 I'm going to read a quote as my test. As the Secretary General of the United Nations and organizations of the 147 member states who represent almost all of the human inhabitants of planet Earth, I send greetings on behalf of the people of our planet. We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship to teach if we are called upon to be taught if we are fortunate. We know full well that our planet and all its inhabitants are but a small part of the immense universe that surrounds us. And it is with humility and hope that we take this step. Welcome, everyone, to the Science Circle and our ongoing series of presentations. Recently, we have learned about science and religion, the Fermi paradox. We had a presentation on sci-fi films, and then most recently on the Cambrian explosion. So a wide range of enjoyable topics. Today, we have a special event to take a deeper dive into one of our more popular topics, science fiction. Our recent discussion only touched on the surface of this fun topic. And I think we were all hungry for a little more at the end last time. So we are lucky to have with us our previous panel, Sysigie, Tagline, and Mike, who back to help us explore this further. Let me give you a little brief information about our panelists. I'm not sure we did that last time. So I want to make sure everyone has an appreciation of the expertise we're able to bring you here at the Science Circle. So Tagline is a well-known to us science circle students. He has a background in mathematics. But professionally is a physician, surgeon, or by career. He was a former associate professor at Pitches University School of Medicine and has written a variety of clinical papers and book chapters in biophysics as well. Our other panelist, Mike Shaw, let me see, has a degree in chemistry and a PhD in organometallic chemistry. These are all from top-notch institutions, by the way. But for purposes of maintaining privacy, I'm not going to give too many specifics. And also was a lecturer in organometallic chemistry. And he's currently a distinguished research professor. And finally, our next panelist, Sissigie, who I think is also well known to us. He is an astronomer specializing in the study of nearby galaxies at millimeter wavelengths. How badass is that? And he has a PhD in astronomy also. So now it's my understanding that one thing we can expect today is a look at the science behind science fiction. And I think we'll all be able to appreciate that. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to our panelists for their opening remarks and presentation. I may inject occasionally to voice something from the student at. And I don't know if the panelists have already decided on who would like to speak first. My thought was to end with tagline. But let me know if you guys have a different one. I want to approach it differently. All right. Very good. Yes. OK. So let's begin with tagline. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. I had slides I'd made for the first presentation, but I was too inexperienced to be able to get the projector to work properly. So co-panelists here were kind enough to look at my slides and suggested that we show them in a second setting. I'm going to have to be careful not to click too much so they get out of order. I don't want to just read them to you. The first few will be a bit of a review of some of the discussion from before about what fiction is. And I tend to think of it in terms of literature. I'll let you read it for yourself, as I mentioned. And fiction and fantasy are related, but a bit different. Fantasy can be like Grimm's fairy tales. Most people would not consider those science fiction. Although, in modern views of fiction, anything that is marketed as fiction can be considered fiction. Science fiction is sort of speculative fiction, often based on technology and science of the day, and especially how it affects humanity and the future of humanity. Here's what I was mentioning. Isaac Asimov in 75 spoke of science fiction as anything published as science fiction. An example of how that broadens the genre, I felt the man in the high castle story, which is an alternative history loosely based on Philip K. Dick's work, could be classified as sci-fi. And sci-fi has a lot of sub-genres, which I list here in a few slides, about three slides. Again, I'll just let you glance over them. I don't think there'll be great surprises. And I tried to give a few examples. And cross-genre is pretty big, so it's hard to define it. I think it's the last of the slides showing the list of sub-genres of sci-fi. I didn't really want to dwell on that, but I wanted to begin by telling you about the movies we had chosen. I'll just give a brief introduction. This was one I had chosen from 1951. The Day the Earth Stood Still. It was remade with canaries. But I like this one. And basically, what you see in this slide is Klatu. Klatu's this guy who shows up with his 10-foot robot with the power to destroy the solar system and a spaceship landing in Washington, DC. And he has a simple message that for the monkey boys that like to make bombs and blow each other up, cut it out with the atomic weapons and with their belligerence towards the world. And if they don't, they're going to be destroyed. And he soon comes to realize that these guys won't listen, these guys being all of us. So he has to make an example. And yeah, we could stand to visit. We could use some help from Superman, too. I've thought that often. But any radio shuts the mother down for a day. I'm talking about Mother Earth. And he had to get their attention. And then he leaves. And basically, it's, you know, I am take it or leave it, you know, and we'll be back if you don't listen. And so it was an extraordinary movie. And I like the original actually much better than the remake. There are a lot of taglines. But my favorite, too. I like taglines. It's a synced statement of what the idea behind a movie is from out of space, a warning and an