From the Vault: Dune Biology

Frank Herbert's 1965 novel 'Dune' is a game-changing saga of space-age feudalistic intrigue, rampaging sandworms and prescient mind drugs on a desert world. Even today, the work resonates with scientific wonder and philosophical intrigue, so join Robert and Joe for a two-part exploration of the science of 'Dune.' In this episode, explore the lifecycle of the sandworm, mentats and the power of the spice. (Originally published Oct. 1, 2015)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, you welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My
name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it's Saturday.
The Vault is open and it is going to be
part two of a two part Vault series. Now. Last Saturday,
we ran part one of our Science of Dune episodes
from we ran the Science of Dune Technology. Today it's
going to be another foray into the planet Iraq as

(00:26):
part two, the Science of Dune Biology, which originally aired
on October one. Yeah, there's a lot of sand where
I'm talking this episode, as we sort of pieced together
the science that that Frank Herbert used to create the
idea of the sand worm, as well as scientific interpretations
by a couple of different commentators in the decades to follow. Now,

(00:50):
wait a minute, Robert, we're going to be getting another
Dune film, right, Yes, it's true. Bye bye Dnevillneuve. Yes,
the director of, of course, the most recent blay Runner film,
Blade Run, which I really enjoyed and it certainly is
just full of visual flare like watching that and especially
enjoy I especially enjoyed the slow pace of the film,

(01:12):
like like Blade Runner is what three four hours long,
it's about seven hours long, but it feels like it's
just an hour and a half. It feels far shorter
than any superhero movie I have ever seen. How long
was Batman v. Superman Dawn of Justice? Is that about
six and a half hours? I don't know. I only

(01:33):
saw that over other people's shoulders on an airplane. I
watched it on a flight and could not finish it
on the flight. Like it. I started it at takeoff
and we landed and the movie wasn't over. Yeah, superhero
movies are not necessarily my thing these days, unless unless
it has Wesley Snipes in it, and he's he's running vampires.
So yeah, I am all in on another cinematic vision

(01:56):
of Dune. I mean every element, all the old ones
we talked about here, the sand warm terms. If we
get to face dancers, I really want to see a
nice cinematic vision of the face dancers as well. I
think I might have said this in the original episode,
so apologies if I repeat later in our rerun what
I'm about to say now, But I think there should
be an HBO series adaptation of the Done universe. Oh

(02:18):
you think what HBO did with Game of Thrones. They
should do with Done. Yeah, there's plenty of material. They're
even just the first book. You could do a full blown,
drawn out, you know, cinematic treatment of the thing. Like
I'm currently watching the Netflix adaptation of Richard K. Morgan's
Altered Carbon, which is a not that lengthy of a novel.

(02:41):
It has a lot of ins and outs, and they've
done a really great job of of giving it the
multi episode treatment. Whereas I like watching their treatment of it,
I can't imagine crushing it all down into even a
lengthy film, so Done is perfect for that that sort
of treatment. But I guess we're getting another movie. Hopefully
it'll be four to five hours long. That's that's that's

(03:02):
what I'm looking for. Hud percent agree, And I hope
it has a little intermission break in it. It just
runs for thirty seconds or so, but not a werewolf
break because there are no there are no werewolves. That's
a callback, folks, all right, with without further ado, let's
enter the vault. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your mind

(03:24):
from how Stuff Works dot Com. Disembarkation disembarkation notice to
all passengers arriving on Station Aracus, the June Planetary Tourism

(03:46):
Consortium funded by the great generosity of the most noble
House Hardconed would like to welcome you to planet Aracus.
Aracus is a dry place. Please remember to conserve water
whenever possible. It is recommended that you do not venture
outside without a properly fitted steel suit to recycle your sweat,
urine and fecal moisture. When traveling beyond the shield ball,

(04:08):
remember always to watchful worms. Signed by keeping in mind
the three ages, hissing, heaving, and high energy discharge. A
hissing sound in the sand, heaving up of displaced sediment,
and high energy study discharge from the dunes may all
indicate that the sand worm is near and the event
of worm sign do not activate shields and proceed immediately

(04:29):
to the nearest cave building or evacuation or in a
thought or local vendors and kiosks gone throughout station. Iraqets
are the best place to purchase steel suits, frim hits,
and individually packaged worm thumbers and duty free prices. Please
remember also the spice must blow. Anyone suspected of sabotaging, inhibiting,

(04:49):
or interfering with spice production may be subject to penalties
up to and including gladiatorial remuneration on gating prime or
personal evaporation. Please enjoy your stay among the dunes. Hey,
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And this is episode

(05:10):
two in our exploration of the science of doone, the
science of Frank Herbert's sci fi classic Dune, which is
celebrating its fifty the anniversary this year. Yeah, so if
you missed the first part, you should go back and
listen to that first part one where we talk about
the technology of doing and we we talked about some
important sort of introductory materials to the universe of doone.

(05:33):
If you're not familiar with it, we highly recommend that
you check out that part first before you listen to
this one. But if you just want to get thrown
right into the middle, here we are. Yeah. Last time
we talked about but Larry and Johad, we talked about
still suits, We talked about orna thoptors, and a little
bit about the Holtzman effect whatever that is. But yeah,

(05:54):
this time we're going to talk more about the the
living science of done, about the biology an ecology of
the planet Iracus, and one of the coolest things about
the Dune universe has got to be the sandworms. Yes,
I imagine that is one of, if not the key
aspects of the franchise that come to people's minds when

(06:17):
they think of do Yeah. I So, I just finished
reading this book a few weeks ago, and I loved it.
I absolutely adored this book. As I said in the
last podcast, it frequently struck me as just amazingly fresh
for a fifty year old book. It's full of ideas
that you don't encounter elsewhere. It just felt very original

(06:37):
and unique and different. But the moment where the book
really kicked into gear for me was the first sandworm attack.
And this is when they're going out to observe spice harvests. Correct. Yeah,
So I want to kind of put you the listener
into the moment of the sandworm attack. So imagine you're
one of a group of twenty six spice sminers working

(07:01):
on a patch of spice in the deep desert. So
you're out there among the dunes. The heat is high,
the sun's bearing down on you. You've got your protective
still suit on, You're working the harvester machine trying desperately
to get this spice going, and you've you've been at
it for several minutes, and overhead there's this enormous cargo aircraft.

