The Horrifying Science Of Beaming You Up

Hello again! This is Everything is Amazing, a newsletter about science, curiosity and wonder.

Since the penultimate season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is currently airing (possibly marking the beginning of the end of Star Trek 😢, at least for now), here is a piece I originally published last year, about the franchise’s most famous piece of technology - which would open up all sorts of thoroughly horrifying philosophical questions if anyone ever got it to work!

But first, here is some important research concerning the inhabitants of your garden:

In fact there were actually two wheels - and between them the Dutch team recorded 200,000 visits from animals. Of those, around a thousand involving wild mice - not just investigating the hamster wheel, but clambering on and using it, in a sustained and apparently intentional way.

The same also happened with visits from rats, shrews, slugs (!) and even the odd frog and snail.

Why on earth would they do this?

“Existing explanations are that wheel running is a consummatory behaviour satisfying a motivation such as play or escape, or that it is linked to the metabolic system as a motor response to hunger or to external stimuli relating to foraging. Our results indicate that while the number of visits to the recording site decreased when no food was present, the fraction of visits including wheel running increased. This implies that wheel running can be experienced as rewarding even without an associated food reward, suggesting the importance of motivational systems unrelated to foraging.”

Their overall conclusion? It seemed to be “elective” - they just wanted to do it, even though there was no apparent benefit beyond the joy of doing it.

In other words: fun! They were just enjoying doing it for the sheer ridiculous fun of it - just like us, when we remember to resist the tyranny of usefulness.

Here’s some of the footage, including what is presumably the Usain Bolt of slugs doing his best to get that wheel spinning:

This won’t be a surprised to animal-lovers, but there’s a growing body of evidence that wild animals like to have fun as much as the rest of us - including ticklish rodents (hat-tip to Tara Haelle), rats that love driving (via this edition of Jodi Ettenberg’s newsletter) and bumblebees that love rolling balls around for no apparent reason (thanks, Hugo).

I was also made aware of this beautiful and wise essay by the late anthropologist David Graeber, which argues that fun is - and should be! - at the heart of how we interact with each other:

“Our minds are just a part of nature. We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms—because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing.

Now wasn’t that fun?”

Secondly: I saw this stunner of an illusion on Threads, and it’s been haunting me ever since:

If you don’t know what you’re looking at, turn the picture upside-down and all should be revealed.

It’s another example of pareidolia, the cognitive bias that makes us see human faces in random objects (I wrote about it here) - except in this case, it’s two examples of it fighting for ascendency behind our eyes.

Your mileage may vary - you may mostly see the girl at the top or the moustachioed chap at the bottom, or it may suddenly flip from one to the other in that incredibly fun “ta-daaa!!!” way that makes such illusions a blast to play around with…

But in my case: by staring at the top image on my phone and turning the phone right round without moving my eyes from the screen, then sliding my gaze to the other image, I was able to keep seeing the girl - but the exact second my gaze flicked away and back again, it snapped into the moustache-guy. It seems like the “screen refresh” action of looking elsewhere and back again (caused by saccades, which we’ve looked at before) is enough to override my conscious awareness of what I’m looking at and replace it with pareidolia. Absolutely fascinating to see it in action like this.

(If you’re a cognitive scientist and you believe this analysis is contemptible guff, I’d love to hear from you!)

Okay. So - have you ever thought about what’s actually going on when this happens?

By modern scientific standards, Star Trek’s transporters aren’t just entirely fictional - they’re also, scientifically speaking, just plain super-weird.

I’m currently working my way through the earliest editions of the magazine Analog Science Fiction & Fact, starting in the early 1960s, and…well, beyond the eye-watering sexism, what’s most striking is the things many speculative writers were obsessed with back then.

Lots of spies, for a start - unsurprising considering the background of the Cold War, but because it was 60’s sci-fi, many of these spies were using mind control powers, or reporting to their superiors using ESP (extra sensory perception), or opening locked doors using telekenesis. To escape capture, they levitated through open windows, or pyrokinetically lit fires with their mind to cover their escape…

I’m not exactly sure when psychic abilities fell out of fashion in science fiction. Maybe Stephen King had something to do with it, with Carrie and the books that quickly followed it having so much to say about small-town life in America, and supernatural horror being King’s chosen lens to achieve that aim. His characters weren’t Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers in a more contemporary form - they were paranormal time-bombs, blowing great holes in neighbourhoods that looked like yours. You didn’t chuckle at their cleverness. You shuddered at the thought of meeting them.

But for whatever reason, psychic abilities aren’t now generally regarded as scientifically credible, and they’re usually labelled as pseudoscience.

(In 1988 the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released a report that concluded there is “no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena“.)

That hasn’t diminished the public’s fascination with it, of course - assisted by social media’s proven ability to amplify anything sufficiently outlandish. Just take the extraordinary success of controversial podcast The Telepathy Tapes, which knocked Joe Rogan off the #1 position (and gathered scathing critical appraisals from some science writers).

But it does mean it’s been a good while since up-and-coming science fiction writers approached any of these ideas with anything less than a bargepole.

This is why it’s remarkable, and just plain odd, how teleportation has escaped a similar fate, all thanks to Star Trek - especially considering how nightmarish it is, if you stop and think about it for a second…

So let’s pour a stiff cup of Raktajino and do that right now.