The Science of Farscape
John A. Grant ¤ originally published in the Jigsaw
Farscape Special
Translator
Microbes
Chakkan Oil
Moya's Starburst
Wormholes
In Conclusion
Hey, hi, and hello there, gentle readers. If you’ve taken an interest in this subject, I thank you. I can’t guarantee you’ll still be interested at the end of it, though. I do pledge that you will learn a few things and perhaps understand a bit more about the actual science behind some of Farscape’s mysteries. Now, this isn’t a look beneath the scenes of the show itself, but how the various things might really work.
Herein I’ll go into a few topics that have puzzled not a few fans of the series. Things such as those pesky translator microbes, freaky tannot root and its evil twin chakkan oil, starburst, and the ever-enigmatic wormhole. All answers are accurate to the best of my knowledge and if they aren’t, they probably will be in another universe. In any event, they make sense to me and that’s all that matters right? No? Darn, and here I was hoping to slip one by you. Okay, okay, I’ll try and make sure they make sense to you as well. Could you ever hope for a better deal? Wait -- don’t answer that, just read on.
In regards to those pesky translator microbes (henceforth known as TM), with the scanty information available, I shall have to make do with what sources I have. As reluctant as I am to take Rygel’s words, “translator microbes colonize at the base of the brain” and that “they’re injected at birth” at face value... I am forced to. What can I do with that? It turns out that the lack of information becomes a benefit instead of a hindrance, since I can say almost anything and have it work.
They probably don’t alter the genetic structure of their host, else why would babies need to be inoculated? I assume there is a base form of TM that is given to all species and has been stable for some time. I wouldn’t have wanted to be there for the original experiments myself.
“We’re gonna stick these microbes in your brain and hope they work.”
Here’s the big problem. Crichton’s not Sebacean and TM weren’t exactly tested on humans. That it works on him, we know, but what if there are unexpected side effects? Say, for instance, that it has reacted with his unique body chemisty, mutating into an airborne version. This would explain how the pre-space flight Deneans in episode I, E.T., and the tribe in Jeremiah Crichton (who presumably couldn’t inoculate their children) could understand him.
One might wonder why they wouldn’t come up with an airborne version in the first place. No icky needles and all that. It was likely a compromise between the species. Would you want the Peacekeepers or Nebari mucking about with an airborne contagion? I shudder to think what would happen if anyone figures out that Crichton is a new Typhoid Mary, however beneficial.
Right about now you may be saying “That’s all well and good but how the heck do they work?” Aha! I have anticipated your question and have the answer right here. Now this is only how they might work on a human as I don’t exactly have access to the anatomies of various Farscape races. Not that I would mind in the least, I’ll have you know. Well, maybe the Sheyang, but I digress.
First of all, we hear through our ears. Not a great revalation to most of you, I suppose. The sound vibrations enter the ear canal and bounce on the tympanic membrane (the ‘eardrum’), causing it to vibrate. These vibrations are in turn passed through three very small bones connected in a chain. The first bone is called the malleus (or ‘hammer’), it is in turn connected to the incus (‘anvil’) in such a way that the resulting movement pushes in and out the third bone, the stapes (‘stirrup’). The stapes is connected to a membrane called the oval window of the cochlea. Kind of like leg bone connected to the hip bone sort of thing. By the way, you know when your middle ear is stopped up? That’s where it happens.
Now the cochlea itself is a bony canal in the form of a spiral like a garden snail and filled with liquid. It’s also got little hairlike protrusions (cilia) lining the inside. When the oval window moves it causes the liquid to stir around and shift the cilia which stimulate other things and blah, blah, blah eventually transmit signals to the vestibulocochlear nerve. (Whew! Say that ten times fast!) That’s why you get dizzy when you spin around in your chair. The fluid is still going. Not that I sit and spin a lot. Nope, not me. Did I forget to mention that the ear has a lot to do with balance? Oops.
Here’s where it all comes around. Get ready. Guess where the vestibuwhatchits nerve goes. Right! The brain stem. Aha! Right where the TM reside, just like Rygel said. From there various wacky things happen that end up accessing the part of your brain that relate to hearing and speech.
So, we know where the TM are, but what do they do there? In order to explain that, I’ll have to talk about memory for a second. Don’t worry this won’t hurt. Much. Okay, I’m going to give you a list of words and you try and remember them. Get ready, get set... go! Candy, sour, sugar, bitter, good, taste, tooth, nice, honey, soda, chocolate, heart, cake, eat, pie. Got ‘em? You better be sure. Go over them again. Got them now? Good. Put your pencils down and close your books.