(07:21):
I suppose it would be some type of ornithopter with
flapping wings, which, as we discussed in the last last episode,
doesn't make a lot of aerodynamic sense, but okay, uh,
And it's called a carryall. It hovers nearby, waiting to
lift you off at a moment's notice, and preferably at
the last possible minute, to maximize the profits, because you've

(07:41):
got to get as much spice as you can. The
spice is important. The spice must flow, the universe needs it.
But a worm will come. The worm always comes it.
Here's the harvester. It knows where you are and the
moment you start working, it's on its way now. With
for precautions, you'll lift off at just the right moment,

(08:03):
you'll get the maximum spice and you'll avoid the worm.
But if you're not able to lift off in time,
you may notice a hissing sound in the sand sliding.
You know, it's sand sliding against sand. In the background,
you might see a static discharge in the air and
Eventually you're gonna notice an upheaval of sand as the

(08:24):
worm rises to the shallows of the desert. And then
finally you see, and it's probably the last thing you see,
a great gaping circular mouth, maybe up to eighty meters wide,
emerging from the dunes, spreading open, closing over you, and
swallowing you and your friends and your mining vehicle all
in one bite. It's quite a site. And as far

(08:47):
as sound goes, we do want to give a quick
thanks to Chris Knife double O seven. Uh. He's on
band camp as Cheesy Nervosa. Will include a link to
his account on the landing bait for this episode. But
he does a lot of cool and it tracks where
he gets the the ambience from from various sci fi properties.
And so this was the track that we used to

(09:07):
was Dune Sandworm Ride. Yeah, so I love the sandworms.
I love the sandworms scenes in the book. When we
first encounter sandworms in the book, it's there merely as
a threat. You know, this this huge, terrifying beast that
lives in the desert. It's you know, it's a gigantic
snake eel worm type creature that it's sort of like

(09:28):
the monsters and tremors. You know, it lays under Yeah,
it lives under the ground. It can hear where you are.
You know, it might be hundreds of meters long. They're
so huge you can't fight them off. There's no way
to avoid them except to run. Yeah, and I've I've
seen it describe that that the Frank Herbert sandworms are
are kind of like dragons, and but but not merely

(09:51):
in just the threat aspect. Not just a monstrous dragon,
but a celestial dragon, because there ultimately the gateway to wisdom. Yeah,
that's true, because I do want to spoil too much.
But then later on in the book, we learned that
the desert dwellers of the planet Iraq is the Fremen,
have a more complex relationship with the sand worms. It's
not just you know, here's this huge, threatening creature that

(10:13):
we have to avoid. They have a sort of a
bit of a back and forth. I don't want to
say too much more, but it's really interesting, and so
I thought we should talk about the sand worm. What
is this organism as it's imagined in the Dune universe,
and how has this changed the way we think about
aliens and science fiction? And what what analogies can we

(10:34):
make to real world life forms? Yeah, and for starters,
let's just go ahead and roll through what we know
from from Frank Herbert's books. And again it's one of
those cases where Herbert, there's a lot of information at
you about how sand worms work, but then when you
add it all up right, you realize you don't know
key things. Um, here's what we know. The sand worm

(10:55):
or shy hallud I believe that is the fremin term
a creature. Again, you utterly unique to iraq Us, totally
tied to a complex life cycle on the desert planet.
Links exceed four hundred meters width of a hundred meters
at the thickest point, perhaps as long as the thousand meters.
In the deep isolated parts of the desert mouth, diameter

(11:16):
is probably about eighty meters, so when it's open and
lined with a thousand or more cargo silica crystal teeth um.
A typical worm consists of one to four hundred segments,
and each segment possessed its own nervous system. Something to
keep in mind for later. Now, what Herbert didn't tell us.
He didn't tell us whether sand Mouran's lay eggs. They

(11:38):
He didn't tell us if they're male and female, how
reproduction occurs at all. He didn't tell us if it's
a definitively if it's a vertebrate or an invertebrate. He
didn't explain the physics of how it moves, and he
didn't tell us what it eats. I would be surprised
if it's vertebrate, simply because I think of vertebrate as
a category belonging to Earth life. I mean, I think

(11:58):
it might have some kind of internal, you know, rigid structure.
But it's weird to think about those, you know, those
peculiarities of evolution that seems so ubiquitous on Earth. We
just assume their natural categories. But I mean, who knows
if a alien life form is likely to have a backbone, right,
And I think that ultimately, the like the segmented nature
and the independence of the segments tends to imply something

(12:21):
that is inherently invertebrate. But but again, he doesn't draw
a distinct line in the sand. Well, then to learn
more about the sand worm, I think we're gonna have
to turn back to our old friends that we mentioned
in the last episode. A couple of books that we
used as resources. So one of these is going to
be The Science of Dune, edited by Kevin R. Grazier,

(12:42):
and then the other one is the Dune Encyclopedia right right.
That one's compiled by Dr Willis E. McNelly, and that
came out in eighty five. It's out of print, but
you can still find used copies in various places. Uh
I got mine online for like, you know, fifteen or
twenty bucks, so it's it's still out there and it's
not like an out of your reach collector's item. In

(13:03):
particular that the explanations for sandworms from these two books.
From Doune Encyclopedia, we have an explanation by marine a shifflet,
and in the Science of Doune we have a sybil
hetchel pH D's explanation from her piece the Biology of
the sand Worm. Now I'm actually gonna start with the

(13:24):
Doune Encyclopedia explanation from Marine shifflet. Um shifflet goes ahead
and defines both male and female sandworms, the ladder somewhat
smaller than the males, with the secondary segment um of
each worm containing its reproductive system, and she posits that

(13:45):
at age one thousand, because these are long living creatures,
the female develops an egg sact in her reproductive system,
constructs a deep, massive nest, and then a tracts a
male with rhythmic thumping. Now this is key because in
the in doone we see people attracting or distracting a
worm by using a mechanical thumper. Right, yeah, that's one

(14:07):
of the technologies we could have talked about in the
last episode, but I guess we just didn't have time.
The thumper is a sort of you might think of
it as a defensive decoy mechanism out in the desert
where if you want to draw off a sandworm, or
perhaps even attract a sandworm, you put this thing down
in the ground and it starts beating on the sand
to say come on over, Yeah, with a rhythmic pattern,

(14:31):
because if you you know, there's like this thing, if
you you got to walk without rhythm, yeah, you know,
unless you want to attract the worm. So yeah, one
of the things that's frequently mentioned in the book is
that if you want to walk across the sand and
not attract the worm, you have to walk without rhythm.
You have to walk without any kind of uh cadence
to your walk. And I love how they bring up
the fact that this is so much harder to do

(14:52):
than it sounds like, like the characters are just exhausted
from trying to walk without maintaining a rhythm of their gait. Right.
And so she ties this into the into the life
cycle the worm by saying that it's that kind of
rhythmic um thumping that not only indicates something unnatural on

(15:12):
the desert surface, but perhaps the mating cry, the mating
call of the female worm. So she says that then
the male would arrive, consumes the smaller female, just straight
up eats the female and then goes into a dormant state.
And it's during the state that the heavy duty spice
fiber egg sac remains intact and it's fertilized by the

(15:35):
male's reproductive system. And then when he wakes up, he's
gonna spit that fertilized egg sac out. What yeah, I mean,
I've heard of reproductive cannibalism, but what yeah, this is
it's an interesting uh uh. And again this is you know,
her taking Herbert's world and extrapolating on it and trying

(15:55):
to come with a scientific explanation for how it might work.
It's not. This is not cannon by any means, but
it is interesting because we don't see sexual cannibalism occur
in nature that I can think of where the male
eats the female, because generally the female is the species
and she may or may not eat the male after
he's served his purpose. But here we have the male

(16:16):
consuming the female. Yeah, okay, I mean that just makes
me wonder if this almost would start to play with
the definitions of what counts as male and what counts
as female in a species. Yeah, I would. I feel
like I would feel more comfortable with this example if
the genders were reversed and the primary primarily the sandworms
are are female. But but you know, either way, the

