argue my innate intuition of how to solve problems and observe the world has increased drastically due to my decade and a half’s worth of education.
Finally, transference of information by humans is absolutely horrible compared to that of computers today. When I talk, I’m flapping pieces of meat, transferring about 100-200 words a minute (the fastest talkers in the world at most reach 500 words a minute). When I write, I am typing on the keyboard or moving my hand with a primitive piece of graphite (a.k.a. a pencil). If I tried to build a smarter A.I., I could take forever: as a person even if I just continuously typed, I may not be able to finish coding an intelligent multi-purpose system (For example, the Windows Operating System or the Google Search Engine are each millions of lines of code).
Again, I am transferring couple of kilobytes of information from my mind into the physical world or to the mind of another human being. In comparison internet speeds today can reach terabytes. Thus a machine is magnitudes faster in building a smarter version of itself than I am. At the same time, while I can’t consciously rewire my DNA or rewire my neurons without significant external machines (which I cannot procure), a machine can easily recode itself on the fly.
All in all, I had an interesting discussion with Ted Chiang and I found his talk enlightening.
-Winston
Science Fiction: Disrupting the Art World?
March 20, 2019 § 4 Comments
Some previous posts on the blog have discussed how culture – art and fashion – are represented in science fiction.
But is science fiction ever represented in art?
I have two words for you: Meow Wolf.
Meow Wolf is an immersive, interactive art experience based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The inaugural exhibition, The House of Eternal Return, opened in 2016. Involving more than 100 local artists, The House of Eternal Returnis at once a mystery, a scavenger hunt, a playground, and most of all, visually magnificent. Walk into the normal-looking, life size Victorian house, and you will soon realize that things really are not normal at all. The secret passageway in the refrigerator proves that.
(There are many more secret passageways waiting to be discovered – I won’t spoil any more, in case you want to visit)
Beyond being a psychedelic, fantastical, out-of-this-world arena to be explored, there is a story behind the madness. Based on clues left behind throughout the house and exhibit, the home belonged to the Selig family of Mendocino, California, who mysteriously disappeared. Portals ripping through the space-time continuum appeared in the house, and a mysterious, intergalactic agency called the Charter is somehow involved. (Are they good guys? Bad guys? Somewhere in between? I’m not sure.) Just to explore The House of Eternal Returnis wondrous enough, but if you want to get invested in solving the mystery, clues are everywhere – from notes left strewn on desks of the house, to mysterious family pictures, to the youngest son’s bionic hamster that appears elsewhere in the exhibition.
Though the overarching “story” of The House of Eternal Returnis clearly influenced by science fiction, the immersive art experiences housed within are influenced by a range of themes, from fantasy, to pop art, to things too weird to categorize. But, just as literary science fiction was once thought of as a “junk” genre, Meow Wolf represents a watershed moment in the art world. To expand on this, I’ll tell a little about the story of Meow Wolf.
It all starts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe, a town of 70,000 and the state capitol, is steeped in more than 400 years of history and a major tourist destination. It is also the third largest art market in the country. Meow Wolf, as an art collective, was founded in 2008 by a group of young artists who felt that the Santa Fe gallery art world was closed-off and snobby. Initially anarchical and radically inclusive, and headquartered in a run-down warehouse they rented for $1,000 a month, Meow Wolf eventually got more attention in the Santa Fe art scene and around New Mexico. As the collective grew more structured, their ideas became bigger, and with some venture funding from Game of Thronesauthor and Santa Fe resident George R. R. Martin, they purchased a vacant bowling alley, renovated it, and created the inaugural 20,000 square foot exhibit.
Meow Wolf was an instant critical and commercial success. The collective, which at its beginning had united over feeling orphaned by the tony Santa Fe art world, turned a profit of nearly $7 million in the first year of the exhibition. In just over two years, one million people visited The House of Eternal Return. Currently, plans are underway for a 400-room hotel in Phoenix, an art and entertainment complex in Las Vegas, an amusement park ride and massive complex in Denver, and a multi-story installation in Washington, DC – all created working with local artists. Co-founder and CEO Vince Kadlubeck has no qualms about his vision for Meow Wolf. He wants to see it become a billion dollar company. (I want to note: Meow Wolf is a certified B-corporation, a designation that denoted a corporation’s commitment to social and environmental well-being, as well as its shareholders.)
Meow Wolf has certainly departed from its anarchic roots, and their growth (and success) has not come without controversy. They have certainly shaken up the art world, not just in Santa Fe but across the country. Perhaps this could have only happened in New Mexico, where cultural traditions thousands of years old mingle with scientists working on top-secret government projects, where art aficionados encounter UFO truthers. So if you find yourself in Santa Fe (or Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, or DC) in the next few years, go and check Meow Wolf out. You won’t be disappointed.
