Cybernetic Implants and Prosthetics

We live in the future. It doesn't look how we thought it would; there are no flying cars or house-keeping androids, but there are robot vacuum cleaners and we can use our cell phones for anything (but are mostly used to play Angry Birds and look at pictures of cats). Dreams of yesterday are the realities of today, and if not today, there is always tomorrow. It has been said that necessity is the mother of invention. I say - not necessity, but desire. What humans desire is power, life, pleasure, love, and ease. Whatever we want, from a desire to save a life, to protect our children, or to feed our family can be traced to these basic goals. All innovations have been for one of these goals in one form or another, this includes what we term the necessities. These desires are central to what we are. Our works and our dreams hinge on this.

Today our focus is on life and power, in particular the ways we try to change ourselves to something beyond our natural state. Humankind has always had fictitious super-heroes. Demigods, legendary warriors, gods, demons, and Marvel Comics all have one thing in common: they reflect the dream of being more than human. We want more strength than our frames permit, better healing to recover from any injury, the ability to fly, to see in the dark, to move things with thought alone, and even immortality. We have bent our strength to these ends.

The Etruscans were making false teeth out of animal teeth or adding gold to fix their teeth in place as early as 7000 BC. This is one of the earliest examples of body improvement by the surgical introduction of non-natural materials.

We have been finding ways to modify the human body, replacing what is weak or lacking with man-made replacements. This is nothing new. We have always sought ways to make better bodies as far back as history tells us. People have been adding bits of metal, leather, and bone to their bodies to hold back the march of physical decay for thousands of years. Sometimes we add bits of metal and leather for purely cosmetic purposes (think piercings). Over time we have become better at re-building ourselves.
Our recent advances would stun our ancestors - the progress has been absolutely stunning. Enhancement has become common place. We've even advanced into integrated cybernetics. Cybernetics is defined as command (thought), action (motor ability in muscle), and feedback (senses sending input to command centers) working together. So, you are already cybernetic. Your body works as a well-oiled machine, unless it breaks. When we break down, we've got two main choices which I'm going to call the gardener approach and the engineer approach.

A gardener will graft branches, use fertilizer and chemicals, prune or train branches into new shapes to cure - basically most modern medicine today. This is a topic for another time.

An engineer will find a faulty part and either remake or replace it. An engineer looks for ways to update the design and lives for a good upgrade. The best upgrades network devices together for increased inter-operability.

There have been some problems historically with this method. Infections where flesh and foreign objects meet. Lack of control and functionality. The new parts never worked as a part of the body. That has changed. So let's get to it!

Hypoxyapatite: Used as a coating on metal surfaces, bone and flesh can bond to it like an antler bonds to the skin of a deer. This can allow the body to attach to a piece of metal as if it were a natural part of the body. A titanium bone can be as firmly linked to muscles and other bones as you like. Ports and protrusions can pass through the skin with no fear of infection.

Nervous System Control: Artificial limbs and control devices have come a long way. The C-Leg has archived well-deserved fame helping wounded warriors walk again, but a man with a C-Leg can't wiggle his foot. The sensors in the leg can guess how he wants to move but can't read his mind... yet.


The woman in this video has a device implanted in her brain (note electrode on her head) allowing her to move the arm as she wishes. Reading the brain like this is easier and more mainstream than many people think. We've advanced to the point where we can record sound by using readings from the hearing centers of the brain instead of a microphone. The electronics in the video above can be cheaper than an iPhone because of the simplicity of it (not the arm, just the mind reader thing), but the human research needed to produce it, the sterility standards needed to certify it as human safe, and the skill needed to implant it put it way beyond the reach of the common man. Lucky for us, that isn't the only way to read the mind. More on that below.

Haptic Feedback: Close your eyes and touch something for a second. Several remarkable things happen at once: your skin comes in contact with the surface; nerves at the surface send back information on the surface (texture, temperature and size). Your skin deforms as you press against it; nerves throughout your skin telling you how much pressure you are exerting. Nerves in every joint relay information on the position and angle of each joint giving your mind knowledge of your current posture (known as proprioception), letting you know the position of the object you touch relative to yourself.

