Welcome to FUTUREPROOF, where I nerd out about classic sci-fi staples and their real-world counterparts. I'm your host, the result of Michael Swaim cloning himself to harvest organs from and then eventually swapping every single body part with the cloned ones, including brain, skin, and in a real feat of surgineering, skeleton bones. So I guess I'm like halfway between being the real Swaim and a Swaim-clone? Philosophers are baffled. All I know for sure is, he forgot the penis. Or kept it intentionally, but why would he want two? Unless...of course! The v*****-shaped locks on the vault door! He can trade the p****** for more information about them! Damn, I'm always one step ahead of me.
Welcome Michael Swaim back to the channel for Futureproof, where your trust host explores science fiction technology and their real life counterparts. This week we Swaim-splain: Lasers!
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#scifi #science #movie #technology
Welcome Michael Swaim back to the channel for Futureproof, where your trust host explores science fiction technology and their real life counterparts. This week we Swaim-splain: Lasers!
Subscribe: http://www.youtube.com/user/cracked?sub_confirmation=1
Cracked.com: http://cracked.com
Facebook: http://facebook.com/cracked
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cracked
Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/cracked/_created/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cracked/
#scifi #science #movie #technology
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00:00Welcome to Future Proof, where I nerd out about classic sci-fi staples and their real-world
00:05counterparts.
00:06I'm your host, the result of Michael Swaim cloning himself to harvest organs from, but
00:11then eventually swapping every single body part with the cloned ones, including brain,
00:16skin, and, in a real feat of surgeon-earing, skeleton bones.
00:20So I guess I'm like, halfway between being the real Swaim and a Swaim clone?
00:25Philosophers are baffled.
00:26All I know for sure is, he forgot the penis.
00:30Or kept it for himself intentionally, but why would he want two?
00:34Unless...
00:35Oh!
00:36Of course!
00:37The vagina-shaped locks on the vault door!
00:40He can trade the penises for more information about where to find the matching keys!
00:44Damn.
00:45I'm always one step ahead of me.
00:47The line between a clone and an evil twin, doppelganger, or mirror-self can get blurry
01:01sometimes in fiction, but the science behind realistic cloning was actually pretty well
01:06understood long before pop culture caught up.
01:09Hans Dreisch split up a two-celled sea urchin embryo and grew both into identical sea urchins
01:15all the way back in 1885.
01:17By 1931, Aldous Huxley had published the sci-fi classic Brave New World, featuring
01:22a society separated into castes based on the quality of the genes people were cloned from.
01:28Nevertheless, most video games, movies, and shows still choose to completely fudge cloning
01:33into something much simpler, because it's a lot more fun to cast the same actor twice
01:38and let them bounce off themselves than it is to watch them play against an egg fertilized
01:43with their own DNA.
01:44My first exposure to the idea was in Calvin and Hobbes.
01:47All that process required was a cardboard box with the word duplicator written on the
01:51side.
01:52Naturally, I tried it with my own box with Timely Reference written on the side, but
01:56when I opened it up, it was still just full of my old Herman's Hermit concert tees and
02:00jorts.
02:01And jarts, if I'm being honest.
02:04But I didn't want to say that because it sounds so much like jorts, and I was worried
02:06you'd think I was making this all up.
02:08But I'm not.
02:09From light, bubbly fun, like the Prestige, to the brooding angst of multiplicity, we
02:14really seem to like to imagine human cloning as just a Xerox machine, or else a teleporter
02:20that spits out a copy of the person but keeps the original.
02:23Incidentally, the episode of Star Trek The Next Generation where Riker's teleporter
02:27beam gets refracted and spits out a clone predates the Prestige by 13 years.
02:33Eat it, Tesla.
02:34Go fall in love with a pigeon.
02:35I think part of this has to do with the human urge to examine and understand ourselves,
02:41which a clone is a handy story device, and part of it has to do with the fact that twins
02:45and mirrors already exist.
02:47Not to mention, we've been cloning plants since 1954, and Friedrich Miescher identified
02:52DNA as the body's instructions for building a human back in freakin' 1869, dawg.
02:59For some perspective, that's the same year treason charges against Jefferson Davis were
03:03dropped.
03:04It was so long ago that the US legal system gave a racist insurrectionist ex-president
03:10a total pass.
03:11How times change.
03:12In stories featuring full-on pixel-perfect clonal copies, there are a few ways you can
03:18go, all of which say something about identity.
03:21What forms us.
03:22Nature vs. Nurture.
03:23There's stuff like Horizon Zero Dawn, the Spider-Man clone saga, and Metal Gear series,
03:28where genes basically dictate the shape of your fate, determining the type of person
03:32you are or lifestyle that you're drawn to.
03:34In Metal Gear, Snake's genetic destiny even comes down to which genes were recessive and
03:39dominant in that clone's particular case.
03:42And look, I'm not saying that these stories promote eugenics, but I'm not not saying
03:47that either.