(16:39):
the best example that comes to mind of something close
to this in the natural world would be um anglerfish,
where you have, oh those great things, so you've probably
seen pictures of this from the deep ocean. They look
like movie monsters. Uh, they've got the crazy faces and
that they've got a little a little lit up fishing pole, right,

(17:00):
And those are the females. The females are the ones
we see pictures of the males. Um are essentially a tiny,
heat seeking sexual missile equipped with gigantic nostrils. Uh. All
they do is they swim out in search of a
female and if he's lucky, and most are not, they
find one and they bite onto her abdomen and hang on. Again.
These are the angler fish, real world organisms, nothing from

(17:21):
sci fi. And then there I'm looking. I just sorry,
I looked. I just googled pictures of the male angler
fish attaching to the female angler fish. And it's pathetic.
It's could go with that interpretation because what happens is
not only does he bite on and hold on, but
their flesh grows together, their blood vessels connect, and the
male becomes a mere part of the female's body, sustained

(17:44):
by her systems. His eyes, fins, and some internal organs
all atrophy h and just leave him as just this
fat flap of skin, this just mindless thing on the female.
And this way, the male and his reproductive systems are
always there when she needs them, which is a necessary
adaptation in the a dark, lonely world of the deep ocean.
That's fascinating. I've never read about this before. I was

(18:05):
really I ran across in the past year or two
and was pretty amazed by it. But that's certainly it's
the case where the male and female fuse into one.
And I guess you could interpret this consumption of the
of the female sand worm is more of emerging than
a consumption, since there's not, according to her model anyway,
there's not really any nourishment to be gained from the
worm eating the other worm. So this is where we

(18:29):
start getting into a more complex life cycle. So bear
with me, everyone, Um, when the male sum so, the
male sandword comes to vomits up that egg case, and
he takes off the egg case. Eventually hatch catches into
a legion of sand trout sand trout sand trout. Yes,
and now these these this is where we're getting back
into um, into the actual canon of of of Frank

(18:51):
Herbert's sandworm biology, because these are very much a part
of the series. Yeah, there are sequences in Dune where character, well,
at least one character I can think of, the planetary
scientist kinds Uh. There may be other characters, but not
that I recall. At least Kinds thinks about down under
the the dunes of sand there are these massive patches

(19:12):
of life. Then there's moisture down there too, which is
sort of hidden from the surface, which is I guess
being trapped or used by these unicellular life forms. And
in this case we're talking twenty by six centimeter unicellular organisms.
But that's a big cell. You know, Alien world, different laws, right, um.
But but yeah, their water scavengers. So the idea here

(19:34):
is that they're traveling out, they're collecting water, they're bringing
them back, according to um to this model, anyway, to
the nest site and there sequestering the water. And here
the water mixes with excretions from the pre spice mass. Uh.
And here the c t U c O two builds
up as a byproduct, and this eventually results in a
spice blow explosion. And this is very much a part

(19:57):
of the books, where eventually the pressure builds up and
it blasts that precious spice melange that's produced uh somehow
by this sand trout nesting water sequestering action blows it
up to the surface where people can say, hey, there's
some spice there, let's go get it, all right, all right,
So but it's not only people that want to come
and get the spice that also attracts the sand worms,

(20:18):
which we'll get into. Um. And at this point, according
to Schifflet, the sand worms enter a pre metamorphic stage
during which surviving sand trout joined bodies, and as metamorphosis
sets in properly, each sand trout also known as a
little maker among the fremen, becomes a segment of a
conjoined body that becomes a small sandworm. So again we

(20:40):
see conjoined bodies coming into play. Uh. And this is
this is certainly part of of Herbert's original model for
the sand worm. So this is fascinating because the sand
worm and that sense it's is sort of a composite organism. Yes,
very much so. Um and this this play I don't
want to give any spoilers, but this also plays out
and rather unique and mind blowing ways in the sequels. Okay,

(21:03):
so how long does it take for little sand trout
joining together to become the gigantic shihlud like we see
in the book? You know, before they're they're a big
sandworm out in the desert over over a thousand years,
because it's going to take that long, corner and Chifflet
here to segment for the segments to take on. Uh,
you know, the different properties such as the tooth head,

(21:25):
the reproductive system. If you're going by her model and
h during this time of environmental conditions are not met,
then the underdifferentiated segments can revert to sand trout. So
it's kind of like those jellyfish that can that can
reverse age, right, they can revert to the earlier life
form stage if things aren't going well. Yeah, I like

(21:45):
that detail. If she throws in and finally the a
sexual juvenile warm develops and it's twenty to thirty long,
and this is the form that fremen eventually capture and
drown to produce spice essence. More about spice in this
episode later that's coming up. Uh, most juveniles, according to Shifflet,
would become females, but it's possible that it's possible that

(22:07):
the environmental absence of a male is what results in
male development. In the book itself, we're told that each
male has a three four hundred kilometer territory that it
defends against other worms, and she has a really interesting
bit about how that combat would work. Yeah, how do
the worms fight each other if they're just they're huge

(22:30):
worms with big circular mouths. Well, she draws on a
on a on a detail that will discuss in a minute.
Um or I guess, let's go ahead and hit it.
How does someone ride a sandworm? Ah, yes, well this
is something we learned about later in the book and
it's very interesting. So the sandworm, like the sandworms like
we mentioned, have these segments on their bodies. They have

(22:50):
sort of scales that protects their soft, fleshy inner tissues
from the you know, the harsh exterior realities of Aracus
and all the sand. So a coman who is who
is hopped up on spice and ready to ride, will
go out into the desert with some hooks and attract
a sandworm using a thumper, and if the sand worm

(23:11):
comes by at the right time, the fremen rider can
get the hooks under one of the sandworms outer plates
or these scales segments, whatever you wants, yeah, and then
pull it back. And what that does is exposed the
sandworms inner tissues to the external elements. Obviously, the sandworm
does not like this and says, oh no, and it

(23:34):
rolls over to protect the exposed part of its body
from the sand, and in doing so can lift the
rider up onto its back. And then once you're going
like that, the sandworm refuses, It doesn't re submerge into
the ground while it's got a part of its body
exposed like that, because it doesn't want sand to get

(23:54):
in there and hurt it. So you can essentially ride
this sandworm around as long as you want until it's
just exhausted and collapses, as long as you've got the
hooks pulling back the plate. Right, did I describe that
about right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, that's that's perfect. And and
so in shifflet, trying to understand like what its teeth
are for, she draws on this detail and says, well, uh,

(24:16):
what happens when two males are are getting into combat
over territory. They're using those teeth to pull back each
other's segments, essentially wrestling that way. And uh, because again
sand gets in there, it's gonna irritate the flesh. And
she posits that in extreme cases this could result in
a viral infection that could kill a worm, but generally

(24:36):
the bluser breaks away. So uh, yeah, just grappling with
each other, exposing each other as inner flesh by pulling
back with the teeth and eventually forcing one of them
to give up and break. Yeah, And a lot. It's
like in nature on Earth, a lot of territorial disputes
between you know, angry males of species. They don't always
end in death. They just one of them is like, okay,

(24:56):
I give up. Yeah, if you can have it, you
can eat all the female in this region that you want. Um. Finally,
a word on diet from Shifflet. Her theory here is
that the sandworm is a true autotroph as an organism
that's able to to form a nutritional organic substances from
simple inorganic substances such as carbon dioxide. In this case,

(25:17):
the sandworm is producing all of its nutritional needs from
inorganic compounds on the planet's surface. The energy for this,
she says that it it drives the synthetic reactions to
completion just by by traveling across the sand, which causes
an electrostatic charge differential, which we do see in the
books with a whole You know, you see that you
already mentioned the static charts that tells you that a

(25:40):
worm is approaching and uh. Incidentally, she also uses this
as an as an explanation for why water would be
fatal to a sandworm, and that it would cause the
electrons to discharge abnormally. Yeah. Now, obviously it can't be
that any massive water is fatal to a sandworm because
there there is some tiny amount of water on a racus.

