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Fiction Science Club

How humans can reinvent themselves for life in space

Robert Pattinson in a double role on an icy planet in "Mickey 17"
Robert Pattinson plays two "expendable" space travelers in "Mickey 17." ( Copyright: © 2024 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.)

Let’s face it: Space is a hostile environment for humans. Even on Mars, settlers might have a hard time coping with potentially lethal levels of radiation, scarce resources and reduced gravity.

In “Mickey 17” — a new sci-fi movie from Bong Joon Ho, the South Korean filmmaker who made his mark with “Parasite” — an expendable space traveler named Mickey (Robert Pattinson) is exposed over and over again to deadly risks. And every time he’s killed, the lab’s 3D printer just churns out another copy of Mickey.

“He’s dying to save mankind,” the movie’s poster proclaims.

While it’s possibly to create 3D-printed body parts for implantation, the idea of printing out a complete human body and restoring its backed-up memories is pure science fiction. Nevertheless, Christopher Mason, a Cornell University biomedical researcher who studies space-related health issues, is intrigued by the movie’s premise.

“If you could 3D print a body and perfectly reconstruct it, you could, in theory, learn a lot about a body that’s put in a more dangerous situation,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I think the concept of the movie is actually quite interesting.”

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How science weighs the pluses and minuses of space sex

Illustration: Male and female astronaut floating in space and grasping for Valentine heart
The effects of the space environment on sexual intimacy have been debated for decades. (Credit: Catrin1309 / Bigstock)

You might think sex in space would be an out-of-this-world experience — but based on the scientific evidence so far, low-gravity intimacy isn’t likely to be as much of a high as it sounds. In fact, dwelling too deeply on the challenges of off-Earth sex and reproduction could be a real mood-killer.

“In one’s fantasies, or on a quick imaginary level, you think, ‘Wow, think of the possibilities,’” says Mary Roach, author of “Packing for Mars,” a book about the science of living in space. “But in fact, to stay coupled is a little tough, because … you know, you bounce apart. So, I said this to one of the astronauts at NASA, and he said, ‘Nothing a little duct tape won’t take care of.’”

Fortunately, Roach won’t be delving too deeply into the downside during her Valentine’s Day talk at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. At the 21-and-over event, she plans to focus on the lighter side of living in space — including zero-gravity sex. In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Roach provides an update on “Packing for Mars,” plus a preview of tonight’s “Mars Love Affair” presentation.

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Fiction Science Club

Science points out paths to interplanetary adventures

Illustration: Habitable airships floating in Venus' atmosphere
NASA engineers have laid out a concept for a "cloud city" of habitable airships in the atmosphere of Venus. (NASA Illustration)

What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or just watch the clouds roll by on Mars?

All those adventures, and more, are offered in a new book titled “Daydreaming in the Solar System.” But the authors don’t stop at daydreaming: York University planetary scientist John E. Moores and astrophysicist Jesse Rogerson also explain why the adventures they describe would be like nothing on Earth.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Moores says the idea behind the book was to tell “a little story that is really, really true to what the science is, and then give the reader an idea of what science there is that actually enables that story to take place.”

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Fiction Science Club

Why it’ll get harder to draw the line between AI and us

Scene from "Blade Runner 2049"
The movie “Blade Runner 2049” blurs the line between humans and machines. (Warner Bros. Pictures)

Some say artificial intelligence will be humanity’s greatest helper. Others warn that AI will become humanity’s most dangerous rival. But maybe there’s a third alternative — with AI agents achieving the status of personhood alongside their human brethren.

The potential for that scenario is the focus of a newly published book titled “The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood.” The author, Duke University law professor James Boyle, says the book has been more than a decade in the making — which suggests more than the usual prescience about the tech world’s current fascination with AI.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, he recalls the reaction he received when he shared his early ideas about the book with federal judges more than a dozen years ago..

“They’re like, ‘Rights are reserved for humans, naturally born of women!’ OK, well, not necessarily a great crowd,” says Boyle, founder of Duke Law School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. “Obviously, things have changed since then. The book seems perhaps less unhinged now than it did then.”

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How to track untrue tales in the disinformation war

Illustration: A stream of words relating to disinformation superimposed on a hand holding a mobile device
Online tools fuel an arms race between purveyors of disinformation and those who defend against it. (Credit: Skorzewiak / Bigstock.com)

Artificial intelligence is fueling an arms race between the purveyors of disinformation and those who are fighting it in this year’s high-stakes political campaign, but the best tool to defend against fake news is honest-to-goodness human intelligence.

That’s how two expert observers size up the escalating information war in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

“As a longtime AI researcher, I’ve become a huge fan of human intelligence,” says Oren Etzioni, the founder of Seattle-based TrueMedia.org, which uses AI to distinguish between genuine and faked photos and videos. “So, the first, second and third defense has to be media literacy and appropriate skepticism about what you see.”

Annalee Newitz, the author of “Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind,” agrees that humans are “the most important part of the loop” in the fight against disinformation..

“We need technical tools. We need things like TrueMedia. We need access to APIs for social media platforms so that researchers can provide tools like TrueMedia for text and for posts that are mostly text-based,” Newitz says. “But ultimately, it is about people being wary of what they read that’s passed to them by any platform that they’re on, even if it’s something they hear from their neighbors.”