ultimatum. And you have to imagine this was the message to people from the era of World War II and the beginning of the Cold War. So warnings and ultimatums were taken to heart. And the other was, what is this invader from another planet? Can it destroy Earth? And I guess the answer is yes. And he writes a cool movie. I really recommend it if you can get it. I own a copy. Invasion of the Body Snatchers was another one I liked a lot. It's set in San Francisco. And Mr. Spock is in it as a psychiatrist, I think. And I apologize for the telephone. It is a remake from a 1950s movie about the fear of immigrants. And I really enjoyed this one the most. I mentioned in the original meeting that I made the error of showing it to my daughter when she was eight years old. And she never in her life would sleep with a plant in her room after that. The idea was this beautiful flower falls from space and gets picked up. And people admire exotic plants and will put them in water. And so they eventually fall asleep. And while they sleep, tendrils come out and develop them. And they end up getting replaced by aliens who acquire their physiology and fitness for this planet but have their intelligence and consciousness running the show. And the taglines for it that I like is one is get some sleep. Well, the second tagline that counters that is watch out. They get you when you're sleeping. And the main tagline I think that this movie was known for is pray for the human race. They had one striking moment in the movie when they were going down to the ships and they heard the bagpipes playing Amazing Grace. And you had this thought that, yeah, the human race is going to make it. And then they saw that these pods were being put on to the ships to be transferred to all the continents. So this was a global invasion and takeover. So let's see here. Here's some pictures from it. And embryology is not that pretty. Sorry, there's Spock talking to Donald Sutherland. And this is after Donald Sutherland had become one of them. And he was seeing somebody that was still human. So my next movie is The Fly. This is from 1986. The tagline in this I like the most is help me, please help me. Jeff Goldblum and Gina Davis were outstanding in this. Another tagline I really liked in this was something went very wrong in the lab today. Very wrong. And so Jeff Goldblum plays this brilliant scientist, Seth Brundle, who develops this teleporter that can move him from one spot to another in space and reassemble him. And he ends up getting a fly in the teleporter with him. And he gets genetic information from the fly. And yeah, Jeff Goldblum became like a sex machine as he was morphing into an insect. He could buzz all night, so to speak. So let's see here a few pictures from that. That's Jeff at the beginning. The metamorphosis in this was really extraordinary. And the pod is sort of fun. It makes you want to just kind of hop in there and have a cup of tea and see what it feels like. And here is when he's digesting his rival with his vomit, like flies do. They vomit and then suck up the digestive enzymes and suck up the liquid. They can't chew. And so he goes through some changes. So the next was the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, which is a movie I really loved. And it's along the same lines of limitless. If you've seen limitless, limitless was about a nootropic. Nootropics are pharmaceutical agents, usually. That can enhance cerebral activity. In this, they have a technology by which they can erase memories. And there are experiments by which they try to reduce the chance of post-traumatic stress syndrome, for instance, giving sedatives. Like they did in all the old British movies. Whenever someone had had a shock, the doctor would sedate them with some morphing. And that actually probably saved them a lot of grief because that helped inhibit the memory from getting embedded. So this is the device that erases a memory. And in this case, these individuals, Kate Winslet and Jim Carey, they're an item. And their relationship goes sour. So they try to erase each other. And then they regret it. And they can't stop the process. But in the end, it comes to a conclusion, this movie, that you tend to have the same response because of who you are, even if you don't have the memories, as they encounter one another again and hit it off. The same attraction is there. But it's a fantastic movie. Then the Matrix, which I am sure everybody knows about, was really stunning. One of the things I really liked about this is the movie Club to Death. It's the theme music, Club to Death. If you are aware of what that is, you can find it on YouTube, Club to Death. It's really big music and dramatic. So the tagline in this is the future is not user-friendly. That was on an Australian poster. Basically, most people know the story that Keanu Reeves is a hacker, a computer hacker, at night. And I guess a programmer in the day. He was Mr. Anderson, Thomas Anderson. But his handle as a hacker is Neo. And so his persona in most of the movie is Neo. But in the Matrix, when he's dealing with these computer programs that are so treacherous, they always call him Mr. Anderson. And it's a fascinating evaluation or study of perceptions and the difficulty in determining what truly is real. Then we come to, I'll show a few, these are Matrix pictures. I should be flipping through them as I talk. If I could do two things at once, I'd be all up to date here. I'm not sure what that is. Now we have Gattaca, which was 1997 and was really quite a movie. Is a genetically inferior man assumes the identity of a superior one in order to pursue his lifelong dream of space travel. Ethan Hawke was the superior man. Personally, I found myself distracted by Uma Thurman quite a bit, but that's me talking, I guess. In society, if you weren't up to snuff genetically, you would become a menial individual who does, or an underclass person who does menial jobs. And so the tagline is shown here that is most