Clone Wars -- "A Friend in Need" (Ep. 4.14)

-- Friendship shows us who we really are.

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The return of Death Watch... and a plan to assassinate Dooku?

Having the Death Watch around is always interesting, and, hey, it's always cool to see the Darksaber, but I actually don't want to talk about what the episode is about. No, again, I want to focus on something that's off to the side of the story.

When Ahsoka, R2-D2, and Lux Bonteri arrive at the Death Watch camp, the members of the Death Watch are busy torturing... droids. For fun. Their pattern seems to be to torture the droids into inoperability then have someone fix the droids up so that they can torture them some more. And I know some of you, right now, are thinking, "So...? They're droids."

It's important to remember that in Star Wars, droids are sentient. They have self-awareness and value themselves as individuals. This isn't a subject that's ever explored in Star Wars, but it's certainly there in the background. It's actually a parallel line of thought to that of the clones.

Now, most people would probably say it would be wrong to torture clones; they're alive, right? But not everyone believed that. They were, after all, built, so doesn't that make them something like organic machines? "But they can feel pain!" Sure, but so can the droids. "It's not the same!" Why not?

Why not?

Of course, after the Clone War, the making of clones was made illegal. So was the making of droids for combat purposes, though that's barely touched on.

Did you know that science (yeah, I know, for a lot of you, I may as well have just said "magic") is showing us, right now, that dolphins and other marine mammals are self aware? They have names for each other. So, you know, when a dolphin gets caught in a fishing net and pulled out  of the water, some other dolphin out in the ocean is going off to tell the pod, "Samson got caught in a net..." Imagine how you would feel if you found out your neighbor caught and ate your dog.

And some of you are saying, "So what. It's only a dog." Or it's only a dolphin. Or... it's only a black person. Or a Mexican. Or a Muslim. Or a faggot. It's not like they're people, right?



"You don't want to make them angry; they are far from rational."

I'd Rather Be Disney

I grew up on Six Flags. So to speak. The original one. The one that was built because Angus Wynne went to Disneyland and thought he would also build an amusement park, one that didn't require you to go all the way to the west coast, and, so, he built Six Flags near Dallas, kind of a halfway point in the U.S.

I only, actually, went to Six Flags a few times as a kid, but I went a lot as a teenager. A few times a year. It was only about two hours away, so, when we wanted a bigger trip, that's where we went. Not my family, my youth group. My family never went. See the "only a few times as a kid" (and that may be stretching it, as I can actually only remember going twice prior to being 15).

At any rate, I loved it. I thought Six Flags was great and the epitome of amusement parks. At this point in my life, I've been to several of the Six Flags parks, and, until last summer, I didn't think it could get better than that. Seriously. See, I'd never been to a Disney park, and, really, the only reason I even wanted to go to one was because of Star Tours. I mean, seriously, Disneyland couldn't really be that much better than Six Flags, right? Right? Well... how wrong I was, and you can read all about the trip to Disneyland starting here, if you're so inclined.

Still, at the point I went to Disneyland, it had been a good 10 years since I'd been to a Six Flags, so, although I knew Disney was better, it was kind of an abstract thing, because it had been so long since I'd been to a Six Flags, the memory wasn't really fresh enough to know why Disney was better.

My younger son received for his birthday, this year, a season pass to Six Flags: Discovery Kingdom. Actually, for his birthday, the entire family received season passes. This is, of course, a mixed blessing, because, on the one hand: yea! season passes!, but, on the other hand: oh, season passes; now, we have to go enough to make them worthwhile. This past weekend was our first trip (because we had to go by the end of the first week of April to activate our parking pass, which would have become void if we didn't (and can I just say, "What the heck?" I mean, it's paid for. It's not quite fair to put a time limit on when it can be activated especially since the park only opened for the season two weeks ago).

So what did I learn about why Disney is better after our first trip of  the season to Six Flags?

1. Everything at Disneyland is designed to make the experience better for the user. For instance, when we went to Disneyland, everything we needed was mailed to us ahead of time, and we had it all when we got there, so getting into Disneyland was smooth and hassle free. However, when we got to Six Flags, we had to go get IDs made for our passes, and that was the longest line we had of the day, nearly two hours just to get IDs, not to mention that the parking pass is specific to me, so, if my wife wanted to take the kids to Six Flags on a day that I couldn't go (which won't happen, but still...), she would have to pay for parking.

2. Disneyland is SO clean. It's clean for two reasons: If you have some piece of trash in your hand (like, you just finished a beverage), and you want to throw it away, there is a trash can right there for you. They make disposing of trash so convenient, it's almost more trouble to drop it on the ground. But, if you do, there are people walking around with brooms constantly cleaning up. It's not only the "happiest place on Earth," I would bet it's the cleanest. On the other hand, Six Flags makes it extremely difficult to get rid of trash. There are no trash cans at all in the ride lines, so, if you get in a line with a beverage and want to throw your trash away before you get on the ride, you CAN'T, because there are NO trash cans. But, yet, they have signs up everywhere saying "Please Keep Our Park Clean." I just want to know how they expect that to happen when the trash cans are hidden. And they have no people walking around on clean up duty.

