Dune | The Science of Science Fiction

[Music] imagine that you were a young reporter you've heard about an environmental project out on the oregon seacoast which hosts one of the most extensive sand dunes in the world hundreds of miles of sand extending miles inland where the winds blowing from the sea move the dunes so that they threaten towns and railroads agriculture and forests the project is meant to protect all that is threatened from the moving sand you learn that since the 1800s people have planted different varieties of beech grass to put roots into the sands to prevent them from spreading the projects are beginning to bear fruit with extensive areas of the dunes becoming stabilized you write a story about this casting the engineers in charge of the projects as heroes protecting civilization from the ravages of time you link the spread of the sands to lost cities of the past and tell of how entire civilizations have been buried under the shifting sands you pitch the story to your agent who declines it on the grounds that there is not enough human interest in it this is not the most auspicious origin story for one of the greatest works of science fiction of the 20th century the young reporter frank herbert the novel dune according to his son brian herbert frank's visit to florence oregon the place of the sand dunes was a direct inspiration for dune it's too simplistic of course to say that this was the only inspiration for this work however the project that herbert was interested in makes a compelling link between the science used in the novel with the real and very important project of environmental science in this lecture we're going to see how the science of ecology plays a major role in shaping the plot of dune and its sequels and even more specifically how frank herbert the author anticipated a major and still controversial theory of planetary ecology the gaia hypothesis we will also examine the oregon dunes stabilization project to see how it influenced aspects of the first three novels of the dunes series and how such projects both real and fictional always carry unintended consequences herbert anticipated some of these in his novels the real efforts which are still underway involve a number of other ones along the way we will look at dune's ecological cycle as created by the giant sand worms and see how it has similar elements to daisy world a fictional world invented for purely scientific purposes we will also investigate a more perverse example of a science fiction ecology david gerold's unfinished war against the couture series i'm going to specifically talk about the novel dune originally published in 1965 and three of its sequels dune messiah children of dune and god emperor of dune rather than any of the movies or tv adaptations this is because none of the adaptations have the same ecological focus that the original novel and its sequels have the novels are also infinitely richer in plot and settings than any of the mass media works based on them the importance of dune was recognized immediately it won both of the two biggest awards in science fiction the hugo given by science fiction fans and the nebula given by science fiction writers i think this underscores two things about the book it is a very enjoyable read and it has serious intellectual content it's also impossible to pigeonhole it into any science fiction genre it has elements of what is sometimes called space opera it features interstellar travel laser weapons force fields and a huge galactic empire set thousands of years in the future however it also highlights key elements of the new wave of science fiction burgeoning in the 1960s with its emphasis on culture language religion ecology and real politique the language is elevated even archaic in places and the text is sprinkled with loan words from many languages and cultures often middle eastern or arabic the fremen the desert nomads the souk the marketplace and the quizadzhatarach the one who shortens the way the galactic empire's culture is also deliberately archaic it is vaguely futile with mysticism and religion playing an important cultural role there are also no computers of any kind because a of a great conflict thousands of years in the empire's past the butlerian jihad was a war between humans and the artificial intelligences they had created but hey we covered that topic in the lecture on robots to simplify an enormously complicated story dune begins when dukelato atreides one of the most powerful nobles in the empire is sent to govern the desert world of arrakis the dune of the title arrakis is a hot dry desert world with a few scattered settlements and an impoverished population living at the edge of survival it is also the only world that produces melange also known as spice a drug that gives its users psychic powers shortly after arriving the duke is betrayed by a trusted servant to his enemy the baron harkonnen and is killed but his consort jessica and son paul escape they go to live with the fremen militant bedouin-like nomads living in the deep deserts paul becomes a religious figure uniting the fremen to overturn the empire if this storyline seems a tad familiar remember that dune was published 12 years before star wars one of the fascinations of dune is how the ecology of arrakis drives the story the ecology of arrakis is tied to the life cycle of the sand worms giant segmented worm-like creatures that swim through the sands of the deep desert the mechanics of how they move is never explained although incredibly dangerous the fremen used the sand worms as transport across the desert the sand worms are part of an ecological cycle that produces the spice and also ties up the water on dune it is revealed in the third novel children of dune that the sand worms are an invasive species introduced from another world sand trout immature sand worms insist the water blocking it deep underground from reaching the surface of the planet water combining with their excretions produces the spice in giant explosions called spice blows that occurred due to the chemical reactions that create the spice melange is the central product that allows the empire to function giving iraqis importance far beyond what an impoverished desert world would normally have for example it is the