An entire genre of fiction is about to disappear from our lives
forever. A quarter-century from now, science-fiction in it’s
written and filmed form will be a dead art, like Olde English or
paint by numbers. The reason? Everything that once made the basis
of a good science-fiction story isn’t fiction anymore. Cloning,
black holes, teleportation, space travel, zero-calorie Coke that
tastes like the real thing… when will the madness end?
It was reported in the Jan. 23 edition of the Journal of Science
that the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland,
with help from colleagues at the University of Michigan,
successfully teleported information between two separate atoms
about a yard apart. Fox News, in a related story, explained that
“teleportation works because of a remarkable quantum phenomenon
called entanglement which only occurs on the atomic and subatomic
scale.”
I don’t know what that means.
What I do know, rationally speaking is, teleportation to most of
us shouldn’t work. Stuff doesn’t just appear from someplace else.
That’s bad juju, not science. Haven’t these guys seen The Fly [both
the campy 1958 version and the way-creepier 1986 Jeff Goldblum
creation?]
Perhaps early man saw the wheel in the same light, or at the
turn of the 20th century, flight was seen as bad juju. Either way,
this may be a good time to cash in those frequent-flyer miles.
On to cloning. On to cloning. [Get it?]
A couple living in Boca Raton, Fla. just dropped $155,000 for a
cloned version of their late yellow Labrador, Lancelot. Lancelot
Encore was picked up from Miami International Airport by owners
Nina and Edgar Otto just last week. The Ottos, planning for the
future, froze samples of the original Lancelot’s DNA five years ago
in anticipation of this event. Lancelot the first died of cancer
last year, and BioArts International in San Francisco, the firm
responsible for the feat, was all too happy to provide the Ottos
with a Lancelot incarnate. I’m sure this is only the beginning of
what will likely become a very hot industry fueled by pet-lovers
worldwide. I just wonder if the new dog already knows all the old
dog’s tricks.
Preserving loved ones isn’t just going to the dogs, though. A
relative neighbor of ours famously — and somewhat unsuccessfully —
cryogenically froze his grandfather in 1989. According to roadsideamerica.com, “The body of
Grandpa Bredo has been kept frozen in a Nederland storage shed,
aided by regular dry ice deliveries. Bredo Morstoel died in 1989,
and has been in various conditions of ‘cryonic suspension’ ever
since.
“Bredo’s grandson Trygve put Bredo in the snappy aluminum shed
in 1994, and apparently wasn’t aware of the American taboo around
storing deceased relatives with yard tools. Trygve was deported by
the US government for other reasons — then the town discovered
Grandpa and passed a local zoning law against corpsicle storage.
Turns out Bredo has been ‘grandfathered,’ and allowed to remain
until a cure is found for being dead.”
Maybe Trygve just needs to send Grandpa to San Francisco.
And now on to the scariest piece of
science-fiction-gone-science-reality in the past year.
The Swiss-based European Organization for Nuclear Research,
better known as CERN, has constructed a Large Hadron Collider. It
even sounds ominous.
According to Wikipedia, the world’s largest particle collider is
“intended to collide opposing particle beams, protons at an energy
of 7 TeV/particle or lead nuclei at 574 TeV/particle.”
Essentially, the scientists are going to smash two very, very
small “things” travelling at very, very high speeds into each
other.
The point?
The scientists want to see if they can produce the Higgs boson,
an elusive theoretical particle. Apparently, producing this boson
would shed light on how the universe was created as well as whether
or not there are dimensions present beyond the three we’ve become
accustomed to.
Here’s the thing. The collider is set to be ready to run in July
of this year following a slight setback in 2008. At first
scientists said the operation of the collider could potentially
create a black hole capable of swallowing the universe. Then
scientists said if a black hole were created, it would be so
short-lived, it wouldn’t have a chance to eat the universe. The
latest news: the scientists redid the math and, lo and behold,
maybe, just maybe the black hole would live long enough to eat
something to keep from dying, grow, eat something else, grow … ad
infinitum.
Eat the universe…
And you thought science-fiction could be scary.