Blueprint for a Battlestar

Serious Scientific Explanations for Sci-Fis Greatest Inventions

Rod Pyle

• Publisher: Aurum
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781781315934
• eBook ISBN: 9781781316252
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This beautifully illustrated pop science book which answers the enduring questions raised by science fiction, such as "Do hoverboards really exist?", "How can you bring a dinosaur back to life?" and "Can we really travel in time and space?"

Packed with stunning images, including 75 illustrations created exclusively for this book, Blueprint for a Battlestar takes twenty-five remarkable and memorable technologies from the world of sci-fi, from Star Wars and The Matrix to Ironman and The Terminator. Each concept will be explained and dissected to reveal the real science behind it. Some are boldly obvious – such as the Death Star and exoskeletons – and some less so (think bio-ports or cloaking devices). All are fascinating and will make wonderful explorations into the science of the future as we understand it today.

LIFE—BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT

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MORE THAN HUMAN
LIVING WITH FEMBOTS

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ATOMIC MANUFACTURING
THE NANOTECH REVOLUTION

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MAN OR MACHINE?
TERMINATOR-STYLE CYBORGS

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MY PET T-REX
HOW JURASSIC PARK GOT IT WRONG

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HANDS-FREE
INTERFACES IN AN IRON MAN WORLD

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AUTO-DIAGNOSIS
TRICORDERS BEYOND STAR TREK

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ECO-ENGINEERING
THE SCIENCE OF TERRAFORMING

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PLUGGING IN
BIO-PORTS AND CRANIAL INTERFACES

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WHO’S OUT THERE
SEARCHING FOR EXTRATERRESTRIAL LIFE

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STOPPED COLD
BECOMING IMMORTA

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DISAPPEARING ACT
ACHIEVING INVISIBLE

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BUILDING TOMORROW
THE CITIES OF THE FUTURE

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MORE THAN HUMAN: LIVING WITH FEMBOTS

Female robots are a staple of science fiction movies and graphic novels, though almost unremittingly in the form of the shapely mechanical dream woman of the (predominantly male) designers. Robotic females are more properly classified as androids—robots with a human appearance—than as simple robots. A world center in their development has been Japan, where research in universities and government-funded labs has tried to crack the technical challenges of a lifelike, but robotic, woman. After decades of intensive development, they are still very limited in function.

OUT OF REACH?

It has turned out to be much, much harder to create the robots than the examples in books and on-screen made us think. The idea of a talking, walking, and thinking machine seems so simple... but the further along the technology gets, the more the technical challenges of providing such needs as power-packs, realistic skin, and true artificial intelligence become clear. Robots—at least those of the human-mimicking kind—seem to be right up there with jet packs, flying cars, and personal moon rockets in terms of realization... just one more cool technology forever slightly out of reach.

THE POWER OF EXPRESSION

Humans, like most mammals, key their emotional responses to subtle facial cues. Robotics researchers have invested large amounts of time and money to learn how to reproduce the tiniest of facial cues, concentrating mainly on the eyes, eyebrows, and mouth.

Making a machine that can take care of itself and think—ie, understand and reason—is still beyond today’s technologies (as engineers on projects such as the Mars Rover and probes to Jupiter and beyond will attest). The Japanese robotics industry has been chipping away at these problems for decades, and while the results are fascinating, practical uses are still at least ten years away.

The first big-screen representationn of a female robot came in 1927 when the visionary German director Fritz Lang released his masterpiece Metropolis. In the movie, a mad scientist named Rotwang invents his perfect fembot, a resurrection of the now-dead love of his life. Subsequent on-screen robots, from various Terminators to the Iron Giant, have continued to exhibit a level of intelligence that the real thing is far from matching.

Most robots are program driven, using feedback-loops of some kind to direct their motions. They perform tasks too dull or dangerous for humans to do, so long as the economics of the arrangement are workable. In Japan alone, the number of ‘robotic workers’ is into the hundreds of thousands (and these are not just a mechanical arm with a welder, but quite sophisticated units), and the country remains in a leading position. Other developed economies, such as China, Europe, and the United States also lead in the utilization of robotic manufacturing and assembly technologies.

FEELING HANDS

Enabling robots to understand their environment is a huge challenge for robot-makers. A large part of this is measuring input from the hands—touch pressure, temperature, and other stimulation to the hand are critical to reproducing human behavior and utility via robotic dexterity.

Crude robots have been around for decades, but in 2000 the Honda corporation stunned the world with the introduction of ASIMO (Advanced Step in Innovative Mobility), a walking, vaguely humanoid machine whose primary purpose was to be a technology demonstrator and inspiration to young people. ASIMO can run at almost four mph and stands about five feet tall. While the machine has the ability to walk, run, and even avoid obstacles with minimal human intervention, that is about the scope of its humanoid characteristics. It is also expensive, costing $150,000 a month to lease.

A few years later, another Japanese company began marketing Guard Robo, a mechanized security unit. Able to operate via remote control or autonomously, the machine can follow a programmed patrol path on its own, but any machine-to-human intervention is still overseen by humans, and it is not authorized to shoot autonomously...yet.

More mission-critical is Robonaut, NASA’s most advanced robot yet. Robonaut is more humanoid than most, and by far the most anthropomorphic ever sent to space. Designed for dexterity over brute strength, Robonaut could be considered the inverse to Canadarm, the remote robotic arm used on the Space Shuttle. The resemblance to spacesuit-clad astronauts is no coincidence—Robonaut was purpose-designed to work comfortably next to astronauts with the same tools and physical restraints. An improved version, Robonaut 2 (cleverly designated R2) was flown to the International Space Station in 2011 and performed a number of tests successfully during the mission.

All these machines have some level of autonomy. Robonaut 2 was designed to be given specific tasks, then left to finish them without continuous human oversight. A slightly more ominous development would be Atlas, a 330-pound ‘robo-sapiens’ machine built by Boston Dynamics with money from DARPA. Atlas stands six feet tall and looks an awful lot like the Terminator. At this point, according to Atlas’s developers, its mental capabilities amount to roughly those of a one-year-old child. But the machine has been designed with the ability to learn. The challenge that DARPA set up to test this semi-autonomous robot involved crossing uneven ground, opening doors, throwing switches, and turning valves.

DARPA has also been busy designing cyborgs—cybernetic organisms—the slightly terrifying blend of people and machines. Early experimentation centered on controlling rodents electronically, but now growing insects with microcontrollers (all the better to spy on the bad guys) is the state of the art. Arming dragonflies with micro-lasers seems to be around the corner.

One of the recent iterations of the Japanese perfection of female androids is called Actroid. First debuted in 2003, Actroid is designed, in the words of its creator, Hiroshi Ishiguro of Osaka University, to be ‘a perfect secretary who smiles and flutters her eyelids...’ The convergence of humans and machines, and particularly the appearance of part-human, part-machine cyborgs, is raising tricky questions of whether machines can have human rights or at least be protected from sexism.

Other female robots have been created since in the United States and Asia, but Japan always seems to be one mechanical stride ahead of the pack. The developmental emphasis has been primarily in creating realistic facial responses, speech patterns, and overall movement. There has also been work done on sensing, both visual and tactile (yes, the newer models can ‘feel’ touch, both wit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Weapons of the Future
• Fantastic Voyages
• Life–But Not As We Know It
• Acknowledgements and Picture Credits
• Further Reading
• Sources
• Copyright