THIS WAS THE FUTURE

Scientific American | December 5, 2011

By Gary Stix

Ray Kurzweil and other so-called transhumanists have promised that in coming decades we will be able to transfer a digital copy of the trillions of connections among nerve cells in our brains into a computer. We would essentially reincarnate ourselves as non-biological beings that persist for eternity inside a laptop, on the endless links of the Internet or as avatars inside a television set. After achieving the ultimate copy and paste, we would wave goodbye to death as we know it.

For fairly evident reasons, biologists tend to dismiss out of hand the ideas of Kurzweil and the transhumanist lot as the ravings of computer jocks who know nothing about the real workings of the DNA and cells that make up living tissue. Into this debate comes Sebastian Seung, a young and well-regarded computational neuroscientist from MIT, who has taken a serious look at some of the questions put forth by the transhumanists.

In Connectome, due in February, Seung conveys the excitement of studying the complete circuit diagram of the brain for which the book is named. A full connectome might provide telling insight into what goes goes awry, for instance, in an autistic child or an Alzheimer’s patient (definitely worth reading for these bits alone). In the last chapters, though he takes up the claims of the transhumanists who desperately would like to get their hands on a full connectome for the ultimate upload into binary immortality.

Seung tries to come to grips with the controversial assertion that  someday you might be able to transfer the equivalent of a connectome.doc file to computer hardware, software or any other robot or avatar that you can pick from back issues of Analog.

Seung strikes a pose that mixes skepticism with fascination. The advance reading copy that Scientific American received acknowledges some doubts :

“In his book Live Long Enough to Live Forever, the inventor Ray Kurzweil predicts that immortality will be attained in the next few decades,” Seung writes. “If you can manage to live long enough to survive to that point, you will live forever. Personally, I feel quite confident that you, dear readers, will die, and so will I.”

But Seung remains intrigued by the notion that a unifying mechanism drives the workings of the meat machine between our ears and its mechanics might be decipherable and reproducible. And he is at least willing to cast a critical eye on  the prospect of a 2.0 version of the self that, when transferred into a supercomputer, laptop, or software avatar, might then live on as an electronic ghost. (Yes, some would say that ESPN and Facebook have already brought us there, but Seung doesn’t address social media as immortality.)

The central question for Seung—and the one that also keeps the transhumanists on tenterhooks—is whether you are your connectome. If you could deduce every connection point of every brain cell, the strength with which each neuron fires, and the way these firing patterns change as the cells interact with each other, would, in fact, you be left with a copy of you?

In a chapter called “To Freeze or to Pickle,” Seung undertakes, from multiple perspectives, an earnest and unsmirking analysis of the connectome as a pathway to immortality. All of his conclusions point to obstacles that could very well prove insurmountable.

First he considers what might called the meatlocker problem. Because it may take a while to create that complete wiring diagram, many transhumanists have plans to place their heads or whole bodies in a cryonic liquid nitrogen Dewar soon after death—or, as alternatives, to preserve themselves in a glassy solid or by another process called plastination. (Plastination is the form of preservation used in the Body Worlds tour of skinless corpses.)

Once the uploading technologies are perfected, the idea goes, the preserved tissue could be used for piecing out the wiring plan. On its own, this expectation may be a showstopper because of the difficulty of maintaining the integrity of the brain’s unfathomably complex circuitry. “At the present time, cryonics is closer to religion than to science,” Seung writes. “Its members believe that a future civilization will be able to resurrect them, based only on their faith in limitless technological progress.”

Even if this niggling detail can eventually be resolved, there remains the unresolved issue of what information the connectome contains exactly. To better understand brain connections, scientists have been trying to simulate at least parts of the brain for decades. They are now also taking on the larger question of recreating the whole thing. The Human Brain Project in Europe has targeted the task of crafting a model of the entire organ a decade from now. The model would, in principle, simulate the thousands of different neuron types as well as the connections among them—and their changing structures as the brain learns and forgets.