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Fiction Science Club

AI goes full circle from fiction to science and back again

Illustration: Paz on Mars in a spacesuit with a spider-bot on helmet
A teenager is left in charge of a Mars base in one of "The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories." (Illustration by Maurizio Manzieri / Infinivox)

Artificial intelligence has had an effect on nearly every facet of modern life — ranging from diagnosing diseases, to applying for a job, to deciding which movie to watch. Now it’s reaching back into the realm where our notions about AI were born decades ago: science fiction.

“AI is just becoming more and more prominent in science fiction, which I think is a just a reflection of the times we’re in right now,” says Allan Kaster, who has been editing annual collections of sci-fi stories for 15 years. “It’s getting harder and harder to see a story that doesn’t include some sort of AI.”

Kaster, who heads up a sci-fi publishing house called Infinivox, discusses the connections between real-world science and fiction in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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‘The Expanse’ team explores what happens if aliens win

Black-and-white portrait of Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham
Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham are the authors of "The Expanse" series and "The Mercy of Gods." (Kyle Zimmerman Photo)

In nearly all alien-invasion tales, the puny humans somehow find a way to win — for example, in classic novels like “The War of the Worlds,” or in movies like “Independence Day” and “Battle: Los Angeles.” But in a new novel by the authors of “The Expanse” sci-fi series, the humans lose within the first hundred pages.

“The Mercy of Gods” is the first book in what’s destined to be a trilogy by James S.A. Corey, which is actually a pen name representing a long-running collaboration between science-fiction writers Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck. “The Expanse” is their best-known work — consisting of nine novels that lay out a future history of the solar system and encounters between human settlers and alien outsiders.

Those novels inspired a TV series that ran for three seasons on the Syfy cable network — and was then picked up for three more seasons on Amazon Prime Video. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made a memorable splash in 2018 when he announced at a Los Angeles space conference that “‘The Expanse’ is saved” from cancellation.

In this week’s episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Abraham says the idea behind “The Expanse” came from Franck’s imagination. The idea behind “The Mercy of Gods,” which kicks off a trilogy of Captive’s War novels, came from Franck as well.

“When Ty pitched the idea, the thing that I loved about it was this very different kind of not-at-all-triumphalist vision of being a human in a wider galaxy,” Abraham says.

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How a brainstorm could unlock mysteries of the mind

Jerome Lecoq in Allen Brain Observatory's lab
Allen Institute researcher Jerome Lecoq sets up a microscope in the Allen Brain Observatory. (Allen Institute Photo)

The Allen Institute’s OpenScope program lets scientists study the weird workings of the brain — for instance, how magic mushrooms work their psychedelic magic on neurons, how memories of the past influence perceptions of the present, and how the brain’s visual system interprets motion and texture.

But one of the program’s leaders, neuroscientist Jerome Lecoq, says he’s really excited about an experiment that hasn’t yet been fully defined. It’s a study that could support a theory about the mechanism by which sensory data is fed into our consciousness — to modify our view of the world, and perhaps to modify our behavior as well.

The experiment is being fine-tuned online by an international community of researchers, through an open-source process that the Seattle-based Allen Institute fittingly calls a “brainstorm.”

“You can just go and follow us on Twitter and visit the Google Doc,” Lecoq says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “We’re going to meet in two weeks and a half in Boston at a conference and discuss this experiment. The document is very open. If you have a good idea, please chime in.”

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Fiction Science Club

Movie points to the past and future of moon marketing

Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum on "Fly Me to the Moon" poster
Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum star in "Fly Me to the Moon." (Apple Original Films / Columbia Pictures)

In a new movie titled “Fly Me to the Moon,” a marketing consultant played by Scarlett Johansson uses Tang breakfast drink, Crest toothpaste and Omega watches to give a publicity boost to NASA’s Apollo moon program.

The marketing consultant may be totally fictional. And don’t get me started on the fake moon landing that’s part of the screwball comedy’s plot. But the fact that the makers of Tang, Crest and Omega allied themselves with NASA’s brand in the 1960s is totally real.

More than 50 years later, those companies are still benefiting from the NASA connection, says Richard Jurek, a marketing and public relations executive in the Chicago area who’s one of the authors of “Marketing the Moon: The Selling of the Apollo Lunar Program.”

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Jurek says Tang sold poorly when it was introduced in the late 1950s. “But once it was announced that it was being used in the space program and marketed that way, it became a huge bestseller for them, and in fact, still sells more overseas — and is a multibillion-dollar brand today,” he says.

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How future satellite wars will be fought — and won

Illustration: Surveillance satellites in orbit
An artist's conception shows satellites that are part of the Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness Program. (Space Force Illustration)

Wars in space are no longer just science fiction. In fact, Space War I has been raging for more than two years, with no quick end in sight.

This isn’t the kind of conflict that involves X-wing fighters or Space Marines. Instead, it’s a battle over how satellites are being used to collect imagery, identify military targets and facilitate communications in the war between Ukraine and Russia.

“As I looked at Ukraine in the early months, it was obvious to me: This is the first space war,” says David Ignatius, a journalist who lives a double life as a foreign-affairs columnist for The Washington Post and a spy-thriller novelist.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Ignatius delves into the potential national-security threats posed by satellite-based warfare — and how he wove those threats into the plot threads of a new novel titled “Phantom Orbit.” The tale lays out a scenario in which Space War I tips toward a potentially catastrophic Space War II.

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