(If you’re flying on Southwest Airlines this month, you may notice that there is an article on Meow Wolf in the in flight magazine. I wrote this BEFORE I saw that – I promise!)
I also would have loved to include photographs I took of the exhibition, but I think that may be violating their policies of allowing photography only for personal use. But it’s not hard to find snapshots. I’ll help you out and search Google Images for you.
-Max B.
That Poem From Interstellar
March 20, 2019 § Leave a comment
“Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
When I heard Professor Brand recite the first two verses of this poem by Dylan Thomas in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, I actually got chills. I could immediately understand that the use of this poem was to parallel the main characters’ struggle to fight for the survival of mankind that is the central plot of the film. That part was obvious. However, as a lover of poetry, I wanted to find out more reasons why this particular poem might have been chosen.
Written by the poet as an address to his aging, dying father, the speaker essentially tries to convince his father to fight for life. He makes his argument by identifying, through various stanzas, four types of men (or people, I’d rather say) who might be approaching death: wise men, good men, wild men and grave men.
There are six total stanzas in the poem (a full version of which you can read here): an opening, four middle stanzas – each discussing one of the four types of men approaching death – and one concluding stanza in which he asks his father to consider his argument and basically keep fighting for life.
The key thing about this poem is that Thomas might describe four different types of men with different motivations, but he repeats one of the two phrases “Do not go gently into that good night” and “Rage, rage against the dying of the light” at the end of each stanza in order to make the argument that all of these different men, when approached with death, regardless of the life they have chosen to live, do not go down without a fight. That is the meaning of the titular line “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Thomas does refer to death as “that good night,” meaning he realizes everyone must die, but he still urges his father – and all men – to still “not go gentle.” The plea to “rage against the dying of the light” adds to the brilliant symbolism of fighting with all you’ve got until the very end.
Reflecting back on Interstellar, I felt like there were some characters in the film who paralleled the four types of men Thomas describes. Since the central plot of the story is the approaching end of life on Earth, almost every single main character is being faced with certain death for themselves and/or their loved ones if the Lazarus and Endurance missions aren’t successful. In this time, their characters are shown in the types of decisions they make and why.
Since Professor Brand is the first to recite part of the poem and he chooses to stop after the second stanza, I associated him with the “wise men.” His stanza speaks of men who know that death is inevitable and they accept it, but “because their words had forked no lightning,” they don’t go gentle into that good night. I interpreted this line to mean that wise men fought death by choosing their words and actions carefully in a way that would not further divide mean around them. After Professor Brand admits on his deathbed to Murphy that he gave up on Plan A years ago, we understand that he kept up that illusion simply to keep all of the men and women in NASA united for their cause. He didn’t want them to become divided on the moral question of choosing between their family and friends on Earth and the future of humanity that he thought could only be ensured through Plan B. Thus, he views his final fight against the death of humanity to be the choice he made to keep his true intentions a secret.
The next group of people are the “good men,” whom I believe were represented in this movie by Joseph Cooper. As a father of two young children and a valuable farmer during the world’s worst blight, Cooper has much to still offer the world before he is whisked away on the mission. The stanza in the poem describes good men whose achievements are essentially cut short by the onset of death and who would like to fight for the chance to live a bit longer and make more of an impact. From the beginning of the movie, we see how difficult it is for Cooper to leave his children, especially his daughter, and then on their first expedition to Miller’s planet, his primary concern is losing the fewest number of years before he can go home. His character’s drive to fight against the death of humanity primarily comes from his drive to go back home to his family and complete his unfinished role as a father.
Then come the “wild men,” who I associated with people like Cooper’s son Tom. These men unfortunately find happiness very easily in the world around them and are “too late” to realize when death is upon them. Even though Cooper was upset in the beginning of the film that Tom wouldn’t be able to attend university, Tom was genuinely happy following in his father’s footsteps to become a farmer. He marries and has children, all the while not realizing that the environment is getting worse and worse. As people in the town start to move away and even after the death of his first son (presumably to some kind of lung disease developed as a result of the increasing dust in the air), he remains adamant at staying on his farm and doesn’t seem to listen to his sister, all the way up to the end of the film. In this way, Tom still appears to fight death, but he is sort of fighting the wrong fight and his ignorance is blinding him from being able to fight effectively and ensure his survival earlier.