The Human Brain Project is intended as an exploration of basic science, not a preparation for eternal life. But Seung points out that even an impressive endeavor of its magnitude might fail to capture all the necessary information.

One potential flaw: The model of the brain might have to take into account the way neurons communicate outside known channels—foregoing the transmission of chemical and electrical signals across the small gaps, called synapses, between brain cells. To overcome this hitch, it might be necessary to create a simulation of each atom in the brain, an undertaking of such unimaginable complexity that it would verge on the impossible. “It seems absurd to even consider the enormous computational power required, and is completely out of the question unless your remote descendants survive for galactic time scales,” he writes.

Seung ends his book with an epilogue that calls for a “return to reality”—a recognition that “grand challenges” remain, beyond quixotic quests for eternal life. A 10-year effort to find the connectome of a mouse brain is on his wish list. Such a quest lacks the box-office appeal of contemplating eternity as a file on a flash drive. In the end, though, Seung believes a project of this more modest scale would, like The Human Genome Project push researchers to the limit but vastly deepen our knowledge about an organ that remains largely a mystery.

One thing that I didn’t understand after reading the book was why he didn’t end the chapter about uploading with a blanket condemnation of a seemingly absurd endeavor, a conclusion that would have been fully justified from his arguments.

I e-mailed Seung and asked him whether he thought these far-fetched technologies might ever materialize. He replied that he has received this question before but prefers not to respond. “People often think I’m being coy by not answering the question you ask,” he writes. “I’m not being coy; I just don’t want to waste my readers’ time with matters that are purely matters of opinion. It’s impossible to predict events so far in the future, and my opinion is no more likely to be correct than those of other people. In the book, I address questions that can be discussed scientifically.”

He continues later: “In my book, I compared transhumanism to religion. Effectively, you’d like to know whether I belong to this religion. (i.e. perhaps you’re just asking me a personal question.) Strangely enough, the answer doesn’t matter…I’ve realized that transhumanists view me as working for their cause, whether or not I believe in it. I’m part of their vision of manifest destiny, whether I like it or not.”

Seung undoubtedly retains a lingering fascination with the possibility of an intersection between connectomics and transhumanism. At a TED talk given last year, he commented that connectomics might eventually put to the test whether a technology like cryonics will eventually be feasible. And Seung is a member of an advisory board to the Brain Preservation Foundation, which is offering a prize for technologies that would successfully preserve the structure of either a mouse or large animal brain after death for “science,” “memory donation” or “continued life.”

Don’t let any of that deter you, though. Even without meditations on crossover dreams between science and fiction, this is a great book if you want to know where neuroscience is going during the next 10 years and maybe far beyond.

Wired: Danger Room | February 11, 2010

The Pentagon’s scientific fringe want to fast-track the quick and easy repair of wartime wounds, by eliminating one of the most important elements of tissue engineering – and replacing it with magnetic fields.

Last year, Darpa-funded researchers successfully generated human muscle tissue, and the agency requested proposals for a device that could pump out new body parts made with adult stem cells. Now, Darpa’s next-gen military medicine mission continues: the agency’s budget for the upcoming year includes $6.5 million for the creation of a scaffold-free tissue engineering platform, which would allow the construction of “large, complex tissues in vitro and in vivo.”

Tissue engineering has been around for years, and researchers have made major progress in the last decade. They’ve created lab-grown collagen, artificial bladders and even reconstructed damaged rabbit penises. But all of the progress has taken place with scaffolds: artificial platforms that provide structural stability while cells develop their own matrix, and eventually turn into fully functional tissues, organs, muscles, and even body parts. Dozens of different scaffolding methods have been developed, but all come with inevitable drawbacks. Usually, as Darpa notes, scaffolds can’t sustain tissues larger than 2-3 square millimeters, and it can be difficult to control how cells will react to the scaffolds, especially inside a living organism.