(26:01):
But it sounds like a large amount of water will
kill the sandworm, right, and it gets into that whole
segmented thing because it's it's mentioned in the book that
to really kill a sandworm, like to straight up kill it,
it's so big. And since each shot, since it doesn't
have a central nervous system, since each segment has its
own nervous system, you would have to just nuke the
whole thing with one of your your handy house atomics

(26:21):
that you're not allowed to use anyway. Wow. Yeah, so
uh yeah, it's a it's kind of a complex life cycle.
Uh and uh it's it's summed up in this brief
bit from the appendix to dune. Now they had a

(26:42):
circular relationship little maker. Again, that's our our sound trout
to pries spy spice mass little Maker to Shah Haloud
Shah Haloo to scatter the spice upon which fed microscopic
creatures called sand plankton, which we'll get into the sand
plankton food for Shah haloud, growing, growing, becoming little makers.

(27:03):
Now that of course is a little complicated, and we'll
get into that, because here it seems like how can
one be. It sounds like one part of its own
life cycle is also part of it is also it's
part of its diet. That's bizarre, alright. And this brings
us to biologist Sibyl Hetchel, PhD s um. Science of

(27:24):
Dune Explanation, which, uh is also really interesting and I
think gives us our best comparison to real world biology. Okay,
so first of all, she she she zooms in on
the whole idea that sand trout produce oxygen deep underground,
as mentioned by Kinds in the novel. But they need
an energy source to produce oxygen, and since photo since

(27:47):
theist is out of the question because their underground, right,
the best candidate is of course deep hydrothermal vents. That's
how we see it working on Earth, right. Okay, so
one could interpret the sand trout is the producer of milange,
and that's certainly Herbert doesn't really say exactly like it's
just sandworms are key to the production of spice malhunch,

(28:07):
but I don't know exactly how it goes happening, but
of course we don't want them to go extinct. Right.
So Hetchel deposits that just as sand trout scavenge and
herd water, they may also tend a milange producing fungus.
So in this case then it's not actually any part
of the of the sandworms life cycle that produces the spice,

(28:31):
but they are harvesters of spice, right. She's theorizing that
they would sequester stashes of water around these hydrothermal areas,
and this would cause the spice fungus to grow. Uh.
And in our world, plants, bacteria, and fungi produced the
majority of exotic compounds, such as psychedelic compounds, so this
would make extra sense, right, the secondary compact pounds that

(28:55):
synthesized for protection by a particular fungus. And of course
they're are examples of animals on earth that actually do
practice farming, I mean animals other than humans. Right. The
example here would be, of course, the leaf cutter ants,
and that's the comparison that that civil Hetchel makes in
this uh. In this piece, the leaf cutter ants are
of course a number of species that are found in

(29:17):
the America's and they cut tree leaves. They drag them
to an underground growth chamber and they keep it moist
to gold, cultivate fungi on the leaves um and then
they so they so basically it breaks down like this.
They bring leaf cuttings back to the colony along well
worn forest roads and paths. We've probably all seen video
or images of this, you know, very very visual. Um.

(29:39):
They filter out the bad cuttings, they hand the good
ones off to their farmer ants. Then they munch the
leaf cuttings down into a fine mulch. Then they grow
the delicious fung guy on that mulch, lay some eggs
in it, and enjoy. They drag the depleted leaf cuttings
to the dump chamber, along with all the dead ants
and dead fungus. So the crazy part about this, and
ultimately kind of sigh five uh sounding thing about the

(30:02):
leaf cutter ants is that they gave up hunting and
gathering fifty million years ago and they became farmers. And
they they discovered the technology of agriculture before we did.
They did, and well not only before we did, before
we existed, right, They not only did they find this substance,
but they essentially domesticated it, and it's grown extinct in

(30:23):
the wild, like it's no longer something that they can
go out and get. So the analogy here would be
imagine if leaf cutter ants, uh could grow to become
giant leaf cutter ants that can eat a city. But
also if the fungus that the little leaf cutter ants
grew in their colonies created a drug that lets you
see the future. Yeah, yeah, imagine all those leaf cutter

(30:46):
ants voltron ing up into a larger organism over the
course of a thousand years. Um, And I do also
want to know that it's it's also kind of like
a caveman movie in that when a winged male prepares
to leave a leaf on her cut her aunt colony
to found a new colony, they have to take a
sample of that precious fungi with them because again, it
doesn't exist in the wild anymore. It was continually fascinated

(31:09):
by that. Um, we're completely at the mercy of the
ants if we want this fungus exactly, and of course
we don't want it, but they require it completely. It's
key to their their their life. But back to the sandworms. Okay,
so we don't know exactly what sand plankton and sand
trout are supposed to eat. But maybe they eat spice,

(31:29):
uh and it and it, but you know it, but
it wouldn't make sense. Hetchel argues for the creature to
both create and consume spice, so the fungus again makes
more sense from from that analogy as well from that
comparison as well. So she well, I mean I wonder
you could look at depending on what you mean by create,
you could look at an example like honey in a

(31:49):
bee colony. You know, the bees don't create the honey,
but they sort of they process the honey. Yes, And
I think that would be an apt analogy here for
the milange as well, that the mash is kind of
is a created element. UM. So she argues that sand
trout communities um are essentially like a combination of leaf cutting,

(32:09):
ant nest and hydrothermal vent community and in this case,
sandplankton and sand trout would subsist on living spice, fungi,
and bacterial mats that grow around the events. She also
presents the notion that sand trout or essentially a sexual
and they might subsist as clone communities for quite some
time at least until the build up of carbon dioxide
from their farming efforts triggers sexual reproduction and also triggers

(32:33):
that spice blow the results from the build up, and
then that that would scatter the newly produced sand plankton.
So then the sand worm comes in. It wants to
eat up that spice, and in doing so it disperses
the offspring across vast distances, because of course sandworms have
those large spread out territories. That makes sense with some
earth earth life too. Or you can think about seeds

(32:54):
that spread by growing in fruits that predators want to
come and eat, or maybe not predators, you'd call them.
I guess they're predators of the plant. They come and
want to eat the fruit, and then they take the
seeds with them wherever they go afterwards. So now she
also goes on in this piece if she has some
some thoughts on size constraints of enormous organisms. If you