drug that allows the spacing guild navigators to guide starships through hyperspace it also gives the benedresserat psychic powers that let them influence the empire they are a quasi-religious organization dedicated to the protection and breeding of the human race and the power behind the imperial throne paul realizes that by controlling the spice he can control the empire in the climax of the novel he threatens to destroy all of the spice plunging the empire into a dark age one of the most fascinating aspects of the novel's approach to ecology and science in general is its emphasis on holism the overall philosophy is that one must understand complicated systems as systems that to study the individual parts without considering their interactions will it best result in ignorance and at worst destroy the system under study consider the words of kinds the imperial planetologist of arrakis there is an internally recognized beauty of motion and balance on any man healthy planet you see in this beauty a dynamic stabilizing effect essential to all life its aim is simple to maintain and produce coordinated patterns of greater and greater diversity life improves the closed system's capacity to stain life this sounds a lot like the gaia hypothesis of james lovelock and lynn margulis except that it was first proposed in 1972 six years after the novel was published the gaia hypothesis is that one cannot view the ecology and the climate of earth as separate entities rather life on earth regulates its climate on both small and large scales to maintain earth's habitability this was a controversial idea in the 1970s and still remains one detractors of the idea focus on the fact that naively it seems to imply a purpose to evolution and the development of complicated ecologies this has been called mysticism by some however others see the philosophy as viewing earth's ecology as an example of a feedback system one in which elements of the system react against each other to stabilize it a classic example of a feedback system is in the temperature regulation of a house imagine a thermometer in a house that is hooked up to both a furnace and an air conditioner if the temperature gets above 80 degrees fahrenheit the thermometer sends a signal to the air conditioner turning it on until the temperature drops below that value if the temperature falls below 60 degrees the thermometer sends a signal to the furnace heating the house this is a negative feedback loop we are trying to keep some parameter the temperature within a range of values if it strays too far away either too high or too low we apply a correction in the opposite direction that keeps the parameter within the correct range in ordinary speech negative feedback is well negative something that is unpleasant in control theory however negative feedback is a key feature that keeps systems in stability james lovelock and lynn margulis proposed that earth's biosphere keeps earth's surface temperature within the limits required for life in a similar manner to how a thermostat keeps the temperature of a house within acceptable limits there is certainly some truth to this which can be seen from the natural greenhouse effect greenhouse gases in the atmosphere related to life on earth mainly water vapor and carbon dioxide warm the earth up without their presence earth would be too cold for life detractors of the theory point out that most of the water vapor in earth's atmosphere doesn't come from living organisms lovelock and his colleague andrew watson created a simplified theoretical model of how life can affect the surface temperature of a planet the daisy world this theoretical model reads like science fiction it is a model of a hypothetical planet that has two species of daisies on it one that absorbs more light from the sun than its surroundings do the other that absorbs less these daisies can thrive in a temperature range from 5 celsius to 30 celsius and they can hypothetically spread over the entire planet if there are more dark daisies than light the planet heats up the temperature increases if there are more light ones than dark ones the planet cools down what happens is interesting instead of a runaway daisy effect where one species takes over and either heats or cools the planet to extinction they coexist in ratios that ensure that the planetary temperature remains within the acceptable range what's even more interesting is that the authors of the paper showed that if daisy world sun grew either hotter or cooler the environment would adapt to the change if it got cooler comparatively more of the dark daisies would grow heating the planet if the sun got hotter the opposite would happen one issue with the gaia hypothesis is that it is concerned mainly with negative feedback effects however positive feedback can be important as well leading to sudden and drastic changes in ecological systems positive feedback is the opposite of negative feedback instead of cooling the house when the temperature is too high the thermostat turns the furnace on leading to the temperature getting even higher and higher one example of a positive feedback loop is the runaway greenhouse effect in the atmosphere of venus venus is very similar to earth in many ways in terms of size and composition it is slightly closer to the sun than earth is however the slight difference in distance means that the surface of venus is bathed in about twice as much energy as earth is from the sun increasing illumination led to carbon dioxide being driven from venus's crust into its atmosphere this in turn led to more heating as the greenhouse effect trapped heat near its surface this in turn led to more carbon dioxide being driven into the atmosphere from the crust leading to more heating until we have the situation today the surface temperature is over 800 degrees fahrenheit the atmosphere 96 carbon dioxide and surface atmospheric pressure is the same as the pressure in the deep ocean climatologists fear a similar although much smaller effect on earth as there is a lot of methane stored in permafrost in the arctic and in the oceans methane is a very effective greenhouse gas man-made global warming could lead to permafrost melt and the release of ocean stores of methane further increasing global warming in a positive