prominent, the prisoner, his cell. In other words, we're entrapped by our cell biology, which is all determined by nucleic acids, of course. So these are pictures of, he tortures himself to do this identity theft, or it's not really a theft of an identity, it's because he gets the assistance of the individual who is Jude Law, who's sitting in the wheelchair behind him. He's sitting on a mobile contraption and this guy is having his height and increased by devices on his legs. And there's interesting artistic juxtaposition there. There's a lot of that in this movie. So, well, it was a gift in a sense, identity gift. That's a good point. Identity theft is just the term so often used in society anymore. Then we have iRobot, which the tagline that actually like quite a lot is laws were made to be broken, sort of like motorcycles were made to be ridden. It's in the year 2035, a technophobic cop, investigates a crime that may have been perpetuated by a robot, which leads to a larger threat to humanity. And it deals with conspiracy and larger threats to humanity than just the one crime, or else it wouldn't have been such a movie. It had a 7.1 rating on IMDb. It's worth seeing, if you haven't seen it. These are pictures from it. Now, extinction, I have not seen. It's from 2018. It had an IMDb rating of 5.8, which doesn't mean it's not a good movie, but that's the people that are signed up on the internet movie database, IMDb, due the ratings. The tagline for that is, we were not here first. About a father who has a recurring dream of losing his family and this nightmare turns out to be prophetic and real, rather than paranoid. And the Earth is being invaded. And the invaders are bent on destruction, but he has some ability hidden in himself that he apparently discovers that helps develop the story. I don't know how the story ends. Oil Europa report, let me flip through these. These are from extinction. Oil Europa report, 2013. These are pictures from that. It's an international crew of astronauts, undertakes a privately funded mission to search for life on Jupiter's fourth largest moon. The taglines are fear, sacrifice, and contact. So it's a manned mission to Oil Europa to search for data proving the existence of life there. It shows difficult choices and sacrifices the crew has to make to fulfill the objective of sending valuable data to Earth for research. So, OK, ex machina, I liked quite a lot. And the Vandercamp, I think, is her name. The young lady who played the robot in it, I thought, did a marvelous job. And in this, I guess the main tagline would be, I'm sorry for the noise from my computer, the main tagline would be that there is nothing more human than will to survive. And the whole thing was sort of an examination of a tutoring test, but more. And she had this as an individual with artificial intelligence and self-realization, apparently. She wanted to live and wanted to have her own life and didn't want to be contained. It's an extraordinary movie as well. So let's see. 2001, we're getting close to the end of the movies. 2001, everyone knows up from 1968 to a multi-year in the world. And the tagline for it on the remake or the re-release of it was 50 years ago, one movie changed all movies forever. I guess 2018, it was re-released, which happens to be this year, I'd realize. And I think the original tagline was an epic drama of adventure and exploration. And it's about man colonizing, man has a colony on the moon, and they are trying to investigate what is going on. I think it was a rope as well in that movie. And there was a computer that appeared to be imbued with artificial intelligence and self-realization named Hal. And of course, if, sorry for all these noises, my laptop makes here and this telephone in the background, Hal, if you do a transposition of one letter, it's IBM decoding the final movie. Let me flip through the pictures. In 1968, these were extraordinary pictures. And Stanley Kubrick, if you have a chance to see really anything he produced during his life, I would encourage you to go for it. Surrogates was a fun, interesting movie. It only got 6.3 on IMDB. It was from 2009. Bruce Willis was in it. And the idea is people can live their lives remotely in the safety of their own home, looking grubby and unshaven, and sort of semi-awake lying down on lazy boys or whatever those chairs are. And they have surrogates that are carrying out their lives for them. And the tagline for this was human perfection, what could go wrong. In a sense, the surrogates were the perfect. There's Bruce Willis as a surrogate, he's younger in his hair. And he gives it up. And finally, he was the only one walking around who was real. Now, I wanted to do a quick run through of 14 slides that I think relate to something here. One was, I like stamps. And the Day-Dayer was East German Republic is no longer in existence. It's always fun to collect stamps from governments that no longer exist. But Kekul, he always went by a ghost. He didn't use his first name. But he was trying to figure out his father, the father of organic chemistry. So around 1865, he was trying to figure out what kind of an element would have six carbons and six hydrogens. And would be more stable than what you would call an aliphatic type molecule. He had a dream of a snake swallowing its own tail. I'll give you the word for it up there. And I'll point out in the stamp on the left, the benzene, which is what he was looking at, a six carbon ring with alternating double bonds, has the ability to explain what's called resonance theory. If you look at the stamp on the right, it shows the double bonds having flipped to the adjacent interspace between carbons. And in a sense, when you have the probability distribution of electrons spread out that way, you end up with a more stable structure. There's having the bonds all in one place, and in a fixed way, as you could think of in a sense, it's less probable, I guess. So benzene can lead to a lot of other