Instead of improving on scaffolds, Darpa wants to do away with them altogether, which would be a paradigm shift for tissue engineering. It’ll also require some major innovation. Last year, a research team at the University of Missouri and Yale tried to create tissue using agarose (a gel derived from agar) rather than a scaffold. They noted “major limitations,” and doubted cell viability in a lab environment, let alone a living organism.

Rather than replacing scaffolds with another substance, Darpa’s after “non-contact forces,” like magnetic fields or dielectrophoresis. The forces would control cell placement “in a desired pattern for a sufficient period of time to allow the cells to synthesize their own scaffold.” Without the limitations of scaffolding, it would be easier to create multi-cellular tissues, both in a lab and in the human body.

Darpa’s long-term objective is to reconstruct wounds in the war-zone, without the need for intensive surgery or the implanting of a specially-designed scaffold. In the short-term, they’re looking for a research team to develop a fully functional skeletal-muscle construct, complete with blood flow and a nervous system, in an animal model
See also:
Pentagon Plan to Regrow Limbs: Phase One, Complete

Sorry to repeat myself but the man is on the money

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City’:
(Simulated love scene between two scanned human copies)

Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate’s hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to be left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong were heard. Peer could recall David Hawthorne screwing a long-suffering lover in a field, once. They’d been driving back to London from her father’s funeral in Yorkshire; it seemed like a good idea at the time. This was different. No twigs, no stones, no animal shit. No damp earth, no grass stains, no itching.

…

She lifted herself till they were almost apart. He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously. He laughed and opened his eyes. The cloud above had darkened. Kate lowered herself onto him again, trembling slightly.
She said “Don’t you find it ironic?”
“What?”
“Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that
Peer said, “No I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.”

A Sex Chip? Targeting the Brain’s Pleasure Center with Electrodes

Scientific American | May, 2009

A fundamental goal of neuroscience has always been to deduce the brain systems that underlie such basic drives as hunger, thirst and sex. In 1956 the well-known physiologist James Olds wrote an article for Scientific American, called “Pleasure Centers in the Brain,” that described how a rat kept without food for a day was lured down a platform by a tasty meal. En route to dinner, it received a pleasurable electric shock. The rat never showed up for mealtime, instead choosing to delight in the arousal. With the optimism characteristic of that era, Olds concluded that stimulation experiments would lead to an understanding of neural functioning that would allow “one drug that will raise or lower thresholds in the hunger system, another for the sex-drive system, and so forth.”

Fifty years later the promise of Olds’s vision has yet to fully materialize. Better drugs are needed to suppress appetite and spark sexual desire. But fascination has grown in recent years with taking Olds’s more direct route of stimulating the central nervous system.

So far no one has created anything like the Orgasmatron, first seen in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper. Undaunted, one clinician—who has trademarked the name Orgasmatron—ran a small, FDA-reviewed pilot trial to test the possibility of applying electric current to the spine to reverse sexual dysfunction. Stuart Meloy, a North Carolina physician who specializes in implanting spinal electrodes to alleviate pain, found by chance that a slightly off-kilter placement in the lower spine caused one woman to exclaim: “You’re going to have to teach my husband to do that.”

In 2006 Meloy reported that 10 of 11 women who stopped having or never had orgasms experienced sexual arousal with the temporary implant and, of that group, four had their ability to experience orgasm restored. Meloy is seeking a medical device manufacturer to bring the costs down to $12,000 for a permanent implant, about the charge for breast enlargement.

Neural electrodes may eventually move up the spinal cord to what is often characterized as the body’s primary erogenous zone. Deep-brain stimulation, the placing of electrodes at strategic spots far underneath the skull, now treats a variety of ailments, including Parkinson’s disease and dystonia (uncontrollable twisting of a body part caused by involuntary muscle contractions). An occasional side effect is spontaneous sexual stimulation.