Now this is what psychologists call a memory recognition test. I’m sorry for suckering you into it, but it’s too late to go back. I’m going to state a word, and you try and remember if it was on the list. It shouldn’t be too hard. No cheating! All right, here’s the word – taste. Was taste on the list? (For those of you who peeked: Come on, play along. There’s no grade, you don’t have to circle anything or fill in tiny ovals and besides, no one’s looking. Except for that one guy over there, but let’s not count him.) Yes, as you suspected, taste was on the list. Good job.
Here’s another word – point. Was point on the list? No? Are you sure? You’re quite right, point was not on the list. The last word I’m going to give you is sweet. Was sweet on the list? Yes? You now have permission to go back and check. Oops! It wasn’t on the list was it? Why did you think it was on the list? That’s because they were all retrieval cues for the word ‘sweet’. If you go back and examine the list, they are all words that can be related to sweet.
What I suspect is that the TM intercept the nerve signal of what you heard and activate retrieval cues for what it actually means. So what your ear hears and what your brain thinks it heard are two different things. It must be like watching a dubbed film. How do the TM know what word to use? Errr, I have no idea. Subsonic vibrations? Hey, I figured out what it does and you want me to tell you how it works? Sheesh.
First, a warning to all you kids out there: while ingesting tannot root can be fun at parties, make sure you have a designated driver. Or a designated Pilot, depending on the case in question. Now, on to the science.
How exactly do we get from growing tannot root all the way to using it to power Peacekeeper small arms, and why the heck would you want to do it? That’s an interesting question, I’m glad you asked it.
You may have heard about using plant oils instead of gasoline as a fuel source. For example, ethanol is a type of alcohol made by fermenting plant material. Although it makes a good fuel, it does have some drawbacks. Namely, it costs more to manufacture, it doesn't explode like gasoline, and it can absorb water, which can cause oxidation, rust and corrosion. That’s bad news for guns and stuff, you know. While ethanol can be a substitute for petroleum oil, a better substitute can be found in plant oils and fats because they have the same base chemical structure as petroleum. By manipulating plant oils it may be possible to create a petroleum substitute.
As you geologists may know, fossil fuels were plants once, millions of years ago, and so it makes sense that both the fossil fuels we use today and oils produced by plants are chemically similar. Both are made up of chains of chemicals known as hydrocarbons.
A hydrocarbon is a carbon atom surrounded by hydrogen atoms. Methane, the simplest hydrocarbon, is a single carbon atom surrounded by four hydrogen atoms. Gasoline varies from 7 to 10 hydrocarbons long. In fact, the word 'octane' means eight carbons in a chain. Get it? Oct (like in octopus) for eight and then, uh, tane. The shorter the chain of carbons, the more explosive the fuel is, and the more power it offers an engine. So when you grab that higher octane fuel, you’re literally getting more bang for your buck.
Chemists have known for decades how to alter the hydrocarbon chains in petroleum through processes known as cracking and reforming. Shortened hydrocarbon chains are used as solvent bases for paints and chemicals. Longer chains (up to 200 hydrocarbons) are known as plastics. Thank you, Mr. Robinson.
The problem is that plant oils are 14 to 18 carbons in length. That’s not exactly the optimum length, but it’s close enough to diesel fuel (15 carbons long) to be somewhat useable. So to get practical use out of a plant oil, you have to be able to do one of a few things. You could genetically modify the plant to produce that type of oil, learn how to crack and reformulate plant oils, or find a nice little plant that’s already suitable. Like, say tannot root for instance. Getting the picture?
I wager that tannot root produces oil that has a very short hydrocarbon length. No mucking about with genetics, no expensive cracking and reformulating, the Peacekeepers go straight to the source and cut out all the middle men. Take the root and press it into a mash or paste. Then use even further hydraulic pressing and even solvent extraction (ewww) to obtain the maximum release of oil from the root. Bang, zoom, instant chakkan oil.
From here I had a whole theory regarding it’s refinement into some sort of unstable Coulomb’s crystals that would release energy not unlike crunching wintergreen candy in a dark room, but then I realized Peacekeeper small arms are powered by oil, not crystals, so I was able to stop speculating. Whew. Besides, as we all saw, just the root itself is weird enough and its effect on Hynerians is... unusual to say the least.