things. Benzene was used to solvent, and it caused its cancer and all sorts of things. But so much of organic chemistry depends on it. And you have pyridine, which comes from coal tar, that sort of stuff. Coal gasification led to pyridine, but I already flipped forward, I'm afraid there. The pyridine has a single nitrogen. Now, if you get two nitrogens, you've got a class of molecules called diazines. Once again, these are all sort of like benzene. So I'm trying to get you to think of benzene, then one nitrogen stuck in there still has a resonant molecule. And because it resonates, you don't have, you have a sort of hybridized SP electron clouds. And these are flat molecules. They don't have the, they lose the tetrahedral quality or distribution of the carbon when it's single bonds. So you could have on the left a para orientation with two adjacent nitrogens or a meta or ortho on the right. The meta is in the middle. That one is particularly important or interesting. Protonated here just means it has a hydrogen on it. But the nitrogen at the 1 and 3, you start at the one nitrogen and you count so you get the lowest number to the next nitrogen. And so it's a 1, 3 diazine. Now, I'd point out, Azult, I guess, I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. But I'm typing this in is the French word for nitrogen. So when you see AZ, A-Z-O or A-Z-I, think of nitrogen. And that relates to Lavoisier realizing when there's no oxygen that organisms can't survive in gas. So it's really important these are planar. That resonance, it's heterocyclic, meaning it's a circle with more than one kind of atom. It's aromatic, meaning it has alternating double bonds that can resonate and it's more stable. So you have this pyrimidine 1, 3, or a pyrimidine is 1, 3 diazine. To remember that a diazine is a 6-atom ring, think of benzene. And from this, if you note, these are all 1, 3 diazines. And you put on functional groups in certain ways and you come up with pyrimidines. And for some reason, my CUT, I have a point to make about CUT, I'll go and hear the pyrimidines shown with three-dimensional models adjacent to them. And the numbering of the atoms is shown. And so pyrimidines, think of benzene. I'll tell you something which sounds stupid when I first learned this. I thought it's interesting. You have pyrimidines and purines. Well, purines, it's a smaller word and it's the bigger molecule. Pyrimidines, the bigger name and the smaller molecule. It's a single ring. Now, if you take an octagon, this is a way of thinking of it. If you're kind of spatial, you have six points on an octagon. Just like you have six atoms on benzene or pyrimidines. And if you cut a pyramid in half, you get two pyramids. So if you can remember the word CUT, if you cut an octagon in half through four points, you get two pyramids, which are equal phases and a square base. So if you remember CUT, that will help you remember which of the nitrogenous bases are pyrimidines. It's just a mnemonic device that I'll share with you. It's one I used back when. Now diazole is another class. Let's just think of a ring of five atoms. And in this case, diazole with two nitrogens, just like with the pyrimidine, the 1, 3 diazine, you have 1, 3 diazole. That's imidazole. And it has resonance where it can switch its confirmation of electron sharing in different forms shown on the bottom there. And that helps give it stability as well. So my point is if you, I don't have these oriented, but if you just move them around in your mind, you combine the pyrimidine structure with matching up the open carbons with open carbons on the imidazole. And remember, A-Z-O means it's an organic molecule with nitrogen in it. You come up with a purine. A purine is a double ring, and each one has two nitrogens in it. It's a six ring and a five ring. And it's resonant and planar. The fact that it's planar is really important in that it lets it be used in the DNA and RNA structure. It fits the geometry of it. Let's see here. Here's just one more picture of it. So you have the pyrimidine shown. And then uracil, which is only in RNA. Thymine is in DNA only. So kind of remember those two get switched off. And cytosine, those are all the three pyrimidines. And then the purine structures include adenine and guanine. Nucleotides have a ribose molecule. Ribose is a five monosecrate carbon chain. And in this case, it's cyclic with an ester bond there. And you can have these nucleobases or nitrogenous bases attached to the one carbon on the ribose. And you notice here there's on the second, between that if you look at the base on the upper right and you have a hydroxyl group hanging down, there's a little, I touched my screen. Well, you can see it here. What's back? Good. The two carbon on the sugar, you have a hydroxyl group that is gone in DNA. One reason that is gone in DNA is the oxygen hydroxyl group in DNA would make DNA less stable. DNA needs to be more stable. And also that part of the DNA tends to be turned out. The outer spine of DNA is sugar to phosphodiester to sugar. And they're connected at the three prime carbon to a five prime carbon. And this one, it shows a phosphorous attached to the five carbon. If you have the hydrogen instead of a hydroxyl group there, it makes it more hydrophobic and less hydrophilic. RNA is better suited for being out in the cytoplasm and although I guess prokaryotic cells don't have a nuclear membrane, but they don't last as well. They're not durable like DNA is as they have different function to. One other interesting thing is that RNA can fold on itself. This is just one more picture with them. I liked it because it numbered the carbons. And the nitrogen atoms. But here are the double bonds, the hydrogen bonds that stabilize the bases. And I gave a note card, I hope you'll take, if you click on the sign to the right of the panel that mentions this and how the triple bonds are formed or which combinations you have triple hydrogen bonds, which are stabilizing but weak. They're