This is far harder than reading the mind. Giving signals back to the brain has proved very, very difficult. Pain is easy to produce, but imagine the complexity of smooth or cold. Even our greatest success in this area, the cochlear implant, has very limited resolution. New tech has enabled us to link electrical sensors to nerves. This has been around for a while, but limited by the difficulty of  connecting the tiny nerves and the limited time before the body rejects the electrodes. Recent development has refined the lifespan and precision of the connections. Go here if you want to know where we are now.

Microbial Glucose Fuel Cell: Imagine a pace maker that never needed batteries, but drew energy from your body, just like everything else. Your blood contains glucose, refined bio-fuel destined to power your cells. Scientists have figured out how to make microbes turn this into electricity; this can be built into a tiny implantable fuel cell along a blood vessel, powering electronics in your body. Hit this link for the long explanation. Warning: contains words. Lots of words!

Artificial Muscles: Self-explanatory. The name is what they are. These have been around for ages too. Many of them use shape-memory alloys, but the field has recently undergone a revolution.

This century's miracle material: graphine. It has many  uses. Pictured here is a twisted strand of nano-muscle. It's made from nano-tubes, graphine rolled into tube shape.  

They made tiny cords of carbon nano-tubes and filled them with paraffin wax. A change in heat causes the cord to contract. The tiny yarn above can lift hundreds of thousands of times its own weight and resist even more without breaking. This can be used to make bundles of muscle fiber that act like human muscles but are. in fact, many, many times stronger. As long as there is power, they will not tire. Also, they could stop a bullet.

So, where does this all put us? I think we've come a long way. We are almost at the point of creating a perfect prosthetic.

Remember this scene from The Empire Strikes Back? Luke Skywalker's hand is almost possible. It's a fusion of engineering and flesh. Hypoxyapatite could bind it into the body, nerves wired into sensors in the hand, blood powering the artificial muscles

The problem is the cost of the project would rival the Apollo program! The tech is all experimental and costs a lot.

At the moment this is the best we can do.

So, what about optional implants? The idea is not that far-fetched. Each year hundreds of women have stuff packed in to their breasts for no other reason than appearance. I can easily imagine a market for tiny fibers planted in to an arm that give you superhuman strength. How about re-enforced bones? Maybe you'd buy if someone offered to give you a reflective layer on the back of your retina to give you night vision like a cat? One that would serve a good purpose is a system to add oxygen to the blood in case of emergency. There are tiny nano machines called respiracites that doctors are studying. The idea is they will activate if your blood-oxygen level falls too low. They could keep you alive underwater for four hours or so.

Something I'd like is to replace the canals in the inner ear. The canals are lined with tiny hairs; when you turn your head, the fluid in the ear pushes the hairs. The vibration of these hairs gives us our sense of balance. Now, the problem is if we move too much, the fluid just sloshes around and the signals get confused. Our brain can't compute that, so we just feel dizzy. Imagine if we replaced the whole thing with a couple of accelerometers. You'd have great balance and never get dizzy.

The average reaction time to an expected event is 1/10th of a second. That is how long it takes for your eyes to see it, the signal to travel to the brain, the brain to process it, the brain to send a signal, the signal to reach a limb, and the limb to move. How about replacing some of those nerves with fiber-optics? Could you increase reaction speed?

Another fun one is controlling things with your mind. There is already a commercially available product that can do that without even the need to implant it!

This is the Neurosky Mind controller. Wireless and flexible, you can get one with an SDK  and  go nuts. They are still finding uses for this thing.

At the moment, the Neurosky only has a single channel of control. This can only be used to control one thing, like dim a light or press the gas pedal. You'd need something different if you want a brake.

I'd like to see a Neurosky used with eyeball-tracking and a computer. There are trackers you can buy for a PC. Just look at an icon, and your cursor is on it. No more hand-mouse-eye, just eye. When you press a button it selects what you are focused on. The end result is a computer that is faster than one with a mouse! Now, replace the button with a Neurosky, and you have control with just looking and thinking. This has real-world applications (besides the obvious cool factor) as a tool for the handicapped.

The goal is to make it a part of you. I think the best technology is one that is so natural that you don't even notice it's there. Something so perfect that you just do the impossible without a second thought.

With this kind of tech at our disposal, I imagine it will be only a matter of time before companies start offering implants to the general public. The question is: how far do we go? Can we slow the aging process? Can we be super human? Should we?

If we go ahead with this, we risk widening the gap between the haves and have-nots. They haves would be stronger, faster, smarter with longer lives. The have-nots would not be able to compete. Already it is illegal to enhance your body and compete in sports.

