Human-Cyborg Relations

As I promised, this post will be mostly about cyborgs.

    How far(or close?) are we to creating the 6 million dollar man? or the bionic woman?  A lot closer than tv and movies have told us.

More like the 60 million dollar man

    There have been successful 'bionic' prosthetics for humans for years and it appears to be getting better every year. The idea is that robotic muscles can be attached to the spinal cord or nerves and can thus be controlled by thinking about moving the limb. The technology is there, people that lose limbs now have the possibility of reviving lost functionality. Bionic limbs aren't even overly expensive as suggested in the Economist, although building a fully functional cyborg, would be a different story, the pentagon has been spending 50 million to 100 million dollars on bionic prototype research.

     
   A more obscure and significantly less practical science with the use of cyborg technology is the use human limbs on an actual robot. In theory it seems like it would be straightforward, much like the technique used in bionic limbs, a robot can just connect wires in a way that transmits a signal to the limb's nerve pathway and there it is! The human limb is now part of the collective. It would obviously be more intricate than that, but nothing a calculating computer mind couldn't overcome. Fortunately for us, this isn't as much of a reality as robots don't have the means to begin harvesting our body parts. It does, however, make a great scary antagonist in Star Trek.


 Thinking of the human body as a mechanical process brings to my mind one of my favorite short stories that I've read recently by the infamous H.P. Lovecraft, Herbert West: Reanimator. The main theme of the story is about the conflict of modern scientific view of the human body versus the concept of the soul. In it the doctor Herbert West and his obedient assistant research the process of chemically bringing alive the recently dead.One of the more grisly experiments, which eventually led to the doctor's impending doom, was one in which he severed and revived separate limbs to prove that each limb can operate independently from the main body.      

You can hear an audio file of the tale here from my favorite podcast of all time, the Monster Island Resort, hosted by Miguel Rodriguez.

With this kind of segway, there can only be one kind of science to investigate in the next post. -'Till then!