Tipu Aziz, a neurosurgeon at the University of Oxford, speculates that better knowledge of the brain’s pleasure centers—combined with improved surgical procedures and control of electrical pulses—may make a sex chip in the brain a reality. “Lack of sexual pleasure is a huge loss in one’s life, and if one could restore that, that would enhance someone’s quality of life enormously,” Aziz remarks.

Some neuroscientists are not so sure. Morten L. Kringelbach, a researcher at Oxford who sometimes collaborates with Aziz and wrote the book The Pleasure Center (Oxford University Press, 2008), cautions that hedonic experience may consist of an impulse corresponding to “wanting” and another that represents “liking.” To succeed as a therapy, a sex chip would have to address the challenge of switching on neural circuits that activate both impulses. In a 2008 paper in Psycho­phar­ma­col­ogy with University of Michigan at Ann Arbor psychologist Kent Berridge, Kringelbach illustrated the distinction between the two by citing an infamous case from the 1960s, in which psychiatrist Robert Heath placed “pleasure electrodes” in the brain of a gay man code-named B-19, in part, as an attempt to “cure” his homosexuality.

The patient pressed a button compulsively to turn on an electrode that induced a desire for sex, but whether he actually enjoyed the sensation was unclear. The stimulation alone did not induce orgasm, and B-19 never expressed any real contentment while hitting the button. Kringelbach warns against similar misuses of contemporary deep-brain stimulation. “It’s important that we not get carried away by this technology,” he says. “It’s important that we not end up in another era of psychosurgeries,” referring to the mid-20th century popularity of lobotomies to treat psychiatric disorders.

In the end, a sex chip may serve as a prop for moviemakers, but turning on the current may never become a truly practical means of adding the buzz back in your love life.

From Greg Egan’s ‘Permutation City
(A love scene between two scanned copies of humans)

She said, ‘Don’t you find it ironic?
‘What?’
‘Transhumans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that.’
Peer said, ‘No, I don’t find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that or castration.’

Death special: The plan for eternal life

New Scientist | 13 October, 2007

I’M SITTING in a darkened hall listening to neuroscientist Anders Sandberg describe how to scan ultra-thin sections of brain. First, embed the brain in plastic, then use a camera combined with laser beam and diamond blade to capture images of the tissue as it is sliced.

The method is being developed (in mice, so far) to better understand the architecture of the brain. But Sandberg, who is based at the University of Oxford, has a rather more ambitious aim in mind. For him, this work is merely the first step towards uploading the contents of human brains – memories, emotions and all – onto a computer.

This is the opening session of the ninth annual meeting of the World Transhumanist Association (WTA) in Chicago. Sandberg and his fellow transhumanists plan to bypass death by using technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), genetic engineering and nanotechnology to radically accelerate human evolution, eventually merging people with machines to make us immortal. This may not be possible yet, the transhumanists reason, but as long as they live long enough – a few decades perhaps – the technology will surely catch up.

To many, these ideas sound seriously scary, and transhumanists have been attacked for jeopardising the future of humanity. What if they ended up creating a race of elite superhumans bent on enslaving the unmodified masses, or unwittingly programmed an army of self-replicating nanobots that would turn us all into grey goo? In 2004, political scientist Francis Fukuyama singled out transhumanism as the world’s “most dangerous idea”.

Now this small-scale movement aims to go mainstream. WTA membership has risen from 2000 to almost 5000 in the past seven years, and transhumanist student groups have sprung up at university campuses from California to Nairobi. It has attracted a series of wealthy backers, including Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, who recently donated $4 million to the cause, and music producer Charlie Kam, who paid for the Chicago conference. For the first time the organisation has recruited celebrity speakers, such as actor-environmentalist Ed Begley Jr and Star Trek veteran William Shatner.

Other well-known speakers are also on the roster, including AI developer Ben Goertzel, longevity biologist Aubrey de Grey and futurist Ray Kurzweil, the group’s unofficial prophet. Kurzweil has recently caused a stir with his best-selling book The Singularity is Near, which explores what happens when our technologies become smarter than us. With transhumanists looking to woo the masses to their cause, I’ve come to Chicago to find out whether they deserve their dangerous reputation.