3. There are ads all over Six Flags for EVERYTHING, the most annoying of which are the ads to upgrade. Upgrade your daily ticket to a season pass, upgrade your season pass to a gold pass, upgrade to a Flash pass so that you can get on the rides more quickly. Upgrade to a season pass for meals. Buy a souvenir cup that you can refill for cheap. Everything aimed and designed to get the customer to spend more and more money. There's none of this stuff at Disneyland. Maybe, Disneyland is enough of an ad in and of itself, I don't know, but there are not banners and ads all over the place trying to get you to spend more and more money. Okay, so they have gift shops everywhere, but so does Six Flags, and those aren't as obtrusive as all the banner ads.

4. Water. We all know that staying hydrated is important. I mean, really important. To help you with this issue, Disneyland does two things: 1. Water is pretty cheap, not more than $2.00 a bottle, and some of the places you can eat let you have free cups of water, rather like a lot of restaurants do. 2. You can bring things in with you, so, if you choose, you can bring in water or snacks or whatever rather than being forced to buy it in the park. Six Flags, however, charges $4.00 for a bottle of water, which is beyond ridiculous. AND they don't allow you to bring in anything from outside the park. Not even water. This just seems wrong to me.

5. Six Flags (all of them) is mostly a park of roller coasters. That's cool. I mean, you know, roller coasters are cool. They are the biggest attractions at Six Flag parks. There's not a lot there beyond the roller coasters, though. Not overall. Discovery Kingdom does have some animal shows and stuff, because it was a Marine World before Six Flags bought it, so there is still a dolphin show (which we missed because an employee WORKING AT THE DOLPHIN SHOW told me the incorrect time for the next show) and a tiger show, and you can (pay more money to) ride elephants (I guess that's the "elephant upgrade"), and stuff like that, but the main things, the big attractions, are the roller coasters (and let me just add that 2/3 of my children do not like roller coasters). I compare this to an action movie where the focus is on the explosions with just enough story to tie them together. Disneyland, on the other hand, has a well developed plot with plenty of action to keep it exciting, but it also has character development and cool settings and all the things you'd expect from a really good book. Although there are roller coasters, it's not about the roller coasters.

6. The lines. Disney knows that waiting in line is a dreary experience, and they do everything they can to make the experience better. There are things to look, environments to experience, all sorts of things to ease the pain of waiting in line, including being able to get "fast passes" to get onto some rides more quickly, and that fast pass thing is just an extra they offer to you. For free. None of that Six Flags. Six Flags is like the Soviet Union of amusement parks. Just drudging through the lines for hours. Nothing to see. Nothing to do. Only ads. And no trash cans. Oh, and their version of the fast pass, the "Flash Pass" (after the The Flash comic book character), costs extra money (see point 3).

And that's why, as a writer, I'd rather be Disney. Sure, roller coasters may be exciting, eye catching and all of that, and they may be fun (they are), but, at the end of the day, I was ready to leave Six Flags. And, you know, we'll have a good time when we go back, but it's really light fair. Surface. I was never ready to leave Disneyland. It was only with reluctance that we left each night because we were too tired to go on, but we were never just ready to leave. And we couldn't wait to get back the next morning. Of course, my kids can't wait to go back to Six Flags, even the ones that don't like roller coasters, and that's okay. They're kids. They're not quite able to differentiate yet. Which is not to say that they don't think Disneyland is better, because they do, but they still approach both experiences with approximately the same level of enthusiasm. Right now, the roller coasters work for them (or the butterfly habitat), mostly because they're young, but there will come a day when just the roller coasters won't be enough.

And that's okay. There are books I read when I was young, books that I enjoyed, that I can't go back to now. They were good for me at the time. However, when you continue to expand and deepen your reading, you find you can't go back to those other books with the same kind of enjoyment, just like I will never again be able to enjoy Six Flags in the way I did before I went to Disneyland. Disneyland is just better. And that's the kind of books I want to write, too.

The A to Z of Fiction to Reality: Xenobiology

This is one of those that I find really cool but still can't help thinking, "What the heck?" about.

I don't remember what book I was reading when I first came across the term xenobiology. It was definitely science fiction, and, although I want to say it was Asimov, it probably wasn't. One thing I am sure about, though, is that it was not The Star Beast by Robert Heinlein, since I haven't read that. That is, however, where the term originates. At the time, it meant "the study of alien life." Even before coming across the term in whatever book it was, there was some other book that several different friends had back in the '70s that was a book of art of what alien life might look like. I was kind of fascinated with the book, especially since it was presented rather as if it was "true." The one image that has stuck in my mind (and I could not find the illustration) was of a large jellyfish-like creature that lived in the atmosphere of Jupiter (evidently inspired because Carl Sagan said something like that might possibly exist).