(33:15):
want to read about that, do check out the book
to check out her peace. But we're not gonna go
into him in this podcast. So one of the things
I've already mentioned that I really loved about doing is
that it's the most ecologically conscious novel i've ever read
It's It's a novel that really has interesting thoughts about
ecosystems and about resources in ecosystems, like how resources get

(33:39):
used and conserve, specifically water and spice, and then also
about how organisms feed into one another and create ecosystems.
There's actually a section in the book where the planetary
scientist and ecologist Kinds has visions of his father, who
was also an ecologist and lived among the fremen on

(33:59):
the dune plan in it, and the vision of his
father says a couple of interesting things. He says, the
more life there is within a system, the more niches
there are for life. Life improves the capacity of the
environment to sustain life. Life makes needed nutrients more readily available.
It binds more energy into the system through the tremendous

(34:21):
chemical interplay from organism to organism. And I think that
makes a lot of sense, because whenever you imagine a
a rich, thriving ecosystem on Earth, it's one that already
has a lot of life forms succeeding in It is
kind of counterintuitive from a resource competition or evolutionary perspective,
places that have a lot of competitions seem like they

(34:45):
they should be harder to survive in. But life creates
ways for other life to thrive. And this is sort
of part of the problem with aracous as it's imagined,
unless you you imagine it terraformed and seated with other
life forms, as some aracters in the novel do kind
of imagine. I think primarily they talked about, let's plants,
some grasses and you know, and settle the dunes. It

(35:08):
doesn't seem to have enough biodiversity to be very hospitable
to life forms. And uh, in addition to the sandworms,
like what life forms are described as inhabiting Aracus, Herbert
mentions some scavenging birds and a few other carrion eaters
and some kind of scrubby plants. But I got the sense,

(35:30):
I don't know what you thought about this. I get
the sense that a lot of these animals that are
described as inhabiting Aracus are imports from human settlement. I
don't know what you thought. That's that's the sense I
got as well. They, like the scavenging birds, have certainly
evolved over over time to to thrive on Aracus. Like
they're there's you know, they're far more conscious. They can

(35:51):
basically hear water, you know, miles away, but that they're
essentially a terrestrial product. Yeah, while the sandworm is it
is entirely alien. So I don't know, maybe somewhere in
the if it's in the sequels, or if I missed it.
In the book, Herbert does talk about other life forms
native to Aracus, but I can't think of any examples

(36:12):
where I remember him talking about that. And and I
wanted to ask the question, if we imagine that the sandworm,
at the various stages of his life cycle, were the
one and only organism native to a planet, is something
like that possible in reality? Can you have a one
organism ecosystem? Yeah, even if it's a really complex organism

(36:32):
like this one. I was trying to find examples of this.
I found one. Actually I think you found it first.
But in two thousand and eight there were reports that
the first known single organism ecosystem had been discovered, and
this was miles under the earth in the moment, I
apologize if I'm pronouncing this wrong, Momponing gold mine in

(36:56):
South Africa, and it was a bacteria called de Sulfuru
dis audax viator. It was a rod shaped bacterium, and
it makes its living in a very remarkable way. It
doesn't need sunlight and it doesn't need any prey organisms,
so it lives down there by itself, and instead it
puts together the organic molecules it needs by access only

(37:20):
to water, carbon, and nitrogen in the ground using energy
from According to this Lawrence Berkeley Lab source I read
on this, hydrogen and sulfate produced by the radioactive decay
of uranium. So this is a it's surviving on chemicals
created by radiation in the ground, almost two miles under

(37:43):
the ground. This is essentially about as close to an
alien microbe as I've ever heard of on Earth. Yeah,
it's pretty it's pretty far removed from our traditional ecosystem model. Yeah,
and so I just thought that was fascinating. But another
way of thinking about it is, if you imagine way
way back in time two I don't know, situations of

(38:05):
a biogenesis on Earth, you probably at least have to
imagine that there are some periods in the history of
life where there was only one organism, um and then
and then of course we got a branching ecosystem. So
that again makes me wonder if you could naturally have
a planet where there's really only one type of organism there.

(38:27):
It seems like the natural course of biological evolution is
to diversify. But another way of thinking about this that
that occurred to me is that what if it is
the case that the sand worm and its various stages
of life is the only major organism alive on Iracus
And it wasn't always that way, And so it could

(38:50):
have been a planet rich with life that has essentially
been conquered by a single invasive species, Like there's one
organism that destroys all eco diversity on the planet. I
could say, Okay, I could see that being the case too, Yeah,
where you end up with just a sandworm only ecosystem
because it's that dominant of species in this environment. Yeah,

(39:12):
I mean, one wonders how sustainable a system like that
would be. Uh. And then of course, if you want
to think about other parallels to the sandworm in reality,
you've of course got the Mongolian death worm. Ah. Now
the Mongolian death worm is not real though, right? Maybe
not to you. Well, I didn't know. I maybe I've
missed a new study where the occasionally you see an

(39:34):
expedition to to to find it. No, as far as
I'm aware, no one has ever discovered the Mongolian deathcorm.
But if you're not familiar, you should. I bet you've
written a blog post about that. I don't know if
I've ever really covered mongolian death worm. Um. I have
run across you have something called a sandworm that lives
in beach sand. But of course that's an entirely different scenario. Yeah,

(39:56):
that's unfortunate, okay, Robert, Yeah, imagine yourself at a party
with some hip young people who start passing around the
hottest new designer drug. It is the spice Melange. And
Herbert never is exactly clear what the spice in the
book looks like, but I'm going to try to imagine

(40:17):
it here based on a scene from the movie and
a description quote I read from a from a sequel.
It's it's a little glass box. And then inside the
box there is some orange mass. It almost looks like
a like an evacuated insect shell, you know how, like
when the cicadas leave their shells behind after they mold

(40:40):
some stuff like that. It's kind of brownish orange. And
then you press down a little piston to crush some
of this stuff. In the glass and an orange liquid
strains out and it smells like cinnamon and you can
drink it right up, or you can add it to
food or beverages or have it transformed into a gas
if you're old navigator in the tank, but it's going

(41:02):
to be doing some weird stuff to you. Yeah. And
if you're in araqan U Dennizen, if you if Iraqus
is your home and you're not privy to a lot
of outsider food coming in from other worlds, uh, it's
just gonna find its way into your diet. It's just
an ambient part of of water and food on the world. Yeah.