basically a biological zipper. And so that the protected inner part of the DNA double helix can become shown. And so this all leads to this last point that if you take, and I think somebody might have mentioned this, the four letters for adenosine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, ACGT. And you take anagrams or combinations of those four characters. You don't get much until you get up to about seven letters and there you got gattaca. So now I'll turn it over to everybody else. I think that's it. Thank you. Hello, this is Berrigan. So that was a long way to go for that payoff. But it was kind of fun to walk through that chemistry. So thank you very much, Tag. Really fun to sort of review those movies in more detail and have a chance to respond to them. We still have a little time left. So I do want to give our other panelists an opportunity to chime in. So let me give first, Syzygy, a chance to maybe weigh in with either some additional movies she'd like to mention or to expand on what we've talked about. And then I'll give Mike a question. Why don't you come in here and react to what we've just talked about. OK, thanks. Thanks, Berrigan. Hello, everyone. Glad to be here again. I think I think sorry. Sorry to break in. Your mic is a little high for me. And the lines over your voice are going into the red. So maybe see if you can reduce the microphone volume. Thank you. OK, good point. Let me see if I can do that. I can just also stand back for my microphone. Maybe that would help. I didn't know how powerful this mic was. I'll sit back for my mic a little bit. So is that better? I think that's a little better, yes. Thank you. OK. Yeah, I just want to thank Tagline for his presentation. It was an interesting presentation. He obviously put a lot of work into it. It was well organized. A lot of interesting information in there. I was getting a little lost as to the organic chemistry lesson at the end there. But yeah, I see where it was headed. That was interesting. It was leading back to Gadica. Yeah, I did want to make some comments about the content that maybe we can discuss. One thing I found really surprising about Isaac Asimov's is his definition of science fiction, anything that's published as science fiction. I mean, that's setting the bar rather low. He was a professional. Well, he had his PhD in biochemistry. So he was a trained scientist. And he was very competent outside his field. He wrote many books in public, various areas of science. So he really understood what science was. And he really understood how to write good science fiction. So what strikes me is very strange that he would set the bar so low. Now, one thing he also wrote, it's apparently in a TV guide article in the 1970s. And hoping that maybe Tagline could find that, I've been looking for that at the time. He wrote the 10 rules for writing good science fiction. I don't know what those 10 rules are, except for number one and number 10. Number one is, you don't break any known scientific laws in your stories. But number 10, I don't know what the other eight were, but number 10 was, you can break any of the above rules if you know what you're doing. So on the one hand, it is an earlier statement that science fiction is anything that's published as science fiction. It doesn't exactly contradict his rules, but it does contradict what's good science fiction, because I can point to a number of movies that where they pass themselves off as science fiction, but they're more like fantasy or even science fantasy. The X-Men movie, for example. These X-Men movies, I like the X-Men movies, but they're not really what I would call science fiction or even Star Wars, which was presented in this presentation as a military science fiction. I would say it's not really science fiction. That isn't to say that they couldn't be made into science fiction if you know what you're doing as a model's rule number 10. That's another topic for discussion what's the difference between fantasy and science fiction. You can, I think, turn fantasy into science fiction if you know what you're doing. But the people who did these movies, like Star Wars or, say, the X-Men movie, didn't know what they're doing with all the respect to the people who created those movies. So yeah, it does strike me as a little bit strange that Asimov, who defined science fiction that way, it seems a little bit in contradiction with his rules. And yes, let's pass that on for others to discuss. I will just chime in with another anecdote from Kurt Vonnegut in reacting to being described as a science fiction writer. I don't think he was necessarily against it, but he just quipped, well, they think I'm a science fiction writer because I know how a refrigerator works. Sort of taking a swipe at the idea that I guess the mainstream literary press thinks that even mentioning some sort of technology in a story makes you. And so now let me give Mike an opportunity to share his thoughts also. So Mike, why don't you take up the mic? Okay, how do I sound? Sounds good. So far, so good. Okay, so tagline, a lovely summary. The movies are all top-notch ones and very important in the history of science fiction. And I'm somewhat prejudiced about chemistry at the end. So it was a delightful summary of how we get from carbon up to DNA. You know, one of the lovely things about carbon is that it's so versatile and it's pretty common. You know, if we look at the composition of the Earth's crust, there might be, oh, I don't know, one third of it, the silicon. But hardly any of our life uses silicon, it's carbon. Even though carbon is about 0.006%, don't quote me, of the Earth's crust. So carbon's gonna out-compete silicon any day unless you change the condition so radically that we might not recognize where life comes from. So yeah, I think that when we encounter other life forms, they're going to be carbon-based. And you know, there's a good chance that we might be able to even digest them. You know, always nice