Saving humanity

They don’t look very threatening, though perhaps not very diverse either. Most WTA members are white, middle-aged men, but WTA secretary and former Buddhist monk James Hughes (see “Essay: The end of death?”) hopes to attract a wider range of people by highlighting the organisation’s democratic aims. The WTA insists that any new technology is used in a fair and ethical way, he says, with global treaties set up to regulate progress. Some transhumanists campaign for equal access to healthcare and for safeguards on new technology.

AI theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky also believes the movement is driven by an ethical imperative. He sees creating a superhuman AI as humanity’s best chance of solving its problems: “Saying AI will save the world or cure cancer sounds better than saying ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen’.” Yudkowsky thinks it is crucial to create a “friendly” super-intelligence before someone creates a malevolent one, purposefully or otherwise. “Sooner or later someone is going to create these technologies,” he says. “If a self-improving AI is thrown together in a slapdash fashion, we could be in for big trouble.”

The theme of saving humanity continues with presentations on cyborgs, cryonics and raising baby AIs in the virtual world of Second Life, as well as surveillance tactics for weeding out techno-terrorists and a suggested solution for the population explosion: uploading 10 million people onto a 50-cent computer chip. More immediate issues facing humanity, such as poverty, pollution and the devastation of war, tend to get ignored.

I discover the less egalitarian side to the transhumanist community when I meet Marvin Minsky, the 80-year-old originator of artificial neural networks and co-founder of the AI lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Ordinary citizens wouldn’t know what to do with eternal life,” says Minsky. “The masses don’t have any clear-cut goals or purpose.” Only scientists, who work on problems that might take decades to solve appreciate the need for extended lifespans, he argues.

He is also staunchly against regulating the development of new technologies. “Scientists shouldn’t have ethical responsibility for their inventions, they should be able to do what they want,” he says. “You shouldn’t ask them to have the same values as other people.”

The transhumanist movement has been struggling in recent years with bitter arguments between democrats like Hughes and libertarians like Minsky. Can Kurzweil’s keynote speech unite the opposing factions? On the final day of the meeting, the diminutive 59-year-old takes the podium, complete with horn-rimmed glasses, utilitarian blue suit and Mickey Mouse watch. Kurzweil offers a few possible solutions to today’s global dilemmas, such as nano-engineered solar panels to free the world from its addiction to fossil fuels. But he is opposed to taxpayer-funded programmes such as universal healthcare as well as any regulation of new technology, and believes that even outright bans will be powerless to control or delay the end of humanity as we know it.

“People sometimes say, ‘Are we going to allow transhumanism and artificial intelligence to occur?’” he tells the audience. “Well, I don’t recall when we voted that there would be an internet.”

By Danielle Egan

The Science of Star Wars: The Clone Wars–Q&A with Author Jeanne Cavelos

Scientific American| August 11, 2008

How close has science brought us to clone armies squaring off against blaster-wielding droids?
By Adam Hadhazy

The new animated film Star Wars: The Clone Wars features an army of cloned soldiers doing battle with droids on far-flung planets. For those of us who grew up watching the Star Wars movies, droids and laser blasters are almost as real as cell phones and Wi-Fi. But what in Star Wars qualifies as remotely plausible, according to our understanding of science, and what is pure fantasy? To help answer this question, ScientificAmerican.com spoke with Jeanne Cavelos, a science fiction writer and author of The Science of Star Wars. When her book came out, researchers had spotted less than two dozen planets around other stars—that figure is now over 300—and South Korean researcher Woo Suk Hwang was five years from rocking the world with his fraudulent claims of cloning the first human cells. We asked Cavelos to update us on how George Lucas’s vision has fared.