(41:23):
And if you're not careful and you keep taking too
much spice, you may begin to see the future and
become fatally addicted. Yeah, and your eyes will turn blue
despite the fatal addiction. There's something kind of appealing about
the way they describe some of the spice consumption in
the novel. Yeah. They mentioned having, you know, having a
cup of spice coffee some I think there's some spice

(41:43):
cakes that are mentioned here and there. Yeah. Yeah, Yeah,
you're like, yeah, I would kind of like that a
nice you know, a nice consciousness expanding cup of coffee
as opposed to this, you know these red Bull and
Samuda cocktails that I keep going. So characteristics of the
spy us in the book, which very according to the
person taking it and the intake level, would be some

(42:05):
of the following. First, I should say that it's core
the spice is described, I think is an awareness drug
and that it changes perception and consciousness. Uh. Now, the
first major feature described is that it's the geriatric spice.
It's when taken in small quantities over long periods of time,
it extends your lifespan. And that's something we probably should

(42:27):
have mentioned more earlier on. Like, that's another reason that
Iraq is the center of the universe, because not only
does the spice enable interstellar travel, uh, it also allows
the wealthy people to extend their lives. Right, once you're
a feudal lord and you've conquered all your enemies and
you've secured a place in the in the power structures

(42:48):
of the universe, what's the next thing you need? You've
got to live forever, right, So it does that. And
then another effect of it is that it stains your eyes.
Taking spice will will cause blue ten ting of the eyes,
not just the irises, but the whole eye. It's a
mind expander. It grants heightened awareness. In some cases it

(43:09):
allows prescience or limited omniscience. I don't know if limited
omniscience is a phrase that makes any sense. It allows
you to have some knowledge beyond your physical time and place,
and the ability to see some aspects of the future
or aspects of the present removed by distance, or to
share communal awareness, sort of collaborating across aspects of mind

(43:33):
with others. And they often make geographic comparisons in the book.
So it's like looking into the future is kind of
like looking across the landscape. And depending on your circumstances,
you might be kind of standing in all like a
shallow basin and you can't actually see that far. Other
times it's flat. Other times maybe you're on a hill,
and it depends on your prescient availabilities. How far can

(43:53):
you see? Yeah, And then of course the negative that
the downside I alluded to earlier is the addiction. When
you take it in large quantities, you will get addicted
to it, and if you stop taking it, you will die. Well,
that'll happen, unfortunately. So the idea of a drug that

(44:16):
expands consciousness is certainly something you find in many cultures writing,
including our own. You know, lots of people believe things
like hallucinogens like LSD, marijuana, psilocybin, mushrooms, uh, and the
ayahuasca brew which I think the chemical uh, the active
chemical and that is D m T right. Yeah, and

(44:36):
so under various circumstances, people have suggested all these drugs
not only provide euphoria and sometimes sensory hallucinations, but they
actually provide access to information or knowledge about reality that
is not otherwise available to people. One of the most
common claims you hear is the sort of transcendence journey

(44:58):
you might call it, where the hallu synogen gives the
user a mental vantage point from which he or she
claims to see a deeper reality or to now understand
that our day to day experiences are not all there is.
I'm sure you've encountered this before. Oh yeah, And of
course it's and that's key to most religions too, that
you have at the heart there's a deeper understanding of reality, um,

(45:22):
that you have to uncover. Yeah, And I think that's interesting.
I think the hallucinogen comparison to spices. Perhaps quite on point,
because in a two thousand five book called my clum
Running by the American mycologist paulse statements, that's a person
who studies fungus. Uh. The author claims that Frank Herbert. Well,

(45:43):
I should just read this quote. It says Uh. He
says that Frank Herbert was apparently an enthusiastic mushroom collector
himself who came up with this great system for for
growing chantrell mushrooms in a way that people hadn't realized
how to do before, by creating this spore slurry in
a bucket. But anyway, he says of Frank Herbert. Frank

(46:06):
went on to tell me that much of the premise
of Dune, the magic spice spores that allowed the bending
of space tripping, the giant worms, maggots digesting mushrooms, the
eyes of the fremen, the cerulean blue of psilocybin mushrooms,
the mysticism of the female spiritual warriors, the Binny Jess,

(46:26):
It's influenced by tales of Maria Sabina and the sacred
mushroom cults of Mexico, came from his perception of the
fungal life cycle and his imagination was stimulated through his
experiences with the use of magic mushrooms. All right, well,
then that that certainly matches up with with what we
see in the book. And again bearing in mind that

(46:47):
this is you know, rising out of NINETI and mid
sixties and and uh and a lot of the counterculture
movements that were taking place there, and the and the
roll of drugs and lucinogens in that subculture. Yeah, yeah,
certainly though one thing about that that was weird. I
googled the psilocybin mushrooms and they didn't look blue to me.
I don't know. Yeah, maybe there's sometimes I have not Yeah,

(47:12):
they look like mushrooms to me. I've never noticed anyway.
To go back to the science of Dune, the writer
Carol Hart, PhD has a great essay about the spice,
melange and the science of Dune, and she makes some
really interesting points comparing the spice to hallucinogens like the
ones I mentioned above, LSD, psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca. And there

(47:36):
are the following changes that you can notice that are similar.
One would be changes to the eyes. The spice, it seems,
causes a more permanent kind of change with the blue tent,
but hallucinogens like LSD and ayahuasca typically cause an extreme
dilation to the pupils. She also notices suspension of time right,
ecstatic us, an ecstatic and sometimes frightening sense of communion

(48:00):
with others, out of body sensations, loss of self and
merger into a oneness, euphoria, death, rebirth, experience, vision slash,
hallucinations and opprescience and life changing realizations. And I think
this is one of the most interesting things because, like
like I said earlier, a lot of times people take

(48:21):
hallucinogens not just with the idea that I'm going to
see something interesting, but they take it with the idea
that they're learning something about the true nature of reality.
They're getting access to facts and useful information. She says,
for example, for the Amazonian Shamans, ayahuasca allowed the soul
to leave the body, to search out the explanation for

(48:43):
illness in the individual or problems threatening the community, and
to decide the course of action. Yeah, I I remember reading, uh,
some words from Buddhist Alan Watts, who is also part
of you know the certainly a name. During the decent
seventies and he was commenting on on the views of

(49:04):
psychedelic drugs in the counterculture, and he compared them to
the use of a telescope or microscope that it's something
that you, you know, you put your eye to the
telescope of the microscope to learn something about reality, but
then you also have to re engage with reality. You
have to put the telescope or the microscope down in
order to to take those lessons and apply them to life. Yeah,

(49:25):
another really interesting parallel with Dune, I think is that
the effect of the drug, whether you're talking about real
hallucinogens or the spice in Dune, is not just a
product of the drug. It's not just here are the
molecules in the drug and what they'll do to you,
but there are there are product sort of combinatorial product
of the drug acting on body and the preparation that

(49:49):
the user has experienced. So it's about preparation, it's about departure. States.
Some people will take acid, take LST and just mess
around and have some weird experiences and don't learn a
whole lot from it. Some people might have bad trips,
some people might have what they would consider to be
transcendent experiences. And I think there are a lot of

(50:10):
people who throughout the years have been advocates of controlled
hallucinogen use, who lament the fact that it's taken for kicks. Yeah.
I mean, we look at some of the current research
and we're finally seeing a lot more research into psychedelics
uh these days. For a while, it was such a
taboo area, you know, really kind of poisoned by uh

(50:32):
the more you know, extreme aspects of the counterculture in
the way that it it gained coverage in the media,
we're finally seeing it being an area that can get
funded and and and be studied. Uh. And there have
been some some really fascinating looks into how the right
levels of hallucinogens combined with appropriate priming, uh, you know,

(50:53):
preparation for the experience, uh and as well as sort
of after uh exploration of what they felt it can
be you to to help eternally ill patients as they
prepared to die. It can be used in in various therapies,
even addiction therapies. UH. So so yeah, that the priming,
the purpose, really the ritual of it is essential. I mean,