to land on a planet and be able to eat things from the forest without having them immediately kill us. So yeah, lovely, lovely talk. You know, in terms of like, what is science fiction, I think you always have to realize that in fiction, there's going to be a little bit of an element of fantasy. It's very, very difficult to write a story that uses everything we know about science to tell a story without introducing some small deviation. Even amongst the very hardest science fiction writers, there's always a speculative edge to it. And the question comes, when do you fall over the speculative edge? I mean, there's clearly some examples. I mean, Star Wars with the force and kind of that quasi-mystical thing that goes on. It makes for a nice, entertaining story. And I love the Star Wars move, walk them over and over again. But, you know, I certainly in my mind classify them very differently from Europa, you report, by 2001 or even Gattaca. So, let's see, Kagline, it's interesting that lead is in the same group. Yes, absolutely. You know, a short answer, silicon lead, tin. The things that make them different from carbon is that their orbitals have internal structure that leads to repulsive forces when they get too close. And carbon doesn't. Carbon atoms can get really, really close to each other without experiencing repulsion. So, carbon can do double bonds as a regular thing. And silicon, you can make it do double bonds. But, you know, it's really quite unnatural. You're not gonna find that out in the environment too much. So, with that, I'll turn it back over to you, Baradon. So far, it's been a lovely discussion. Okay, sorry, I had to turn my mic on. Yes, thanks, Mike, I appreciate that very much. I did have further thought to something, as you mentioned about Asimov's rules being that sci-fi, so it's published as sci-fi. I kind of wonder whether Margaret Atwood is an exception there. And in fact, she was kind of in the vanguard for part of a movement of kind of social science fiction, really sort of in the 80s and 90s where science fiction sort of looked away from technology and kind of looked at sort of futuristic societies. But I'm not sure that, like, what is it, the whatchamacallit tale, I'm having a little brain fart here, but The Handmaid's Tale, I'm not sure that that was originally published as science fiction. I think it was published as literature and sort of was adopted by the sci-fi community. And also, I was just gonna say feel free to respond in voice. Well, do you think something like A Handmaid's Tale is science fiction? So, you know, handmaid's, dystopian. It is dystopian. A Handmaid's Tale is arguably science fiction because it's based in a futuristic world in which humanity has gone sterile and the ability to sort of a little bit like the Children of Men, kind of a two different takes on the same premise where humans have gone sterile. And so this horrible, but in The Handmaid's Tale, the response to that is take over by a horrible right-wing angelical culture in, you know, so it's kind of based on kind of a science-y thing, you know, where we go sterile, but then uses that as a launching point for some dystopian social future. It's not technological, it's social. Well, my beef with The Man in the High Castle is that it doesn't have enough science. It doesn't have enough technology. I mean, they've got this amulet with which they can travel to alternate futures or alternate realities that they hardly ever use it. And nobody really seems to care that it exists. It drives me crazy. I mean, I'm only like a couple of episodes into the new season and I'm kind of hoping that everyone sort of wakes up to the fact that they can just transfer to this other reality. It's gonna be crazy. Well, thanks for your description. I should read more of Margaret Atwood. I have actually read a couple of her stories. I did want to mention, talk a little bit about what Mike said. He said there's some speculative part of science fiction where you have to, where it's almost like a fantasy. And I suppose that's true to some extent, but if you have someone who really knows what they're doing, like Isaac Asimov. And another author I would mention is Alistair Reynolds, who's an astronomer and he writes science fiction stories, those stories are based very firmly on science usually. And you could tell it's written by a scientist because the science seems, even if it isn't extrapolation beyond what we know, it is, yes, usually, that's right. Sometimes they do go a little far afield, but you can tell it very often that these guys are scientists because they, it's, it looks, it seems like very firm extrapolations of what we know very often. And yeah, there's one question that Dali is asking whether something like an inception would be classified as science fiction. It doesn't, I don't know if, say, for sure, that it would be anything else but science fiction. It's sort of an extrapolation of what we know about dreams. I think the rules they have about how dreams behave in that movie are a little too firm. I don't think those rules necessarily apply exactly in everyone, but yeah, you could say it's science fiction in my opinion, even if the content of the dreams are fantasies. So I have a thought about the matrix that I'd like to share. I'm a fan not only of the first movie, which everyone loves, but I, in fact, like the entire trilogy. And one reason I do, I'm not sure if we talked about this last time or not, but one of the things I like about the story arc of the Matrix trilogies is that Agent Smith loses his purpose when he gets destroyed by Neo at the end of the movie. So he's programmed without purpose, which is a contradiction, creates an existential crisis for him. And as a result, he goes rogue and becomes a threat to the machines. So in the third movie, what you discover is that the machines are as freaked out about Agent Smith as Neo is. And but Neo has a power that the machines don't have because he's alive. And so as the