03:48In the Star Trek universe, cloning and genetic modification have been illegal ever since
03:52modified mutants tried to take over the galaxy, as if having your genes tampered with can't
03:56help but turn you into a villain.
03:58Or maybe you were a villain already, and cloning is just a handy way to pump out thousands
04:02of expendable henchmen like the clone army from Star Wars.
04:06Or the bad guys clones from Judge Dredd.
04:08It's probably the most basic view of cloning a story can adopt, which is just that clones
04:13are unnatural and the original is always the good version.
04:16Then there's the stories on the opposite end of the spectrum.
04:19On the nurture side, I'm talking about stuff like Picard's clone in Star Trek Nemesis or
04:24Q-Bert from Futurama.
04:26These clones act so differently from their originator that their story becomes one about
04:30how much life can change you, no matter where you started out.
04:33I was born on the set of a talking head YouTube history show, and look how far I've come.
04:38Science now.
04:39Finally, there are stories where clones represent a confounding of identity itself.
04:43Am I less special if there's another me out there?
04:46Or, big twist, if I turn out to be the copy.
04:50Man, that must have been such a good twist.
04:52The first time someone dropped it?
04:54You know, before Hitman Codename 47 and the Sixth Day and the Venture Brothers.
04:59And John dies at the end in Annihilation and Rick and Morty.
05:03Turns out, we all feel like a fraud sometimes.
05:06So finding out there's a more real you out there is a story we return to a lot.
05:11I'm looking at you, Jeremy Allen White.
05:13Give us back Gene Wilder's head, you monster.
05:16Speaking of monsters, I think we can all agree that one movie probably taught the bulk of
05:21us how in vitro fertilization and cloning actually work.
05:25Jurassic Park.
05:27Thank you, Mr. DNA.
05:29It's kind of weird that you aren't a doctor, but we love you anyway.
05:32And historically, cloning hasn't been much more complicated than Spielberg made it out
05:36to be.
05:37For example, in 1928, Hans Spemann forced a salamander egg to produce clones just by
05:43tying a baby's hair around the egg as the cells split to push some of the nuclei into
05:48a separate little area.
05:50Naturally, he had to perform the act many, many times to verify the results, and we thank
05:54all the bald babies who sacrificed so much in the name of science.
05:58Of course, that kind of cloning is a lot easier to pull off with animals that are already
06:02parthenogenetic, which means they produce an egg that doesn't need to be fertilized
06:07to produce offspring.
06:09Parthenogenetic animals include aphids, tapeworms, jellyfish, marmor crabs, boa constrictors,
06:15lizards, wasps, and sponges, including the ones with square pants.
06:19And I know what you're thinking.
06:20The fuck is a marmor crab?
06:22Look, man, I just copy and paste Wikipedia and add jokes, okay?
06:26It's probably an eel or something, I don't know.
06:28As technology and biology have both advanced, we've naturally started cloning more and
06:33more complicated stuff, and in more and more sophisticated ways.
06:37At first, scientists mimicked the natural process as much as possible, isolating undifferentiated
06:43embryonic cells to implant in a surrogate egg, kind of like intercepting the fetus and
06:47passing it off to another womb.
06:49What was so huge about Dolly the sheep, cloned in 1996, was that she was cloned from a differentiated
06:54adult cell's nucleus, which is much, much harder to do.
06:58So much that she was the only embryo brought to term out of 277 attempts.
07:04That's a lot of sheep f***ing.
07:06The next year, we cloned a primate.
07:08And in 2013, the biology team under Shaukrat Mitalipov were able to create a cloned human
07:13embryo that could serve as a source of stem cells to treat the original person, a fetus
07:18with a rare genetic disorder.
07:20Each step of cloning is slow going, and mired in philosophical and ethical debate, as it
07:25probably should be.
07:26But ultimately, that's not the reason we don't clone people.
07:29Let's face it, if humans can do something profoundly stupid using science, the fact
07:34that it's amoral isn't going to stop us.
07:37It's actually a big challenge cloning primates and humans because our spindle proteins, which
07:42are essential for cell division, are so closely connected to the nuclei of our cells that
07:46when they try to pluck one out, they usually ruin the other part.
07:50Once they figure that out though, boom.
07:53Clone your grandma.
07:54And you know it's true, because there are already companies like Viagin, who will clone
07:58your dead cat or dog for 50 grand, or if you're really splurging, clone you up a horse for
08:0485.
08:05Hell, we'll throw in two pigs and a camel for 118.
08:08ALL CLONES MUST GO!
08:11So yes, cloning is a fascinating field with the potential to open up full new ways to
08:15treat organ failure and genetic diseases, and even potentially safeguard endangered
08:20species or resurrect extinct ones.
08:23Not dinosaurs though, real life isn't cool enough for that.
08:26They'll probably bring back this guy.
08:27What the hell even are you?
08:29You look like a squid mated with a jart.
08:31But enough about you, the audience.
08:34Me, Michael Swayne, am done now.
08:36Toss me a like and comment down below, letting me know what other sci-fi tropes you'd like
08:40me to cover, and I'll see you next time on Future Proof.