Several years after Heinlein's 1954 book, NASA started an exobiology program which focused on the search for life on other planets. Now, these were two different things:
1. xenobiology -- the study of "alien" life
2. exobiology -- the search for alien life
All of this came to be under the heading of astrobiology, which is sort of all-encompassing: Astrobiology is the search for extraterrestrial life and the study of its origin, evolution, and distribution (as in whether it's traveled from one planet to another (like on a meteor)).

But let's go back to just xenobiology for a moment. The idea of alien life is fascinating. And the movies of the '70s, like Star Wars and Close Encounters and, even, E.T. (yes, I know that one was 1980), really cemented the idea into the heads of many young minds. So much so that a "real" disciple around xenobiology developed. Mostly, it was involved in speculation about what alien life could be like, but they considered it a science. A completely hypothetical science. Which I just find fascinating. And astounding. I mean, I was completely unable to believe that there were schools that offered classes in this when I was still in high school and looking over my college options.

"Yes, please, can I sign up for that class in completely make-believe science?"

Not that I don't believe in the possibility of alien life; I do. I also find it completely... well, a little like jumping the gun to be trying to say that speculation about what life might be like on another planet is science.

Some good came of all of this, though. In 1977, we discovered some life here on Earth that does not require sunlight to live or, even, thrive. This changed our definition of the requirements for life (and I remember learning in science when I was a kid that sunlight was required). We've got the requirements boiled down to water and energy (pardon the pun), at this point. We don't even think that all life need be carbon-based anymore, which is another of those things I learned when I was a kid.

At any rate, all of this lead to a change in the definition of xenobiology to "biology based on a foreign chemistry." Mostly, now, it deals with weird forms of life we've been discovering on Earth that have previously been thought to be impossible (like the tube worms that don't need sunlight and those weird bacteria discovered a few years ago that can live off of arsenic).

But, still, there are plenty of people out there studying (speculating about) alien life that we haven't even discovered.

And, now, I want to digress for a moment (like that's unusual):

My buddy, Briane Pagel over at The Best of Everything is doing alien languages for the A to Z challenge. Well, saying that he's talking about alien languages might not be exactly correct since a lot of what he does is talk about talking about them, but that's his announced theme, so I'm just sort of going with it. Anyway... Last week he did a post about our potential for communicating with aliens if/when we ever do meet them. In his post, he talks about dolphins and about how we've been working with them for decades, and we still can't communicate with them. This seems like a similar topic to me as what I'm talking about with this xenobiology stuff.

People start talking about talking to aliens, and we haven't even met them. The pre-supposition is that they will be similar enough to us that we will have some basis of relation to them and, thus, facilitate understanding. And this might be true. However, it might also be totally wrong. Which is kind of why it's not the smartest thing to start speculating about  these sorts of things. Talking to aliens or what alien life might be like.

Here's the thing, dolphins are smart. Really smart. Potentially, as smart as humans (or even smarter). After all, their brain/mass ratio is roughly equivalent to that of humans, which plays a part in our standards for intelligence. For instance, an elephant also has a brain that is roughly the same size as a human's or a dolphin's, but their mass is so much larger, they fall lower on the intelligence scale, because their brain has to be more concerned with their bodies than a human's brain to theirs. No, I don't know why it's defined this way, but that's how they do it. Well, okay, I do sort of know why, but it's not really important to this, so I'm not going to go into it.

So we have this animal that lives here on Earth with us, an animal that has a completely alien way of being. Alien to us, you understand. And despite that we've been working with them for decades, we're no closer to understanding how they communicate. And it's clear that they do communicate. But they don't communicate in any way that makes sense to us, but we think we'll be able to talk with aliens should we meet them?

Here's what I'm getting at: It seems to me that it would be more profitable for scientists to be spending their time on understanding the things in front of us that we don't understand rather than speculating about how we can send coded messages into space to talk to aliens. It seems quite clear to me that if we can't figure out how to communicate with dolphins that we have no hope of stumbling blindly across some code that will allow us to speak to aliens. And I give Briane the credit for this thought, because I'd never really thought about it at all until he brought it up.

In the same way, I think scientists would be better served working to understand the life on our own planet rather than speculating about how life might develop on some other planet. Until we can actually go there and see how that life might have developed, speculation doesn't matter at all. Not that we shouldn't look for life, I'm all for that, but the fact that we have (or had) a science devoted to studying alien life seems more than a bit like putting the cart before the horse.

Leave that stuff to the science fiction writers and you scientists get back to work on the real science. Like faster than light travel so that we can find that alien life.