feedback effect dunes ecology is just about as simple as daisy worlds in both cases the inventors of each planet were working to create a simpler version of an ecology than the hugely complicated one on earth this is a typical reaction of scientists to intractable problems in physics we call it the spherical cow solution creates some sort of theory that has the key features of the real system but nothing more than that remember lecture two in lovelock and watson's case they created the simple ecology of daisy world to illustrate how life could adapt to changing amounts of solar elimination in herbert's case he created the ecology of doing it for the background of a story he created enough for a rich tapestry to serve as a backdrop but not so much that it intruded in the story part of this tapestry is the interaction of humanity with its environment the cultural side of ecology the fremen are clandestinely trying to alter the ecology of arrakis to turn it into a more temperate world with water flowing on the surface to do this they have to disrupt the sand worm life cycle that ties up the free water of dune they are engaged in a centuries-long process to introduce desert scrub vegetation that will simultaneously stop the movement of the dunes free up the water and cool the planet by their shade the plan is carefully discussed in an appendix to the novel as i mentioned before this idea was based on a program to stabilize the oregon sand dunes herbert even has the fremen planting some of the same beach grasses as were used in the real program it seems like a good time to take a more in-depth look at the real program it goes back a long way much farther back than herbert realized or at least wrote about in the proposal for his story the oregon sand dunes represent a major and unique environmental region of our country in preparing for this lecture i corresponded with dr sally hacker a professor of ecology at oregon state university whose area of research is the ecology of the oregon dunes she told me that the history of sand dune stabilization in the western u.s goes back to the mid-1800s to quote a 1984 study whenever moving sand interferes with the activities of human beings programs of stabilization are initiated the process described is essentially identical to that described by herbert and dune to quote further the first step is always the planting of european beech grass this is the only species of beech grass that can survive in a wide enough array of sandy environments however secondary plantings of other species are needed because beach grasses don't grow well when sand deposition stops compare this to the words of frank herbert who describes the planting of beech grasses to initially stabilize the dunes when barrier dunes reached sufficient height the windward faces were planted with tougher sword grasses now the fremen came in with deeper plantings after this they turned then to the necessary animal life the fremen are clearly following the oregon plan introduce tough beach grasses and follow with other plantings when the environment becomes less hostile getting back to those oregon beach grasses man's struggle against nature for control of the dunes isn't an unmitigated success story few such stories are the problem with planting european beach crests along the north american coast is that european beach grass is well european non-native invasive the beech grasses drive out native flora for hundreds of miles along the coast and have wiped out habitats for various animals including the oregon silver spot butterfly and the western snowy plover the butterfly would have gone extinct in the 1990s if people hadn't made vigorous efforts to start recovery programs the history of ecology is full of stories like this involving the laws of unintended consequences science fiction writers are familiar with this of course in the dune series one side effect of the fulfillment of the greening of arrakis is the sudden and drastic reduction of spice production causing an economic crash of the galactic economy this issue is explored in the later books and is similar in some ways to the temporary effects the arab oil embargo had on the u.s economy in 1973 eight years after the book was published on a side note the use of weather satellites is mentioned as almost a throwaway line in the book this is interesting because the use of satellites to monitor earth's weather was pretty new when doom was first published i think that herbert was one of the first science fiction authors to use the idea of weather satellites in science fiction nowadays such satellites are commonplace but back then they emphasized the otherworldly feel of the novel in a time when images of the earth from space were rare and novel of course dune isn't the only example of ecology and science fiction perhaps the alien ecology that has been most extensively worked out is the katorin ecology in the war against the katura series by david gerold this is a story of alien invasion but not by little green men and flying saucers instead it is the invasion of earth by an alien ecology in a manner similar to how invasive species take over new environments the premise of the book is that sometime in the near future plagues wipe out a large fraction of humanity following this never before seen flora and fauna begin to appear all over the earth invading and taking over wherever they appear humanity fights back but in the four books published as of early 2020 it is a losing battle the books are narrated from the first person viewpoint of jim mccarthy a reluctant conscript in the u.s army who has a talent for surviving there are two absolutely terrifying aspects to the series first of all how bloodthirsty all of the couture and ecology seems to be the top of the katorin food chains seem to be worms gastropods huge worm-like beings with big round mouths filled with sharp teeth that eat everything in their path and are almost impossible to kill however many other equally disturbing creatures have been described from blood-thirsty swarms of mosquito-like insectoids that can drain a person dry to huge enterprise fish larger than an aircraft carrier living in the deep oceans the other terrifying aspect is that whatever is controlling the invasion has yet to be identified many