(51:14):
I imagine a number of our listeners can think of
you know, some individual they've come across before that at
least on the surface, looks like they are gaining nothing
of value from their experimentation with psychedelics. And and then
on the other hand, you know, there are cases where,
you know, this particular thinker claims to have had some
sort of profound insight um intellectually or creatively while trying

(51:38):
one of these substances. Yeah, So, as Albert Hoffman, the
discoverer of LSD, once wrote, he said, special internal and
external advanced preparations are required. With them, an LSD experiment
can become a meaningful experience. So I think he was
one of those people you're talking, you know who, who
recommended the preparations that go into making yourself ready for

(52:01):
the mental journey of expanded consciousness. If you don't put
the preparation time in, it doesn't work. And we see
this in the novel Dune because people consuming lots of
spice react to it in very different ways. You get
the sense that when paul A Tradees starts taking lots
of spice and then has his moment of expanded consciousness,

(52:22):
begins to see the future, begins to have you know,
heightened awareness and pressions and limited omniscience. It's all because
of the things that have gone into making Paul who
he is. It's not just like he got a really
strong hit of it, you know. So it's the fact
that he's been trained in the Benny Jesser at ways
that we talked about in the last episode in The

(52:43):
mint at Ways. All this that went into making him
who he is also made the expanded consciousness what it was.
You can see that in contrast to another character in
the novel The Twisted Mint at do you call him
Pider or Peter? Um always read At as Peter, but
Piper might be more accurate. They call him Pider. In
the David Lynch movie, I'll call him Peter. Peter Davrees

(53:05):
the The Bad Men Tad who works for the evil
harconans uh he They say he takes huge amounts of
spice too. He's just gobbles it like candy. He can't
get enough of it. But he does not seem to
have this same type of expanded awareness that Paul has
from extended spice use. And it seems to be that
it's it's because of different types of preparation going into

(53:27):
the experience. Yeah, I mean The other example, of course,
of the Guild navigators who have been engineered in bread
to to pilot these spaceships uh while using the spice.
So they consume the spice in order to safely navigate
folded space and as a celestial mechanic. John C. Smith
points out in the Science of doone UH, there's a

(53:49):
quantum physics tie in here. So eight years before the
publication of doone, physicist Hugh Ever the Third proposed a
radical interpretation of quantum mechanics that everything that can happen
does happen, and each possible action spawns a new universe.
This is what's known as the many worlds theory. Every
time there's an indeterminate quantum event, the world the universe

(54:10):
branches off into separate realities. It's the very thing that
the Borges referenced with the Library of Battle, that this
library would contain not only all books, but all possible books.
So taking the spies here would have allowed the navigator
to at least see the immediate path of the ship
in many different multiverses uh, and then safely, you know,

(54:33):
choose the safest path um. And interestingly enough, there is
kind of a real world tie in here because according
to a nineteen seventy three studied compiled by the RAND
Corporation for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency or DARPA, UM,
there was a Soviet plan to launch psychics into orbit.

(54:56):
Quote how how much should we how much face should
we put in this report? I mean maybe a grain
of salt, I'll read the quote here. Regarding precognition, we
found only one unverified report by a Soviet investigator that
a program was being planned to train astronauts to quote
foresee and to avoid accidents in space. It was clear

(55:18):
from the context that he was referring to pre cognitive process.
So I don't know, uh, if they did look into it,
obviously didn't work out. But this was a time of when,
you know, the stakes were high in the Cold War.
So if there was a possibility that there was something
to some sort of paranormal uh situation, you checked it out, yea?

(55:39):
Why not train a bunker full of psychics? Yeah? The same.
The same Rand Corporation report also mentioned UM that there
was a test into psychic communication by sacrificing a litter
of baby rabbits on board of on board of Soviet
submarine and the idea here was that the mother rabbit,
located on the surface receive psychic signals from the dying young.

(56:02):
So again, uh, this is all unverified, but but it
seems possible based on some of the other reports we've
heard about both the US and Soviet investigations into the
potential use of paranormal effects. You know, one of the
things that's interesting to me about the role of spice
in the Dune universe is that it posits a world

(56:24):
in which the entire universe is completely dependent on a
resource that essentially produces effects similar to things that are
taboo in our culture that not only do we, you know,
not depend on as a society, but we try to
stamp out and say that's not okay. Yeah, Like, essentially

(56:47):
everyone in the book seems to be taking some sort
of um performance enhancing substance. If it's not milange, then
it's the uh you know, then they're taking samudo, or
they're taking the I can't remember the name of it,
but that line that the mentent drink, which I believe
is supposed to be derived from the same source as samuda,
the purple stand lips. Yeah, so everybody's just cranked to

(57:07):
the gills on something because you can't depend on the
thinking machine, You've got to depend on the human mind.
So maybe you could say that if we had to
get rid of our computers, there would be I don't
know less opposition to recreational drug use. Maybe. So all right,
you know, we're running out of time here, and I
don't know, we might even have to cut this part,

(57:29):
but I do want to mention the beneath a lack
Sue face dancers before we close out. These are characters
that you did not encounter in the book because they
don't show up until book two and then play an
increasingly important role moving on. But as we mentioned, uh,
I think in the first episode that many if the

(57:49):
lack su this is a group, this is like a
faction in the Doune universe that are really involved in
trans human post human um machinations. They're changing the human
form uh engineering new people uh to to survive in
this post singularity, you know, Postbutalian jihad world, and so

(58:11):
they're doing things like like essentially engaging in cloning the
producer of these ghoula's that play an important role in
the later books, where dead individuals brought back as a
clone h. I like the sound of that. Yeah, they're
the they're the faction that creates the twisted uh mentats
we've already discussed. And then they also have these face
dancers who are known and feared as spies and assassins

(58:34):
UM and their essentially their shape shifters. They can change
their their face, their appearance, um, their their voice everything
to resemble another person UM and and so they you know,
give some unparalleled acting ability. They serve as entertainers throughout
the galaxy and UM and they're also key at the

(58:55):
Laxu diplomats and conspirators as and as well as just
core members of their society. So uh. There, there's actually
a couple of cool articles about how this might work, essentially,
how a shape shifting humanoid might work as an organism. Uh.
The first uh and the primary one I want to

(59:16):
mention comes to us from the Dune Encyclopedia, and this
is from contributor Walter E. Myers, and he very much
in envisions face dancer biology a shape shifting biology as
a complex creation of training, breeding, embryotic manipulation, genetic team
current tinkering, and surgical augmentation. So basically throwing all of

(59:37):
these various everything. We got everything we got at creating
this shape shifting creature. So I'm not gonna go through
the entire entry because it's a he has a lot
of details that he throws out, But here are the
high points. This is what you need. Key alterations include
selected breeding for appropriate physicality and muscle control, because you're

(59:57):
gonna need muscle control to shift the face around out
and shift everything about. Embryotic stimulation of overdeveloped back muscles
and hyper elastic spine for height control. The embryonic manipulation
of the bodies of psylamic sacks, altering their position and
allowing them to serve in the voluntary inflation of artificial

(01:00:18):
tubes that are implanted after puberty, thus allowing conscious body
size alteration, so essentially bladders in the body that allow
you to just fill up as needed. Childhood augmentation of
facial structure replacing certain facial bones with elastic cartilage, coupled
with extensive training to allow total manipulation of facial features.