Considering Moya’s starburst I began to wonder why is Moya shaped the way she is? Certainly not for bounding about in an atmosphere, the events of I, ET notwithstanding. Leviathans don’t usually land on planets. But she’s shaped like a watermelon seed. Why? Gravitons. She generates her own. Generate enough at one time it’s like squeezing your fingers together and... zip! She’s someplace else. This could also explain why our crew doesn’t float about.
But from what we’ve seen, it’s similar to a matter transporter. No.... that’s not right. Hmmmm.... perhaps by compressing the mass and then... no... wait... she travels through or between dimensions doesn’t she?
As Pilot said in Through the Looking Glass, “Starburst is technically the seam between space-time dimensions. Moya's power cells allow us access and we simply ride out the energy stream until we're pushed out at random.”
I have no notion of what that connotes and can’t even come up with a plausible fake reason. Is relating starburst to Pilot hitting the hyperspace button in an old game of Asteroids good enough? I didn’t think so. My apologies. I shall devote my efforts to doing better on the next one. Onward and upward.
Now we come to perhaps the greatest mystery of Farscape and indeed, a central motivating factor for a couple of characters. Wormholes. Besides having a slightly icky name, what are they good for? Zooming around through shortcuts in space, it appears.
Now a lot of current so-called “scientific” explanations of wormholes have to do with black holes, white holes, tachyons, etc. I say “Bah!” to all of them. For one thing I don’t think Earth would have had a very nice time of it, had a black hole appeared very close by.
I suspect that we are not dealing with black holes at all. (For those of you not on the bus, a black hole is a mass so dense the gravity won’t even let light escape.) In your ordinary black holes (those with no electric charge or rotation), the possibility of entering and exiting is remote. If we consider black holes that rotate and/or have an electric charge, things get more complicated. In particular, it is possible to fall into such a black hole and not hit the singularity (or supermass at the center). In effect, the interior of a charged or rotating black hole can “join up” with a corresponding white hole in such a way that you can fall into the black hole and pop out of the white hole. This combination of black and white holes is one current accepted construction of a wormhole.
But... there is a big problem with this. Radiation that pours into the wormhole (from nearby stars, the cosmic microwave background, etc.) gets blue-shifted to very high frequencies. If Crichton tried to pass through one of these wormholes, he would get fried by the X-rays and gamma rays. Besides, they are supposed to be VERY unstable and the act of traveling through one (thereby interfering with the conditions that caused it to exist) will supposedly cause it to collapse. I won’t mention that Earth would get sucked up pretty darn quickly if one appeared right next to it. Oh wait, I did mention it. Sorry.
So if it isn’t a wormhole as scientists now understand it, what the heck is it? Let’s break down what’s needed to create Crichton’s wormhole. 1) Crichton’s ship. 2) Solar flares. 3) Using a planet’s gravity to accelerate. Considering all those factors, I suggest this hypothesis:
I won’t lie to you (exaggerate and stretch the truth, yes -- but not lie) this can get a bit complicated, so take a few deep breaths and take it slow. Ready? The celebrated and paradoxical feature of quantum mechanics known as the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen effect (which has evolved into a whole field of it own) essentially states that a pair of entangled particles, which were once in contact but later move too far apart to interact directly, can exhibit individually random behavior that is too strongly correlated to be explained by classical statistics. In other words, the two particles are seemingly entangled in some way. (kinda like you and your ex). If you change the vibrational frequency of one, the other changes also, without anyone doing anything to it. You move one to the left, the other one moves to the left, and so on. No matter what the distance is between the two particles. Why? Uh... because. Actually Richard Feynman and John Wheeler came up with a nifty theory that I'm going to use. Their "absorber theory" explains how information is passed from one particle to the other.
This “transaction” model for quantum events (one moves left so does the other) uses “advanced” waves that have negative energy and travel backwards in time. In the absorber theory, any emission process makes advanced waves on an equal basis with ordinary “retarded” waves. But when the retarded wave is absorbed (sometime in the future), a cancellation process takes place, which erases all traces of advanced waves and their “advanced” effects. The absorber manages to absorb the retarded wave by making a second retarded wave identical to, but exactly out of phase with, the retarded wave from the emitter. Thus the two cancel and we say that the retarded wave from the emitter is absorbed. However, the absorber also must make an advanced wave. This advanced wave backtracks the retarded wave, traveling backwards in time along the path taken by the retarded wave and reaching the emitter at the instant of emission. It continues backward in time, but now it is accompanied by the advanced wave from the emitter. The two waves are exactly out of phase, so they also cancel, removing all 'advanced' effects in the process. Thus a “handshake” across space-time is accomplished, which leads to the transfer of energy from emitter to absorber. Uh oh, this is getting complicated and too be quite frank, I’m totally lost. How about you? Let me try it a different way.
