Aeon Flux and grey goo
SPOILER ALERT : Spoilers for Aeon Flux and The Island are contained within this blog, so stop reading if you haven’t watched it yet.
Went to watch Aeon Flux yesterday with another bunch of friends. Well, it’s a good movie for those of you who dig Charlize Theron, and watching her kick butt. =) Little wonder that the movie was aimed at young males eh? After all, it has the usual stuff, predictable plot (bad guys die, good people live, sidekicks die fighting, you get the idea), lots of action and the occasional scenes to get the blood racing in the veins.
Now, is it just me or are the directors are favouring futuristic plots to show off their CGI wizardry? I remember Stealth (combat pilots should still be sleeping soundly, if flight AI is still that pathetic). There’s also The Island (TI) (I remember one reviewer commenting about 2 souls exploring copulating, and illogical props). And then there’s Aeon Flux (AF). It’s obvious, without inside help the rebels would have been eradicated long ago. Come on, 400 years and the government could not get a good grip on its 5 million citizens? Either that the society regressed technologically or there’s a renegade section in the government. Since they have portable Gatlings, a quantum computing pool of liquid and strings and some pretty cool ball bearing explosives the former can be ruled out. Simple as that. So turns out that the antagonist is that power hungry brother (surprise surprise!)
And just like TI, it involves cloning and genetic memory. See the similarity? Clones living in an isolated part of the world. Except that in TI, Dr. Merrick (notice the similarity to Merck Inc.?) tries to play God, but Dr. Goodchild wants to preserve humanity. Well, I have no idea how concrete is the idea of genetic memory, although it might help us understand what the other 90% of our brain is used for. But it’s a bit pathetic, they managed to perfect the cloning process, but it leaves everyone sterile?!?! Immortality with a built in population control mechanism? I wonder what Aubrey de Grey has to say about this. He’s the guy trying to achieve immortality within this century, an engineer turned gerontologist. Go figure.
Interestingly, AF incorporated some sort of nanocircuitry embedded in the rebel operatives. Consume a pill or press a button and you enter a ‘conference chamber’. Since it’s real time ‘teleconference’, I wonder why their EM emissions weren’t detected by the regime. And how could they conference and walk normally without hitting anything? Funny isn’t it? Plus, where did the cool looking automatic sniper rifles come from all of a sudden? Too well armed for rebels don’t you think? All the better for a final shootout! =P
Now, about nanotechnology, here’s something I just came across. It highlights a Nature article in which some researchers came up with a novel way to kill tumors. Gold nanoparticles with tumor antigen receptors attached to it. Release in bloodstream through inhalation, injection, skin absorption, and food or water intake, whichever way you prefer and wait for it to attach to the tumor in sufficient quantities. Cool part about it is, put some of it on your skin and they just dissolves into your skin. Kind of scary though. Then heat the nanoparticles to 40 degrees Celsius and the tumor cells are dead! Of course, the test subjects are rats and there’s no successful human testing yet, or else it would headline news. But there was a question raised in the blog (been wondering the same thing myself) where it was asked if nanotechnology could target individual viruses. IMHO, it sounds great since if you have HIV or the mutated H5N1, just a tablespoon of the nanos and you’re cured by nightfall? But would you be comfortable with having millions of these machines in you? A penny for your thoughts. But the short answer is still a no, at least for now.
Of course, there are regulatory concerns aimed at preventing grey goo scenarios. It’s basically the alternative ending of Michael Crichton’s novel Prey. Nanomachines escape from the laboratory and replicates out of hand, consuming everything. Hence the ensuing grey goo (nobody knows if such a huge mass of nanoparticles looks like goo in the first place). But since the most efficient nanomachines of nature have yet to dominate the world (in case you’re wondering, it’s BACTERIA!), this scenario is still in sci-fi author’s imaginations, for now.