(01:00:40):
Cellular embryonic manipulation to allow conscious control of scalp temperature
and temperature, because this would be used to allow the
color manipulation of artificial liquid crystal hair follicles that are
later planted like individually, genetic manipulation to enable the conscious
formonal control of eye pigment, fetal manipulation, and surgical augmentation

(01:01:03):
to produce male genitals that are attractable within a vaginal
cavity for visual gender swapping. So they wouldn't actually be
able to change sex, but they could sort of retract
the genitals into a cavity as if they were the
landing gear of an airplane. Training and surgery to enhance
deferential muscle and autonomic nerve control. Uh So, in other words,

(01:01:26):
a face dancer by this definition would be an extremely
complex product uh and no mere human subspecies. But this
is just one take. We also have a take from
Sandy Field in her essay Evolution by Any Means on Dune,
and this is from the Science of Dune, and she
goes into a lot of a lot of these sort
of highly evolved human models that we discuss here, but

(01:01:49):
she posits that the face dancers mimic their targets through
conscious migration of body cells. So in order to swiftly
change form, a face dancer would need to reck reorganize
its skin cells, uh, muscle, liature, and skeletal elements, a
feat they might accomplish through the the dissolution and recombination
of the cell to sell bonds that hold the tissue together. Now,

(01:02:12):
how might the the lax who have accomplished this. Here's
what she had to say. Quote the concerted action of
newly created hormones selected genetically by the the laxu over
many generations could act to allow different cell types to
move when prompted by neurological signals. Face dancing then could
be a genetically derived ability to generate specific hormones at

(01:02:34):
will which allow for the concerted movement of skin, muscle, bone,
and other cells to new locations to create the appearance
of another person. So there you go. I mean, I
appreciate that as a as a great attempt to explanation.
I somehow don't feel like a creature like that could
exist in reality. I mean, certainly you can imagine some

(01:02:55):
types of uh, you know, chameleon type elements like changing
pigmentation and when we see octopuses and stuff that have
a remarkable ability to change their external appearance at wed will.
But the moving of bones and things like that, that
sounds impossible to me. Yeah, I I do love the

(01:03:16):
the the rigor in both of these examples, because one
takes a very um, you know, genetic, cellular hormonal approach,
and the other is a very more of a varied
approach but also all into just post human cybernetic tinkering.
And I guess in reality you could create a model
that is a combination of the two, maybe draw in
some bio mimicry by looking to the world of of

(01:03:38):
the of the octopus or the cuttlefish and saying, well,
how could you create those same sort of flesh effects
in a humanoid creature. Well, here's something I would say.
I don't know to what extent they have shape shifting
precision in the books, but I would I would buy
this creature more if it could make basic changes to

(01:03:58):
its body. But but sort of target a particular individual
like I, you know, can look now exactly like Robert
Lamb as opposed to just I can look different than
I normally look. Yeah, yeah, it would. And I think
in the books it's laid out that it depends on
how long they study a target. So if they study,
you know, they just sort of glance at you would
be like a very rough version, but they would ideally

(01:04:22):
want to uh study you in earnest for a few
days before replacing you. Yeah, all right, so there you go.
We're out of time. Uh that's the biology of done.
But before we go, Robert, I gotta ask you about
David Lynch movie. I've been burning to talk about this. No,
I mean, I read the book and then I watched
the movie, and there's so much to like about the movie, actually,

(01:04:44):
because it's got great sets and costumes. Some parts of
it are truly weird, uh in ways that are really
fun and exciting, and other aspects of it are just incomprehensible.
I watched it with my wife Rachel, and I constantly
had to explain things because the movie does not make
sense on its own. Yeah, it's It's been a long

(01:05:07):
time since I've seen the movie, though I did last night.
I rewatched the intro material that was on the TV
airing of it, where they have the the still illustrations
and some narration to set up the world. Uh. Yeah,
I agree. There's there's so much that doesn't work in
the films and ultimately led to it being a kind
of a train wreck. But then there's so many elements

(01:05:28):
that are they're well done. Like some of the casting
is just weird. Some of the casting it's just spot on.
The costumes are amazing, some of the visual takes on
the world are just perfect. But it just doesn't all
come together. Yeah, you know, I think Doone could be
a really great animated movie. Yeah, Like imagine if Miyazaki

(01:05:49):
had had taken it on, you know, because you have
the ecological elements that he's you know, it's so president
in his work. Oh man, that's a thing that I
think was really lacking, and at least the version of
doing that I saw. Now I heard that there there's
shorter there's a shorter version and a longer version. I'm
not sure which one I saw. Uh. If there's a
shorter version, I cannot imagine it because the version I

(01:06:12):
saw left out so much explanation it's crazy. But but yeah,
the one thing that really seemed left out of the
movie is the ecological themes of the book. All the
concerns about water, about about how to survive in the environment.
I mean, this is a this is a key part
of the book, and it's you know, maybe one out

(01:06:32):
of every three pages is primarily about water, and this
is just not the case in the movie. Yeah, indeed,
and that's you know, ultimately a you know, a large
thing to be missing from the finished product. On the
other hand, the movie does have I don't know if
you remember this from the movie, but the the strategically
inserted pug. Oh yes, how how c Trades has a pug. Yeah,

(01:06:55):
and if you mentioned this, I saw he The pug
shows up in the still illustrations for the TV version intro.
So it's got Jurgen proc now standing there with his
his beard in his uniform holding a pug. There's also
a scene of Patrick Stewart as Gurney Halleck fighting a
battle and he's got the pug in his arms. Yeah.

(01:07:17):
I do not remember. I've in my reread of the book,
I've not come across the pug. Pretty sure. They added
that their pug at Tradees is not in the book.
They added the pug, they adding the added the weirding module,
um and a few other things. They added him then
left out some some key things as well. So yeah,
there you go. Well, hey, I know that a lot
of you out there have comments you would like to

(01:07:38):
add on the Dune Universe, on the Dune movies, on
some of this uh uh, some of the possible science
behind the biology behind the technology that discussed in the
other episodes, and we would of course loved to hear
from you. As always, check out our homepage Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. Uh, and you also want
to check out the landing page for this episode that
will include links out to these books that we've mentioned

(01:07:58):
too related our coals, as well as where you can
find some of the music that we featured and uh
and indeed, as we close out here, we're gonna be
listening to the track Aracus by musician Raleigh Porter off
his two thousand eleven album Aftertime, released by Subtext Recordings. Uh.
There'll be a link to that on the landing page
for this episode. But you can also learn more about
human his work at Raleigh Porter dot com. And if

(01:08:21):
you want to get in touch with us about your
favorite aspect of the Dune novels or the Dune movies,
or your least favorite aspect, or just tell us what
you think about Dune or give us feedback on the episode,
you can email us at blow the Mind at how
stuff works dot com for more on this and thousands

(01:08:46):
of other topics. Does it, How stuff works dot com