At what point do we stop being human? I don't know the answer to this, or even have much of an opinion on the matter. I do look forward to the need to make the choice. The future is going to be interesting and fun.

Generation Ships

Warning: this post gets strange and creepy. Read your own risk

One of the great staples of science-fiction is human settlement of space. The protagonists are shown plying the cosmos in gleaming ships capable of conveniently violating the speed of light to have adventures on fantastic worlds far from our own. The unobtanium powered handwavium drives permit the ships to cross the incomprehensibly great vastness of space in a matter of plot moving months, days, or hours. This allows us to have homes on many worlds, and importantly, to travel between them. This is not possible by any method we are even close to understanding.

Space is big. I mean really, really big. Metaphors break down and the mind boggles with the sheer size of it all. The Voyager 1 space probe is traveling at 62,136kph (38,592mph) and was launched way back in 1977 and is only now at the edge of the solar system. That is only 11 billion miles away. If Voyager was going to pay a visit to the neighbors, then we could say in 35 years it opened the door and walked down the steps. It hasn't crossed the lawn or the sidewalk or the street. We struggle to reach the nearest body to us, the Moon, can you even imagine interstellar travel?

I sure hope so because that is what this post is all about.

In almost every Science Fiction story there is a reason to leave Earth. Maybe our home was destroyed, or we were lured off with riches, adventure, and treasure, or maybe we just out-grew the earth and had to leave for lack of room. Another good reason that they never seem to think of is just to have a back-up for the human species.

Let's say for a moment that we had a reason to leave our star-system. A planet wide evacuation would be difficult because I want this to be a near-future hypothetical situation. That many people would not be possible. So, for our purposes let's say it was a back-up of humanity just in case something happened to Earth - this lets us send a small group to colonize another world.

One of the biggest constraints in not technology, but budget. Apollo just sent four men to the moon, yet it strained the resources of our coffers, personnel, and our ingenuity to the limits. Any interstellar launch will be many, many orders of magnitude greater. All launches measure cost by weight. Take a space shuttle. Its purpose was to put cargo in space - human cargo and equipment or supplies. That total payload is the whole raison d'etre, so all cost of maintenance, procurement and launch costs are just for that cargo. If you take the total cost and divide by the weight of the payload, you get a cost per pound to low-earth-orbit. A single gallon of water cost $80,300 on the shuttle! Newer programs cost far less, but remember, it's not going to low earth orbit, but to another star-system. Again, we are not talking far future, but near future, so things like weight and fuel are all tied into a single problem: cost. We theoretically have the technology to build a star ship now, but there is not enough money on the entire planet to do so. Not money available - I'm saying in existence. A program to launch millions of people may not be possible for eons to come.

Let's pretend that we've found a world. The Kepler space telescope picked up an earth-like planet, and after years of observation with first; the Hubble, then the James Webb followed by even bigger and better systems, our scientists decided it would support a colony. It will be a new home for humanity, to hedge our bets and preserve us from extinction. Excitement builds on Earth. Humanity unites to build something truly colossal: our first star ship.

It has a tremendous amount of fuel to allow it to move at fantastic speed. Due to the immense distances involved, it will take hundreds of years for our ship to travel to its destination, a very short time when discussing interstellar travel. Decades, perhaps centuries will be spent accelerating, then that many more to slow it down as it nears the new world. This means that most of the ship will consist of its exotic fuel. Next is life support. This ship will be a home for the colonists for longer than most American cities have existed. There must be food, air, heat, power, and comforts for hundreds of years. There must be a shield on the front of the ship. A grain of sand at millions of kilometers an hour would have an impact like a warhead. This shield will be a heavy piece of ablative armor, perhaps with some sort of deflector field to improve our ship's chances. We should make our ship narrow enough to be protected by a small shield, to save on weight. The math says our ship will be kilometers long.

James Cameron's Avatar star ship is shown above. It actually has a good lay-out. Huge fuel tanks and engine in one end, debris shield, storage and habitat at the other. It's just a little small. A great feature is that the habitat spins to provide the illusion of gravity.

Because our ship will take hundreds of years to travel, the crew is an issue. Nobody on board will live to see the end of the journey. Only their descendants will make the trip. This is called a "Generation ship."