Finally, the “grave men” Thomas discusses reminded me of Dr. Mann, someone who was literally stranded on a planet in an entirely different galaxy than the one he lived in. He was so hopeless that he admitted that the last time he went down for the long nap, he “didn’t set a waking day.” He even mentions to Cooper, Dr. Brand and Dr. Romilly that they “literally brought me back from the dead.” Thus, of all the characters, he seems the closest – apart from those on Earth who have limited time to survive before the air becomes too toxic to even breathe – to death. Yet he finds the strength to keep up his lie about the planet, develops a plan to murder Cooper, blow up the camp where Romilly is, and steal the ship to go back home – all in the hopes of fighting off his own death. Even though his motivations were completely selfish and unforgivable from the audience’s standpoint, it is undeniable that he didn’t stop fighting for his own survival. Knowing life on his planet was impossible, he developed a new way to “rage against the dying of the light.”
While the story told by Interstellar is one of a fight against the death of the human race, I found it profound that all of the main characters were portrayed with different rationales for saving humanity. Even though there was the issue of relativity and time elapsing, and conflict between supporters of Plan A vs. Plan B, in the end, everyone was still trying their hardest to fight for the human race in the way they thought best. Thus, the use of Thomas’s poem in Interstellar to showcase the truly universal idea that humans will not accept the death of their race without a fight was extremely appropriate and effective.
-Priyanka
Sources:
subversions?
March 18, 2019 § 2 Comments
Arrival came out in 2016 to much critical acclaim. It was nominated for all the usual suspects (see Academy Awards and whatnot), but for the purposes of this post, I want to ask, how surprising is this film? How groundbreaking?
First things first, Arrival isn’t perfectly original. Most notably, it derives part of its concept from Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. (Plot summary: Billy Pilgrim is a WWII soldier/veteran who “time travels,” or, more accurately, uncontrollably jumps to different moments in his life. For part of his life, he is abducted by aliens and held in a “human zoo.”) In this way, aliens and time-travel and problems with linearity aren’t a new recipe. Nevertheless, they bake wildly differently cakes. For Slaughterhouse-Five, the random jumps through time serve to make WWII ever-present and to highlight the difficulty (and perhaps even absurdity) in reconciling war-time experiences with pre- and post-war life. For Arrival, the jumps through time, and, by extension, the language that enables these jumps, are inherently reconciliatory. Everything that ever happens and has ever happened is happening all at once, forever. Instead of inducing dread or anxiety or inescapable absurdity in our protagonist, the ability to jump through time grants peace.
Moreover, the movie operates under the threat of war, but does not engage in outright us v. them violence against any particular them. It doesn’t bother with the absurdity of war – war is never fully enacted. Instead, the fight is for communication, for the conveying of meaning, and so meaning and intention are laced into the very fabric of the story.
In addition, perhaps it is the absence of Independence Day -type violence that makes Arrival so surprising. The movie poster depicts a stereotypical cast – the scientists, the soldier, and the threat of a mysterious alien life hovering in the background. The name “Arrival” reveals nothing of the nuances of the movie – no nods to linguistics or translation or personal enlightenment. The word itself reinforces linearity, indicating a timeline into which aliens can arrive at one, fixed point. It does not suggest that the aliens (and, everyone, for that matter) are always arriving and always departing, the way a circular understanding of time might encourage. Instead, at a single glance, Arrival appears to be a standard alien invasion film made “new” with a female protagonist and modern visual effects.
The next “surprise” (aka subversion) critical to Arrival‘s success is the character of Louise Banks. On the one hand, she is an educated female character who is confident and scared, clever and uncertain in equal measure. At the start of the movie, she insists that she cannot translate a language she does not know from just an audio recording. After her first encounter with the aliens, she is not sure that she is cut out for the task. At the same time, she takes risks, lying about a kangaroo anecdote to buy time and risking her safety so that the aliens can see her. She is never expected to be perfect. She is flawed, but earnest. Intelligent, but risky. Basically, she rocks. (And by extension, so does the writer who invented this nuanced character.)
On the other hand, the first thing that this film tells us about Louise is that she has a daughter who dies. Eventually, this “flashback” proves to be a “flash-forward” and the lonely, middle-aged professor we are introduced to at the start is not a woman grieving for her daughter, but actually just a lonely, middle-aged woman. There are two reasons that the “flashback” feels like a twist. First, the director is complicating our sense of linearity from the first moment of the movie. We assume this story is being told linearly even as we receive more and more clues that it is not, and that assumption hurts our ability to understand the alien language. Second, the film relies on the expectations of loneliness and middle-age, especially for women. I’ve complained before about the ways that children inform female sci-fi characters much more often than they do males, and that complaint stands for this film. Basically, the reason we are tricked, the reason the twist works, is because we are so used to women only having permission to pursue more than just motherhood once they have “failed” as mothers. We are used to motherhood being a young woman’s game, even as middle-age is an increasingly safe and appealing time to start a family. We are blinded by these expectations, and so we see the hunched, lonely, middle-aged Louise as a grieving mother without considering that she doesn’t have be. In the end, we get a storyline that plays into a trope for motherhood for the sake of subverting it. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is up to feminist theorists with much fancier degrees than I’ve got. Regardless, it represents a step toward the reimagining and redevelopment of female characters.
