Tomorrow’s Tech … Today!
Many futuristic inventions have come to pass,
while some may never be realized.
REPLACEMENT PARTS
One angle on cloning is the idea of
growing perfect spare organs. If your heart is likely to fail, why not
have a new one waiting in a vat somewhere? The well-known 1997 photo
supposedly showing a human ear growing on a mouse actually depicted a construct
of mold-injected cow cartilage.
Sweden’s Karolinska Institute
has fitted nine people with new tracheas grown from their own cells on decellularized
scaffolds. (Literal) grow-your-own cartilage, skin, and bone are already
being marketed, as at University
College London’s Department of Nanotechnology and Regenerative Medicine.
In fiction, however,
organic spare parts often come from unwilling donors. As narrated by John
Byrne in the 1987 World
of Krypton miniseries, Krypton
fought its Clone War over body farms and the question of humanity. Larry
Niven’s 1967 story “The Jigsaw Man,” first printed in Dangerous Visions, concerns a society
that condemns people to death over things such as traffic violations, in order
to harvest organs for the well-to-do. The concept is still resonant in
books, as in Michael Marshall Smith’s 1998 novel Spares.
Taking the spare-parts idea to
its farthest extreme, the computer RPG Xenogears theorizes that
humanity was begun to provide spare parts for an immense bioweapon (called
Deus, no less).
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SONIC WEAPONRY
The concept of weaponized sound has been around since the storied Battle of Jericho.
SONIC WEAPONRY
The concept of weaponized sound has been around since the storied Battle of Jericho.
In more recent times,
fictional examples include Warhammer 40k, Kate Bush’s 1986
song “Experiment IV,” and Ayn Rand’s Project X in Atlas Shrugged. The
Men Who Stare at Goats depicted Barney’s
song as musical torture (accurate, no?); but what could be worse than A
Clockwork Orange’s perversion of the music of Ludwig van?
The use of Extremely Low Frequency
(ELF) as a weapon is also a tenet of some New World Order conspiracy
theories.
In 1990, it took a month of
blaring rock music for the US Army to spur Panama’s Manuel Noriega to
surrender. BBC news reports alleged a similar employment of western music
against Iraqi prisoners during the Second Persian Gulf War in 2003.
The offensive use of pulsed sound waves is a reality.
The offensive use of pulsed sound waves is a reality.
The Long Range Acoustic Device has been invoked for such mundane goals
as dispersing birds from airports or wind farms, or for more ad hominem tasks —
against political protestors and Somalian pirates. A plane with an LRAD
device was sighted above the 2012 Olympics, but it’s not known if the device
was deployed. Extremely high-power sound waves can disrupt or destroy the
eardrums of a target and cause severe pain or disorientation. This is usually
sufficient to incapacitate a person. Less powerful sound waves can cause humans
to experience nausea or discomfort. The next time you yell at somebody to
turn down their loud music, you can back your request up with science!
See you next Monday!
