Never Say Never

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Over on the FictionMania Hyperboard, someone started a discussion of the use of sex-changing viruses in TG stories and someone made a comment about the impossibility of a virus being able to change bone structure. Here's a version of my contribution to that thread:

Forty years ago there were articles in national magazines about why there would never be practical video phones or portable personal phones in common use. :) The writers of those articles had never thought of digital compression or cellular transmission.

In the late nineteenth century, similar articles were published about heavier than air flight -- they hadn't heard of internal combustion engines. :)

The Romans thought using a lance from horseback would be impossible, until they met someone who used stirrups.

I really think that someday a total body rebuild will be possible, perhaps common; though I agree that what we know about viruses and growth make it look unlikely that that will be the way it's done. But how about a series of viruses that direct the body to construct nanites, or programmed autonomous somatic cells, that do the actual work. The timed viruses change the orders to the nanites as needed, first unwinding the body's bone growth pattern (age regression!) then fast forwarding bone growth once the soft tissues have been adjusted.

Synchronized sequential viral intervention they might call it. :)

Hugs
- Erin

Comments

'There are more things

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Angharad's picture

in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'

Magic is only something we don't yet have the science to understand, despite Richard Dawkins best efforts to alienate non-scientists.

All things are possible to those who believe.

Angharad

Angharad

Fascinating

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Synchronized sequential viral intervention (SSVI?), now that sounds really cool.

Anyone who wanted to write a story involving sex-changing viruses, especially Martian ones :-), might find that a really useful element to throw into the story.

Hugs,

Alys

I hate to use the word

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I hate to use the word impossible, mostly because I write speculative fiction, and impossible is just a few letters too long to be a four letter word.

For me, impossible has several possible meanings.

1. It's not possible in a given conceptual framework. solution: Change frameworks. This may not be possible: it's perfectly true that 2 + 2 = 5 for a sufficiently large value of 2, but there are no sufficiently large values. By definition.

2. It's not possible with the given resources. This may indeed be accurate. You have to deal with the resources and people available.

Can I go to the moon? I doubt very much that a ticket on the Moon Shuttle will be available to someone of my very modest means (and my not so great health) in what remains of my lifetime. That's simply an estimate of how fast something is likely to change.

As far as a DNA mod to change bone structure? Whoever said that it wasn't possible simply doesn't know his developmental biology. I don't see anything that verges on the impossible, or even the improbable.

From a practical viewpoint, it all depends on how fast you want the bone structure to change. If you're content for it to happen over several months, sure it would be possible. The biological engineering to create the appropriate DNA mod with all the intermediate scaffolding of protein networks and regulatory signaling is what would get up into the national budget area.

Xaltatun

I beg to differ...

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Changing the framework.

Assume that each 2 represented above is actually just the rounded variation of 2.4999...

Then, 2.49999... + 2.49999... = 4.99999....

And, 4.99999.... rounds to 5. Thus, 2+2 = 5.

Annette

"What ya doing' wid da family Jules, Verne?

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Sorry, Erin -- I find the idea of new inventions being used in fiction before they're actually invented -- impossible. You need to take a vacation and get your mind straight, perhaps a few thousand leagues under the sea would do you good.

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Federal Department of Sensahumor

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erin's picture

Bob Heinlein got investigated for using a weapon that hadn't been invented yet. :) Later, the feds hired him to help think of things to invent. Half a dozen science fiction writers paid to bullshit on government beer. :) Actually, they did some good work on aircraft weapon systems and other things but it was funnier the way RAH told it back in 1976. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Why So Few Writers?

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We have a hundred Senators, many times that in Congressmen, way too many bureaucrats and other office holders paid to bullshit -- and only a half dozen writers. No wonder nothing gets done about expensive gas.

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

Untapped resources

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I'd think the afore-mentioned individuals would be as good a source of gas as they are BS. Storing it for later use may be a problem, though.

KJT

"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather

"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Sadly

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Capping that source of natural gas is difficult. Then, not all that many vehicles run on natural gas either... YET.

Annette

All depends

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How do you define "invented"? The idea of the matter transporter has been a staple in sci-fi for years, but AFAIK an actual macro-scale transporter has not yet been invented.

"Beam me up, Scotty, there's no intelligent life here!"

KJT

"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather

"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Careful phrasing

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That's why I carefully specified 'macro-scale'! :-) All sorts of strange things go on at the sub-atomic scale.

"What flavor is that charming quark?"

"What quark?" ;-)

KJT

"Being a girl is wonderful and to torture someone into that would be like the exact opposite of what it's like. I don’t know how anyone could act that way." College Girl - poetheather

"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

The Science of Kindness (a drabble)

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laika's picture

The Science Of Kindness
by _ Laika Pupkino

"How'd last night's tests go?"

"Rats 1-40, unchanged."

"DAMN!"

"But it's weird. All 40 control group rats transformed spontaneously. The males are all healthy females,
and vica-versa."

"WHAAAAAHHH?!!"

"Well, quantum pharmacology is in its infancy. We're close."

He was crying. "But I'm out of ideas! And the FDA won't approve anything works so crazy!"

So his interest in this process was ....... personal. I should've realized.

He sagged defeatedly, "A disaster!"

I led the sweetest person I'd ever worked for to the lab's camp-bed. "C'mon, honey. Sleep."

"Stupid. Always knew ........ I'm 67. Should've transit-zzzzzzzzzzz-zzzzzzz..."

I sat. Reached for the vial...

.

[THIS WILL BE ANTHOLOGIZED IN MY NEXT COLLECTION OF DRABBLES....... hugs, Laika]

Never is not Long Enough

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Someone at FM brought up objections to my post, proving, at least to me, that some people prefer the boxes they are used to thinking inside. :)

Here's the gist of their post and my reply:

#If it were possible, it would take too long, probably ten years because children only grow so fast.
#But it's impossible. Cartilage never grows back, and how could you fit a bigger brain into a smaller skull? And how could you shrink teeth?

Not a decade but probably months. Humans grow slowly only because of time needed for training, lots of animals grow much faster. A pig starts out at about 3 or 4 pounds and in a year weighs more than an adult human. And pigs are not the champs of growing, other animals are faster yet.

Cartilage re-grows in some other animals, so it's possible to grow it in humans. In fact, this problem is being worked on now. Young enough human children actually can re-grow cartilage in some cases and the human nose and ears, which are cartilage, grow all your life long.

Big brain? Shrink it. We're assuming technology that could deal with such problems as which brain cells to prune to shrink the brain. But catastrophic injuries have proven both that removing part of the brain can cause big problems AND that removing part of the brain can end up causing very little problem after all. So it's possible.

Teeth, get rid of them and grow new ones. :) You need to shed a lot of calcium anyway. There's no need for growing new teeth to take as long as it does in humans, either. Lots of animals grow teeth much faster.

All of these objections are just story fodder. The brain problem in fact could make a very good story seed. :)

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Viral change

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"Parthenogenesis," my as yet unwritten story that uses a virus to change the character, destroys the original body's cells and creates new ones in their place. It starts by bloating up the man and then she shrinks back down to her new size, so he goes from around 200 lb up to 300lb and then she's down to 100lb. His teeth all fall out fairly early on. The bones getting changed is somewhat painful and very frightening for him. The whole core of the story is the question that if her brain was formed in such a way that it contains all of his memories, is she the same person as him, or is he dead if all his cells are gone?

(The title is a reference to the goddess Athene bursting fully grown from the head of Zeus.)

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