Last, but certainly not least, I’d like to return to the crux of the movie as communication. Alien invasion movies typically nod to moments of world unification. They represent an ideal moment for a myriad of national and international interests to be put aside in the effort to counter a greater threat. Yay! World unification! Arrival buys into this, but with a twist. Instead of faulting the more aggressive countries for assuming that the aliens want to “Use Weapon” (a translation that Banks came to as well), the protagonists look for ways that this translation might be wrong because of pre-existing differences between English and Chinese. As a result, yes, these countries have to bring together their 12 pieces, but the greater lesson isn’t one of unification. Instead, success relies on the willingness to try and understand not just the aliens, but other countries as well.
On top of that, this movie raises questions about the way that we do language, and the ways that the subtleties of language inform our understanding. English has one word for love, Arabic has upwards of ten. English words don’t look like the things that the words represent, languages like Japanese do. Pronouns in English operate on a gender binary, but they don’t have to. Femininity and masculinity are tied up in all kinds of opposing ways – “bridge” is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. There are tons of examples, and each forces us to reconsider if we only see the world the way we speak and read the world, and if we might see more if we spoke and read differently.
In conclusion, Arrival is groundbreaking for a series of subversions and reinventions, but it is most exciting for the ways it implicates language in typical narratives of “Other.”
makpro30
The Fiction of Jurassic Park’s “Science”
March 18, 2019 § 6 Comments
Extracting DNA from amber-preserved mosquitos- mosquitos from before “the meteor” 66 million years ago- and filling in the missing parts with frog DNA is the premise of Jurassic Park’s successful dinosaur resurrection. So… can we do this and bring Busch Gardens to another level?
Sorry, but no. Not really. 
And this is why:
Amber-preserved mosquito
Although we do have amber-preserved mosquitos and biting flies from the dinosaurs’ time, amber preserves the husk and not the soft tissues. (In other words, not the blood.)
BUT
a mosquito from about 46 million years ago was found preserved in lake sediment a few years ago, and, more importantly, there was red pigment in its abdomen. When tested, the pigment had hemoglobin-derived porphyrins, which are products of hemoglobin: a red protein than transports oxygen in vertebrates’ blood.
Lake sediment-preserved mosquito
The thing about this, however, is that “even if you find blood or soft tissue, you don’t necessarily find DNA.” (Dr. Susie Maidment is a dinosaur researcher at the Natural History Museum.)
We’ve been able to recover DNA from permafrost and bones/body parts that have not yet completely fossilized, but DNA breaks down rapidly (with a half-life of 521 years), further accelerated by sunlight, water, and contamination.
The oldest DNA we’ve found so far is close to 1 million years old- the probability of us even finding DNA from 66 million years ago seems to be a bit of a stretch at the moment, nonetheless actually knowing what exactly to do with it…
Nonetheless, the frog thing-
In Jurassic Park, the scientists filled the fragmented DNA with frog DNA. There are two problems here: 1) if you don’t have the whole genome (which we don’t), then you won’t know which parts of the DNA have been found and which gaps need to be filled, and 2) frogs are amphibians, so why would we mix the two? You’d certainly get something interesting, but definitely not “the dinosaur.” You would have to use either bird or crocodile DNA because birds are, as we know lol, feathered dinosaurs, and crocodiles share a common ancestor with dinosaurs. (Again, this is assuming the genome would be figured out in the first place, which doesn’t currently seem too plausible.)
Something else questionable that Jurassic Park did was put the “complete” DNA in ostrich eggs for hatching purposes. In the book, they used artificial eggs, but that’s still just wrong. No matter what, it’s not a real dinosaur egg.
Laboratory: Jurassic Park
So, hatching doesn’t look like it’s going to work out, but there has to be another way.
There is, kind of- reverse engineering: beginning with a living animal and working backwards to get closer and closer to ancient reptiles in an attempt to reverse 66+ million years of evolution.
Of course, there’s the argument that even if this is successful, the creature would not technically be a dinosaur. And as it always seems to do within the realm of science-fiction, the question of ethics arises: “As Dr. Malcolm says in Jurassic Park- ‘just because you can, doesn’t mean that you should.’”
What would it eat? Where would it live? It is owned by someone? What’s its function?
These creatures weren’t living in our modern ecosystem. Unless we try and bring back something that we humans drove into extinction, I think it’s best to leave the dinos to rest.
-PA-
Sources:
https://www.livescience.com/23861-fossil-dna-half-life.html
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/could-scientists-bring-dinosaurs-back.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/jurassic-world-can-we-really-resurrect-a-dinosaur/