How far have would you say researchers have come with cloning in the last few years, and will we ever have clone armies like in Star Wars?
We have cloned many different animals at this point—cats, dogs, sheep—and there is very little holding us back from cloning humans except ethics and law. It’s entirely conceivable that we will see humans cloned for medical or reproductive purposes in the coming decades. The link between genes and behavior has also become much better understood in recent years, and like the Imperial armies in Star Wars, human clones could probably be genetically altered to be obedient and programmable. One area of Star Wars cloning technology that is not very realistic according to today’s science is the limited amount of time the clones have to grow and learn. Nevertheless, cloning technology is something in Star Wars that we will be seeing more of soon.

…

Robots, or droids, as they are called in Star Wars, seem to be getting a lot more common than they were years ago. Was George Lucas right about them, too?
Well, nowadays we have the Roomba, that’s the little robotic vacuum cleaner some people seem to like. Then there’s the Honda Asimo robot that looks like an astronaut, which is pretty much as good as C-3PO at getting around. One of the major areas where people have brought robots into the home is with toys. There were those Furby robots from a while back that would talk to you and pick up what you say, and were banned from the Pentagon. You also see a lot of robots designed and built recently to mimic animals, like geckos and dragonflies.

NASA is now developing these softball-size robots—if you recall Luke’s lightsaber training with the floating ball that shoots him in Episode IV—that float in zero gravity and maneuver with six fans. They can record temperature and pressure, can go into areas that are too dangerous for astronauts to go into, and be like a canary in a coal mine.

You also see robots fighting wars in Star Wars. We have devices like that deployed in Iraq called SWORDS that can detect roadside bombs, and now they are putting weapons on these. Then there are predator drones, too. There’s also the “Big Dog” army robot in development by DARPA [Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency]; it looks like an Imperial walker but with dog legs. This two-and-half-foot-tall machine keeps its balance even on ice, and it could serve as an equipment-carrying pack robot for soldiers.

What about robotic intelligence and emotions? What are some insights since you published your book?
Science has made huge strides in robot technology since the first Star Wars movie came out, and even just since Episode I was released in 1999. But the main thing robots still lack is intelligence and emotion—we don’t have heroic robots like R2-D2 that take on risks, or skittish robots like C-3PO, either. Researchers who are developing artificial intelligence are realizing that emotions are needed to make robots rational; we usually think of these as being opposed to one another, but we need emotions to operate in a useful way. For example, people with frontal lobe disorders have trouble making decisions because, like computers, they go through every possible action before making a move. People with normal brains, though, have a feeling about a situation and that helps them to make a quick decision.

There are ideas to introduce a chemical reward system in robots similar to what humans have, or to program emotional states. If we are in a tough situation, say, stranded on the Star Wars desert planet Tatooine, we focus on survival by pushing ourselves to the limit and being more watchful of our environment. Likewise, robots could quickly “decide” to access their emergency power and shut down nonessential functions. Overall, emotions could make a robot more efficient in achieving its goal.

How practical is the transgalactic travel in the Star Wars universe?
The characters talk about moving in spaceships at “light-speed” or “making the jump into hyperspace” interchangeably, and there are some problems with that nomenclature. After all, light-speed is not very fast! If you were traveling at light-speed, it would take you over four years to reach the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, because it is over four light-years [24 trillion miles] away.

What seems to be going on in Star Wars is that they travel through so-called wormholes. Einstein’s theory of relativity tells us that we might be able to make wormholes to fold space in on itself in order to make the shortest distance between two points. All of space is warped by gravity. Think of it this way: Say space is a sheet hanging over a clothesline. If you want to get around to the other side of the sheet, you could go up to the clothesline and then down the other side, but it would be much faster just to tunnel directly between the two sides of the sheet.

Wormholes, if they exist, are probably smaller than atoms and survive for only fractions of a second. The way to make use of one theoretically is to “open” one up with a huge amount of energy and then keep it open and expand it with an exotic kind of matter. This matter would need to have negative mass or energy to exert an antigravitational force to hold the wormhole open long enough to let a spaceship pass through. This seems to be what Han Solo is doing with the Millennium Falcon when he makes [a] jump to hyperspace. You can sort of think of “light-speed” as slang in the Star Wars universe.

