In what ought to be a tradition (if it isn’t considered one already), this year’s Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo hosted numerous science and social science panels, covering topics from snail sex to immortality.
It’s an idea that seems natural. Science fiction has inspired innumerable minds and launched countless careers. Star Trek, Stargate, Cosmos, and even crime procedurals like CSI have made heroes of scientists, and there is a vast body of knowledge in the real world where real life heroes have established their roots.
The first panel I attended was put on by Dr. Robert Longair, professor of invertebrate zoology at the University of Calgary, a pleasant surprise as I had been a student of his when I was pursuing my own degree. His subject was parasites; the more hideous the better.
Opening the lecture with a discussion on the hypothetical biology of the facehuggers from Alien, things only got more icky from there. Longair showed slide after slide of parasitic wasps, whose larvae eat their way out of living, albeit paralyzed hosts. Audience reactions appeared equal parts fascinated and repulsed.
In a lecture that covered hideous parasitic infections, and more fecal transmission vectors than I’m sure much of the audience was prepared for, perhaps the most disturbing thing I heard from Dr. Longair was amid the few minutes we had to catch up after his lecture. He told me that, while he plans to retire shortly, his department evidently doesn’t intend to replace him.
I asked after another of my former professors, one Dr. Anthony Russell. He was an engaging and passionate zoologist with a true dedication to his students. Dr. Longair said he had retired last year, with no replacement forthcoming. This at a time when the U of C’s biomedical research programs are burgeoning.
The next talk in the series was put on by a grad student, Tina Justin, also from the U of C. The program guide listed it under the intriguing title: Gastropods and Gender Identity in Star Wars — an obvious must-see for a GayCalgary writer.
While the talk itself was fascinating in its discussion of sequential and simultaneous hermaphroditism in invertebrates, it didn’t have much bearing on gender identity as our readers would understand it, save for general good-wishes toward gender-fluid people. Justin did, however, resolve some burning questions about how Jabba the Hutt could be both father and mother to his child, Rotta.
Ender’s Game: Between Science Fiction and Social Theory was a collaborative affair, with three scholars from literary departments at the U of C and University of Lethbridge, each giving a brief talk about what is possibly the most popular work of science fiction by a virulent homophobe.
The second presenter, Grace Chiang, touched on the controversy surrounding Ender’s Game and its author, Orson Scott Card, with a technique that most people with academic experience will recognize.
Chiang seemed reluctant to actually come out in condemnation of Card’s politics though it was, to be certain, heavily implied that the protestors of the Ender’s Game movie were in the right. Card made his position quite clear in a 2008 editorial for the Deseret News saying, "Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy."
One would think that such a statement is unambiguous enough in its vileness that it is deserving of denunciation, even in an academic context.
Throughout the presentations, the French philosophers Foucault and Barthes were invoked by way of providing distance between the author and his text. Barthes may have testified to the death of "the author" in the abstract, as a means of freeing up space for personal interpretation, but the executors of Card’s royalty contracts have not, evidently, been notified. We are not so deprived for compelling science fiction that we’ll be forced to resort to reading Ender’s Game any time soon.
The last science panel of the weekend covered the one perennial desire of any science fiction fan: to live long enough to see stories become science fact. How to Live Long Enough to Live Forever was presented by Geoffrey Shmigelsky, founder of Cadvision, a former Calgary Internet service provider that sold for, he confided "somewhere in the eight-figure range."
Ostensibly on the topic of research into human health and longevity, Shmigelsky spent a great deal of time establishing his premise: that technology in aggregate "grows" at exponential rates. That established, he then began to expound on ideas as yet in their infancy, but which would surely be headed our way any time now, because technology, as a generality, "doubles every eighteen months." Never mind that the eighteen-month rule was created to describe processor speeds specifically.
It was hard to counter the impression of being given a presentation on life extension by Phil Hartman’s "Lionel Hutz" character. Every question raised had a pat and easy answer that, to paraphrase, read as: yes, we will have a solution to that, given much more time, much more money, and much less government regulation.
I am tremendously interested in longevity research and, perhaps, obsessively interested in maintaining my health over the long term, and Shmigelsky’s talk was laser-focused on these two topics. But he had little to offer besides exciting technology trends, their theoretical application to biology, and lots of big ideas in development.
The technologies he suggested over the course of the talk — DNA repair, nano-scale robots, radical longevity extension — each had the capacity to shatter existing structures of health care, population growth, and even relationships.
I have little doubt in the ability of the Geoffrey Shmigelskys of the world to drive technological innovation toward the atom-scale robots that one day massage our very genetic code into centuries-long obedience. I have less confidence in their ability to judge the social consequences of introducing such technologies.
In the US, Shmigelsky’s adopted nation, billionaire Larry Ellison just added a basketball court to one of his yachts, and hired people to follow his yacht on speedboats to recover balls that bounce overboard. Meanwhile, a sixth of Americans are facing such severe economic instability that they’re at risk of malnutrition. The free market that Shmigelsky’s ilk would count on to determine literally who becomes immortal is so broken that it is causing the worst income inequality since the age of industrialist robber barons. A system incapable of ensuring that people don’t go hungry is not one that I would trust to distribute a technology that would redefine human existence.
As the futurist panel closed out, and my weekend at the Expo came to an end, I couldn’t help seeing the dystopia underlying Shmigelsky’s utopian vision. I thought about those two empty tenure positions in the biology faculty at the UofC, while its biomedical and petroleum research wings roar ahead. I thought about what Dr. Russell had once told me: that it was next to impossible to do a long-term ecological impact study of anything in Alberta, because grants and funding for projects longer than a few years were so unpredictable as to be actively hostile.
I thought about bigots like Orson Scott Card, still shouting their loudest and doing their damnedest to make all the important decisions for you and me.
And then I thought about nine billion people — the projected population by 2045 — living forever. It’s going to take more than libertarian platitudes to make that work. It is going to take a commitment to the spirit of curiosity that has brought us this far in the first place.