true one, as we learned in the second movie, that the reality has iterated over and over and over again, where a one has emerged and bought the machines when ever. And but it turns out that Neo in our trilogy is true one and he defeats Agent Smith in an alliance with the machines. At the end, basically, everyone is happy. The machines make a truce with the humans and so forth. So I just think that that's a very elegant resolution to the whole dilemma of the conflict between them. Yeah, that is an interesting way of looking at it. To me, it could also be very mundane. It's just like your laptop has a virus. So you have to find antiviral software and Neo is like an organic antiviral software. And so my laptop's getting all freaked out about this virus running inside it. So I inject my finger into it and somehow my body provides the viral software. So it's sort of like that and you could look at it that way too. Or at least Neo has super user privileges and can go about deleting the glitchy software, Agent Smith. Yes, but let's represent that with some kind of bad ass in the sky, world spanning fight between Neo and Agent Smith. Well, that's how I feel whenever I have to log in as a route into my computer anyway. Right, yeah, it's just a representation of every time we launch our antivirus software. Yeah, but when you do that, when you're super user, make sure you have these cool wraparound glasses and you have this long coat that looks really cool, right? I might. So I wanted to mention we are formally authorized to extend the discussion for a few more minutes. So, you know, feel free to share any additional thoughts you guys have and we can end also the audience can feel free to chime in. So I think we should try to take advantage of. Well, one thing I would like to make a plug for is sometime having a panel discussion on the difference between fantasy and science fiction. As I've mentioned previously, a society's stories in some way define that society and can also be a diagnostic of that society. And if we have a society in which we have movies and even books being passed off as science fiction when they're really fantasy, it says something about the lack of scientific literacy. So I think that's something we should about a panel discussion to sometime. Yeah, we can get into that a little bit too. Cause I'm very on board with things like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, you know, not being science fiction. You know, one of the things I've always loved about Star Trek is this techno, the techno babble that it's famous for where they try to sort of explain the science behind some MacGuffin in the storyline. And one reason I like it is cause you can tell that they really make an effort to like make it seem plausible. Like, you know, they kind of use the right little terms and stuff like that. And they draw from the appropriate branch of science that they need to draw from to explain it. And even though it is just kind of babble, I just admire the effort they put in to do that at least. Yeah, science fantasy, I would call the science, I would call Star Wars science fantasy. And science fantasies can be very, very interesting, very compelling, very, very visually exciting. And they can have interesting characters and it can be an interesting thing to watch. But the problem is that it's, they try to pass it off as science fiction. And despite, with all due respect to Isaac Asimov, I don't consider something that's passed off as science fiction to necessarily be science fiction. You know, I always wondered whether Lucas set Star Wars in space because he was inspired by Roddenberry's elevator pitch for Star Trek, which was that it was wagon train in space. Sort of the idea that it's basically just a melodrama with kind of a science fiction setting. And Lucas sort of took that idea and just set his own melodrama in space, but not really with any intention to make it science fiction. Unfortunately it is passed off as science fiction though. Yeah. Well, I think one of the things Lucas tried to do with this story was to follow the hero's journey with, from Joseph Campbell's work, the setting and the devices used were secondary to having a compelling story. I think that is actually a hallmark of good science fiction, good storytelling in general, that when you have a story that is based on character and plot, you know, having these secondary considerations of setting and devices, you know, various literary forms that allow the story to proceed through science fiction elements, you know, all of these things can play the part of making a good story. If your story is just based on the technology and your character's awarding, it's not going to be a successful franchise. Yeah, thank you. And since you mentioned Dune, and I actually want to jump on that and talk about Dune a little bit, I'm actually a big fan of the David Lynch version of the, you know, movie Dune, though it's often mocked, I actually really love it. But so Dune, the key to interstellar space travel and contact with alien species is the spice, which is a psychoactive substance. And one of the things that's fascinating about Dune is this acknowledgement that sort of reality and consciousness are linked. And that space travel is enabled by mind expansion. So I really would love to get your guys' thoughts about that. Well, my particular opinion is that you're not with your mind going to teleport from one place to another and beat the rules of space time and travel faster than the speed of light. It's not a bad idea. There are just certain parallels with what's happening in the world now because they have to get this spice in order to achieve this state of mind for this interstellar space travel. So it's basically the fuel for the interstellar space travel and it's in a planet which is suspiciously like Saudi Arabia. So it's almost like trying to get a petroleum from Saudi Arabia. And it's an interesting parallel with the interesting characters. And I