Obviously, we’re very far away from any kind of technology that would take us rapidly to another star. NASA’s new Orion spaceship, which will be out in 2014, is designed just to get us back to [the] moon and [to] Mars. But someday we could have interstellar travel like they use so frequently in Star Wars.

What about laser weapons? Are we any closer to having those, and are they realistic?
Who wouldn’t want to have a blaster? They are so cool. Right now we have low-powered lasers than can blind people, or higher power ones that burn skin or clothing—kind of like a long-distance flamethrower. The most powerful lasers we have that I know of have about 2.2 megawatts of power, which can destroy enemy missiles from thousands of miles away. These are rather similar to what we see in Star Wars.

But for these lasers we need enough equipment to fill up a truck or even a building. We can’t exactly fit this laser technology into a holster just yet. The best lasers are still only 30 percent efficient and the rest of their energy is lost as heat. You also have to cool the laser down to keep it working properly, plus you need to put a lot of power in to get a lot of power out.

There are wireless TASERs now about the size of a flashlight. They send out an ultraviolet laser beam that breaks up air molecules between them and the target. This releases ions, and then electricity can be sent through the air to knock someone out, or even give them a heart attack if you’re not careful. It’s kind of similar to when Princess Leia was stunned by the storm troopers near the beginning of the first movie [Episode IV: A New Hope]. There are also prototypes of stun grenades that superheat moisture in the air, which makes an explosive flash and bang that can stun people.

Let’s talk lightsabers.
Ah, lightsabers. When I first saw Star Wars, I was 17 years old, and I thought they were laser beams. But that doesn’t make any sense because a laser beam wouldn’t come to a point after a few feet. Also, the laser wouldn’t be visible unless there was a lot of dust in the air to scatter light and illuminate the beam. Plus, laser lightsabers would pass through each other like flashlight beams, which wouldn’t make for a very fun fight.So I think plasma is a better candidate. This ionized gas is made by lightning, is what the sun’s made out of, and is even used in plasma TVs. You can contain plasma using electric and magnetic fields, which exert inward pressure to match the plasma’s outward pressure. This means you could make different shapes, like a lightsaber–esque cylinder. But there are some problems: You couldn’t create a tip, and plasma would leak and vaporize the skin off Luke Skywalker’s hands. And as with a laser, you couldn’t fit all the necessary machinery to generate the plasma into a sword handle. Plus, the beam would need to be millions of degrees and far denser, in terms of energy, than anything we have now. But if somehow you could do all that, sure enough, the lightsaber would cut through metal and bone. The fields containing plasma would repel other lightsabers, so they would work like what you see, except it would radiate a great deal of heat, about as much of the sun. Jedi would have really bad sunburns.

How do you think “The Force” works in the Star Wars universe, and could it exist in ours?
The most difficult thing about trying to explain The Force is that it does so many different things: It can levitate objects, read others’ thoughts, influence the weak-minded, reveal visions of the past and the future, detect disturbances or presences, and even allow for life after death.

The best chance we have of explaining The Force is through the midi-chlorians, which were introduced in the new trilogy. Lucas explains these midi-chlorians as organisms that live within our cells and allow us to feel The Force. The element that seems scientifically based here is the sensing of someone strong in The Force. You can compare this to creatures living in water that generate small electrical fields. Some fish generate these fields, and these can sense when other fish come into these fields as well as the strength of the field put out by the approaching fish.

Or maybe The Force is similar to magnetism. Birds sense magnetic fields with cells in their beaks and eyes, called cryptochromes. Birds may actually “see” the magnetic field, so you can imagine a similar kind of thing happening in Star Wars. If Darth Vader is standing in the next room, maybe you can see the emissions of The Force like a magnetic aura around him.

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