characters in the novels speculate that the real nasties the tops of the katorin food chain the true invaders have yet to reveal themselves others have speculated that in a weird provision of the gaia hypothesis the entire katarin ecology is the invader that is it functions as a perhaps self-aware super organism in a manner similar to how ant colonies operate it is also possible that the aliens are couture forming earth in a manner similar to the gaia hypothesis by changing earth's average temperature in a manner very similar to how daisy world operates since the katarin ecology is mainly colored red the spread of it over the earth changes earth's albedo the amount of light that earth on average absorbs from the sun which in turn will change earth's overall temperature making it less suited for terrestrial life and more for katarin all of this is speculation right now the most recent book in the series a season for slaughter was published in 1993. david gerold has teased publication dates for books five through seven in the series but the dates keep moving forward so we may never know the answer to these questions of course humans are doing a very good job of transforming earth into an alien planet by ourselves i touched on global warming earlier there is now a lot of science fiction that deals with the consequences of what we are doing to our planet including the hunger games where large segments of the us coastline are underwater from rising sea levels and 40 signs of rain by kim stanley robinson a five minutes into the future novel involving political and scientific responses to mega-disasters triggered by global warming the great courses has a lecture series specifically on global warming earth's changing climate so i am only going to touch on a few points here first of all global warming is caused by the anthropogenic greenhouse effect let's unpack those words starting with the greenhouse effect the greenhouse effect is the warming of the surface of the earth by certain gases in the atmosphere it is caused by the fact that some gases like water vapor carbon dioxide and methane are transparent to visible light which is emitted by the sun and warms the earth but block infrared light which is emitted by the earth this means that these gases in the atmosphere act as a blanket trapping heat and warming the surface of the planet secondly anthropogenic anthropogenic means human made there is a natural greenhouse effect which is a good thing if it didn't exist earth would probably be too cold to sustain life as i mentioned before one aspect of the gaia theory is that life controls earth's thermostat many of these gases are generated or taken up by living organisms since the industrial revolution greenhouse gases emitted due to our technology have increased the temperature of the earth by about one degree celsius so far and are on track to increase it by another two by the end of this century third scientifically this theory is not controversial well over 95 percent of all climatologists except that this is real and there is an enormous body of evidence from the retreating arctic ice to the migration of species into cooler latitudes that support it the theory was first proposed in 1909 by svantarinius a nobel laureate in chemistry finally it is pretty difficult to predict how much the earth's temperature will change but not impossible the reason for this is what i discussed earlier earth's climate is a system composed of many parts including earth's biosphere changes wrought by humanity increases in greenhouse gas levels deforestation changes the weather patterns created by cities all of these go into climate models at least indirectly the system has both negative and positive feedbacks galore so it becomes difficult to predict what happens when you change a single variable it is holistic in that sense for example heating increases the amount of water vapor in the air if it stays in the atmosphere as vapor it further increases global warming because water vapor is an effective greenhouse gas if it condenses into clouds it might offset the temperature increase by blocking sunlight which does it do only detailed calculations can tell and there are a hundred other variables to consider however as computers get better the models get better and we now see that all of the models predict more or less the same thing which more or less they've been predicting all along if we go on the same way we're going now the temperature is going to increase significantly with disastrous consequences for humanity not potentially disastrous consequences mind you disastrous ones these probably include the increasing strength and frequency of hurricanes and other severe weather the drought in california and other places in the world worsening many species becoming extinct because of habitat loss danger to agriculture it's actually hard to overestimate how bad it could be i don't want to end this lecture on a down note so let's conclude with this hopeful quote from dune illustrating again how frank herbert's poetic vision enriched the scientific background of his writing life all life is in the service of life necessary nutrients are made available to life by life in greater and greater richness as the diversity of life increases the entire landscape comes alive filled with relationships and relationships within relationships what a wonderful way to envision an ecosystem [Music] you

Channel: Wondrium

Views: 74,705

Rating: 4.7866669 out of 5

Keywords: great courses, great courses plus, teaching company, free online learning, free online courses, online learning, online education

Id: -R5useo_Dp4

Length: 28min 28sec (1708 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 30 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/AutoModerator]

Hello! We're manually approving every post due to a significant increase in traffic from the new film. Any personal reviews, thoughts, questions, or general musings about Dune (2021) should be posted in our Dune (2021) Discussion Threads. Basic questions about the franchise should be directed towards our Weekly Questions thread. For real-time discussion of the movie and everything else Dune-related, please consider joining our Discord server.

I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.