Saturday, August 25, 2012

Occupy Humanity


I know that researchers are having a tough time making electronic components using graphene as a substrate. Silicene shows a bit more promise, but now there's research at MIT that suggests molybdenite is a better candidate for next material beyond silicon.
Tomás Palacios, the Emmanuel E. Landsman Associate Professor of EECS at MIT says he thinks graphene and MoS2 are just the beginning of a new realm of research on two-dimensional materials. “It’s the most exciting time for electronics in the last 20 or 30 years. It’s opening up the door to a completely new domain of electronic materials and devices.”
Couple all this with the meta revolution in metamaterials and metasurfaces, the advent of a room-temperature microwave laser hundreds of millions of time more powerful than current masers, and I suspect we are going to see some pants-shitting optics and electronics stuff in the near future. Sooner rather than late, I hope.

In the meantime, I was considering an update of the Invasion of the Body-Snatchers scenario, but more in terms of Occupy Humanity. Aliens want to physically occupy our bodies (as opposed to replacing us with pod peoples), and more specifically just shoving aside our personalities into oblivion so they can take over our brains and enjoy a new life on this Earthly colony. But as it turns out, they need eight billion, three hundred fifty million, two thousand, two hundred and forty human beings for their entire population. Were this a half-hour Twilight Zone episode (a light-hearted one, obviously), I would see if I could get John Cleese and John Lithgow to reprise their roles as aliens al a a salute to 3rd Rock From the Sun.



In my episode, they reveal themselves as the Alien Livestock Managers of Planet Earth to an attractive young couple. Once their identities are made clear, the male of the couple, asks if they plan on eating their brains.

"Oh, no! " exclaims John Cleese, "We need those brains to run your bodies".
"...well... we might eat some brains" interjects Lithgow, "you know, out of curiosity!"

When it turns out that there is still some time to wait before all 8,350,002,240 bodies are available for Occupy Humanity:

Lithgow: "I'm really quite impatient. I'd like to try a newer model" (looks a male of young couple) "Perhaps you, right now!" (turns to Cleese) "You can have her! Then we can try out sex!"

Cleese: (disgustedly) Eeww-ww! (then cheerfully) Alright!"

(They move menacingly towards young couple).

(FADE)

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