Construction of the ship will be largely done in space - it's far too big to launch from the earth in one piece. Much like we built the International Space Station, it will be launched as parts. The star ship will be expensive. Stephen Hawking talked a bit about this. He pointed out that the people who build the ship will spend a great deal of time and treasure on this huge project, only to see a few people board it, the engines power up and then move out of the solar system, never to return. It will have to be a selfless sacrifice, or perhaps an act of desperation.

Aside from the antimatter - or whatever fuel source we have - the ship must carry the colonizing equipment, life support and everything. Space and weight are at a premium here. We must deduce what the minimum we can send is, and then shave that where we can. The goal is to establish life, in a meaningful way, on this world. There need to be educators, doctors, nurses, engineers, architects - in short all the human resources of Earth. We don't just want this colony to survive, we want it to thrive. We don't need all of that immediately, but we need it when they reach the planet. In addition, we need to avoid inbreeding and the Founder Effect.

So the question is, how few people can we send? How broad a genetic base do we need, and how do we prevent gene pool deterioration? I don't really know. It's hard to find any info on this. I think, from what I've been able to find, that if you deliberately select for genetic diversity you can establish a population with as few as 6,000 - if you maintain a high birth-rate. This is a problem. That pushes the habitat size and needs way beyond what is reasonable. That is more than the crew of a Nimitz class super-carrier!  The big aircraft carriers are like a floating city, but are far too cramped. Even with an open deck, the crew needs shore leave and time off rotation. We can fix this by increasing the size of the habitat to three times the size of a Nimitz class carrier, or reducing the crew. Neither will work. Hold on to your hats, there's a solution, but it's kind of disturbing.

Do you remember the frozen sleep pods in 2001, A Space Odyssey? Yeah, those don't really work. It would be nice if they did. Maybe someday we'll figure out how to freeze people and keep them alive.

2001, A Space Odyssey also failed to have much of a back-up crew. Frozen sleep, if it even worked would not be without fatalities. Two guys left awake to run the ship is not a good idea.

Maybe I should say that frozen sleep doesn't work on developed humans. Embryos are a different story. This brings us to this freaky idea I got from the life cycle of some species of aphid.

In early spring the aphids hatch  out of eggs. They are small, but strangely are all female and born pregnant. They grow and give live birth to their young. These are clones of their mothers, also born pregnant. They give live birth to clones. The cycle continues with each generation producing the next by parthenogenesis until fall. In the fall a mutation occurs. Some are born male and some are born as unfertilized females. Sexual reproduction of these strange aphids produces eggs that can survive the winter.

Wow, you're still reading?

The idea is that you launch a ship crewed solely by young women, about 60 of them, and a hold full of frozen embryos. Of the passengers, only a few will be core crew. The others would be grunt labor or some other occupation like hairdresser. All crew would have time to pursue their own interests on the side, even change career if they wished.

In this plan there are two sets of embryos aboard, one for transit, one for re-population. The transit embryos are all female, genetically tested to ensure that they are similar to simplify medical treatment. They could even be clones. During transit each woman will impregnate herself with one by in vitro, and raise her child to replace her. Thus the population is maintained at a manageable size. As they near their destination they will begin to grow the population, each one having multiple children. They'll open up the habitat sections that were kept sealed to save supplies and expand their space to handle the new generation.

NASA came up with a concept of an inflatable habitat section for the International Space Station called a Transhab, a concept now being used by Bigelow Areospace to build their own station. This may be a good idea, the living area for the new generation. They can be kept deflated to conserve supplies and prevent transport damage in the hundreds of years before use.

After they land on the planet they will continue as they were. Once they hit about 3 thousand they will open the second batch of embryos. This batch contains genetically diverse male and female embryos, the base of our new population. There will be some cultural problems to sort out - after all these women will have never met a man before. There also will be a period of cultural change as they go from lesbian relationships (if any formed at all) to heterosexual. The shock would be great.

Now, I think this whole thing is a bad idea and really, really creepy. What I want to happen is I want to take my wife aboard a faster-than-light ship to a distant world, and go visit our parents on earth every Christmas. This whole thing was a thought experiment with foreseeable technologies. Who knows, when we leave Earth we might just beam straight to a new place instantly. Guessing the future never works as well as we think it will. Just look how much more advanced our cell phones are than Captain Kirk's communicator.

I can't wait to see the surprises that lie in store for us. How will we leave Earth and when? I would love to know.
 P.S. I promise that the next post will be less weird... well at least a little bit less weird.