Let's say you and a friend are at opposite ends of a pool in your back yard. In front of you and towards your friend is 'forward' in time and behind you is 'backward' in time. Got that? Good. You both jump in and create waves in the pool. Part of your friend’s waves move 'backward' in time (towards you) and your waves move 'forward' in time (towards your friend). Where the waves meet they will cancel out. Does this mean the waves never existed? Nope. But it looks like they didn't.
Recent experiments have shown that photons can be seemingly teleported from one particle (or person jumping in a pool) to another. See where I'm going here?
Okay, so let’s start by accepting the Big Bang theory with all the particles smushed (great word, eh?) together so they were in contact and became “entangled”. Flash forward a few millennia and particle A is now near Earth and particle B is right where Crichton came out of his wormhole. Crichton gets in his craft and starts his slingshot maneuver. A solar flare erupts. Most of the energy of a solar flare consists of ultraviolet radiation; intense X rays are also emitted, along with cosmic rays and less energetic particles. Exactly the same sort of stuff that gets blue-shifted into a wormhole. (Remember that from way back at the beginning of this tract?) His craft has picked up enormous energy from the slingshot maneuver when the radiation from the flare hits his ship. Somehow the shape of his craft (or something; we're dealing in the realm of “magic-like” behavior here, folks) converts all this energy into “activating” the relationship between particle A and particle B.
What Crichton is looking at when he sees the wormhole are the forward in time 'waves' that he will ride to particle B. Anyone want to make a surfing analogy? If he enters it, he will travel along in time until the waves hit particle B far out in space. When they hit, particle B sends out waves traveling BACK in time to particle A. Thus canceling out the amount of time it took the waves to reach it. But since Crichton has already reached particle B he 'pops' out into normal space with nearly instantaneous travel.
One big problem with this, though: If Crichton ever wants to get home he may have to find a particle that “corresponds” with a particle near Earth. Given that all particles everywhere may have been in contact at some point, this shouldn't be too hard but how does he make sure? I have no idea. All this deep thinking has given me a headache. Although it was the only way I could come up with, other than the simultaneous creation and destruction of a black hole. At least I avoided that messy, “Oops. I destroyed the Earth with a black hole” syndrome. Wait a second, what if it was the same particle he interacted with, only in a future time? Aww, cripes. I don’t even want to deal with that.
For those of you that don’t care, or even want to try to understand what just went on, I provide a few alternatives for your perusal.
Here’s one that might be used on a certain ‘other’ space adventure type show: The acceleration of his craft into the ionized particles of the solar flare caused the tachyons preceding his ship to become imbalanced. This opened up a phase shift into a “bubble” universe (or higher dimension) that lies parallel to ours. When the charged tachyon quanta surrounding his ship lost their power, he emerged back into his own familiar universe. The only problem with the Treknobabble theory is that Crichton would have to fight women with green hair for quatloos (ref. The Gamesters of Triskellion). There are worse fates, I suppose.
My own personal favorite: If you look closely at the interior of his ship you may notice a flux capacitor installed in the back. The radiation from the solar flares is converted to 1.21 gigawatts and when his craft uses a planet’s gravity to reach eighty-eight miles an hour...
Finally, there is the ever-popular, simple, elegant solution: the Wormhole Fairy. "Now boys and girls, if you think Crichton can make a wormhole clap your hands, wish really hard and say, 'I think he can. I think he can.'"
See, that wasn’t so bad. Only a few big words. Okay, okay, a few big words and a lot of big concepts. Please, go use what you’ve learned for good and not for evil. Brag to your friends, tell them how it could work, amaze and delight your parents with your newfound wisdom. Go on game shows and win big bucks! Expound to random people on the street. On second thought, I take back that last one. I don’t want you calling me from jail. Not that I wouldn’t accept the call, but I may not be able to make everyone’s bail money for harassing innocent passers-by. I can barely scrape up my own. Ahem.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day.
Copyright 2002 by FarscapeWeekly.com. You may freely link to this article, but please do not repost it without receiving prior permission from the author.