mean, the first book in the Dune series I thought was good and I did enjoy it. It's at best what I would call soft science fiction. It's sort of at the boundaries of fantasy and science fiction. But it's almost like saying there's no such thing as an objective reality because your reality is what your mind creates. And I definitely don't agree with that, but that's, you know, now we're getting. He who controls the spice controls the universe. Yeah, it's been a long time since I've read Dune and the later ones. But they are an enjoyable read, at least until you get too far into the series. And sometimes you just have to, you know, be forgiving of some of the devices that they use. Because so like I just pointed, it's like if they need spice to do interstellar travel, how did they get to Dune in the first place? So the fact that it's set 12,000 years in the future or something like that kind of white washes a lot of the historical things that you might object to otherwise. Oh, I hadn't thought of that. There's a chicken and egg paradox there. Well, not necessarily. You can still have interstellar travel without faster than light speed. It's just that you need colony ships and you have to spend centuries getting to places depending on how fast you go. You know, the whole notion of traveling interstellar space with the spice, like the way that happens is kind of vague. It's not really clear if it's like some kind of a wormhole or some kind of teleportation, you know, but they're able to move, you know, vast fleets and gigantic ships and so forth. And you kind of get the impression it's more like some kind of teleportation just because no one ever seems to be freaked out about, I don't know, like the gravitational issues involved in a wormhole. I mean, no one ever seems worried about the technology, like the physical transformations that happen when you travel like that through space. So this seems like kind of treated more like it's teleportation. Yeah, I mean, Mike ranks a good point. I mean, the human factor in stories is absolutely essential or the stories are flat. I mean, it's just a bunch of techno-babble that has no real meaning. It doesn't reach us inside ourselves. And we need the human element. And the spice is one way of doing that because you can have interesting adventures by traveling across the universe or at least across the galaxy. Using the spice. But one thing I did, yeah, that's true too. Mike brings up another excellent point is that the people don't necessarily have to be human beings. They could be other intelligent beings or other creatures that could be interesting and affect us and we affect them. But one thing I did want to point out is that there are serious scientific papers now on work drive, little space-time bubbles that you form around your spaceships. So the travel faster than light. That is trippy. And I do think the spice is probably analogous to these transporter on Star Trek. Basically, Roddenberry came up with the transporter really just as a narrative device because he didn't want to have to edit in shots of like shuttlecraft or something like that like landing on a planet and stuff like that. So he just wanted to be able to get his actors to where the action is happening and from outer space. So he just came up with the transporter as a narrative device. And the spice is basically the same thing as that. It's just a device to get people to where you need them. So budgetary restrictions have led to technological innovation within that series. Yeah. I think that's interesting about the teleporter idea that just think of two things. How easy it is to get the audience to become accustomed to and accepting of all of these made up technologies and how quickly and deeply iconic became the beam me up or beam me up Scotty line that I've heard many times over the years. It reached a lot of people and spoke to people's imagination. I've always been disappointed that Second Life never adopted the beam me up sort of emoji or whatever. We all say TP, which sucks. We should all be saying beam me over or beam me up or something, but Second Life never adopted it, aren't it? You may have been copyright issues. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, but it has proven useful. Apparently there was a case where a guy was, it was in this big exam room and there were a bunch of people writing their exams and he managed to finish his game early and he stands up and suddenly everyone looks at him and then he pulls out his wall, flips it open like as the communicator says, quick, Scotty, beam me up. All right, gentlemen, I think we're just about at the as much time as we can do. So I'm going to go ahead and bring this to a close. This was a lot of fun. And like I said, last time I get together and hash this out. Get together and hash this out over a beer, but all good things. I want to thank the Science Circle for hosting and helping to administer this program and to our students for attending. And of course, most of all, to our fabulous panel. Thanks everyone and we'll see you next time. Thanks everyone. Bye. Since people are walking probably toward the bathrooms, I'll make a point that uric acid is a purine, it's a larger molecule. The larger molecules are a little more involved to metabolize and they're excreted in the urine and purine itself comes from the word purin or Latin of purum, meaning clean and uricum, which means uric acid. So you get certain conditions and too much uric acid builds up, you can get gout and crystals of uric acid form in your joints or soft tissues and cause inflammation. And crystals accumulated are a good way for scientists in days when they had less detailed investigatory techniques to get samples to look at. So normally uric acid is excreted by the kidneys along with urea, urea is carbon with a, I guess an SCO group on it, double bonded to a carbon and an ammonia on each end. So it detoxifies ammonia. So you can think about that as you go to the restrooms now.