#cause that did irreparable damage to any conversation revolving about her

[nexo-nex]

i am a firm believer that ginger would be so popular in the fandom if 1. she had just a tad more screentime and 2. if her main outfit wasnt so hideous

[scifigeneration]

A robot that can touch, eat and sleep? The reality of cyborgs like Alita: Battle Angel

by Michael Milford and Peter Stratton

Alita: preparing for battle. 20th Century Fox

Alita: Battle Angel is an interesting and wild ride, jam-packed full of concepts around cybernetics, dystopian futures and cyberpunk themes.

The film – in cinemas from today – revolves around Alita (Rosa Salazar), a female cyborg (with original human brain) that is recovered by cybernetic doctor Dyson Ido (Christoph Waltz) and brought into the world of the future (the film is set in 2563).

Hundreds of years after a catastrophic war, called “The Fall”, the population of Earth now resides in a wealthy sky city called Zalem and a sprawling junkyard called Iron City where the detritus from Zalem is dumped.

We follow Alita’s story as she makes friends and enemies, and discovers more about her past. Her character is great – she has many of the mannerisms of a teenage girl combined with a determination and overarching sense of what is right – “I do not stand by in the presence of evil.”

So let’s dig into the many scientific concepts touched on in the film and see how far from reality they are, or might be in the future.

Alita: Battle Angel Trailer. (20th Century Fox)

Touch skin

Alita goes through two cybernetic bodies in the film, with the second being especially advanced. A big part of the film is the interaction between the human and cyborg components, and a major component of that is touch, especially with respect to the main love interest Hugo (Keean Johnson).

A touching scene from the movie. 20th Century Fox.

As shown in the film, Alita’s cyborg body has a pretty advanced and location-sensitive sense of touch. In today’s world, robot touch, or tactile sensing, is relatively advanced (although not yet widely deployed) and uses a range of technologies including deformable skin that changes both its capacitance (to measure and “sense” the touch) and illuminance (to display the results of the touch).

Touch can also be detected in terms of changes in temperature, conductivity, resistance or even optical changes that result from a touch.

Verdict: Not a stretch.

Antimatter heart

A heart of antimatter. 20th Century Fox

Like Ironman from The Avengers with his arc reactor, and The T-850 from the Terminator series with its hydrogen fuel cells, Alita is powered by an antimatter heart.

We are nowhere close to an antimatter-type energy source at this stage - current robots of similar size like the ones Boston Dynamics builds are increasingly being powered by relatively conventional batteries.

There are multiple major obstacles to overcome in using antimatter as any type of energy source, including finding an efficient way to obtain the antimatter in the first place and capturing the energy released from a matter-antimatter event.

Verdict: Beating physics is difficult.

Learning to use a body

Alita’s first steps upon waking up in her new body cause her to stumble, but only momentarily.

Robot walking and other related motion capabilities have long been an active field of research, with companies such as Boston Dynamics making very publicly visible strides (see what we did there) in biped (two legs) and quadruped (four legs) movement.

The two legged robot Atlas performing robot parkour. (Boston Dynamics)

Alita has likely never used the exact body that she is given at first – but manages to walk, jump and fight fluently almost instantaneously.

This is in stark contrast to current robots learning from scratch to walk – which can take thousands of hours of training in simulation and then on the robot to get right.

Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments. (Google Deepmind)

Instead it’s likely that Alita has a range of pre-trained motion models for a variety of body configurations, and is able to rapidly tweak them to work on the body she is given.

Rapid learning. 20th Century Fox

Verdict: Runs well.

Will cyborgs need to eat?

The doctor tells Alita she has to eat to provide nutrients to her (still organic) brain. This sounds reasonable, but she would need a complete digestive system to break the food down into nutrients and absorb them into her bloodstream.

Since her torso is completely inorganic, it’s more likely that fluid, vitamins, minerals and macronutrients (proteins, carbohydrates and fats) would be injected directly into her blood.

Today, some people who have had their intestines removed due to illness continue to live relatively normal lives.

Verdict: Hard to swallow.

Will cyborgs need sleep?

We first see the repaired Alita as she wakes up from a deep sleep.

Scientists are not certain about all the reasons that sleep is needed, but it seems particularly important for the brain. While awake, your brain cells use lots of energy and produce lots of metabolic waste that accumulates around the cells.

At night while you sleep, your brain clears away the waste. Sleep also seems vital for remembering what you’ve learned.

Since Alita’s brain is human, it’s quite plausible she would need to sleep.

Verdict: Not just a dream.

Could a brain survive for 300 years?

Even while you sleep, your brain still needs a constant supply of oxygen. Brain damage from a lack of oxygen starts becoming irreparable after about 20 minutes without it, although with noted exceptions.

Brains can be temporarily put into a state of suspended animation by cooling them down dramatically, and operations like heart transplants are sometimes done this way today.

But keeping the brain cold also requires power, and a brain can only currently be kept alive like this for a few hours, not the 300 years portrayed in the movie.

Verdict: A little brain-dead.

The future of humans - cyborgs

Alita: Battle Angel presents a world full of cyborgs with varying remnants of their humanity (both physical and mental). Whether this is a realistic potential future is still up for debate - we don’t know whether this ongoing hybridisation of humans and technology will be sustained or will rapidly switch completely over to robotics technology.

Read more: Why visual illusions appear in everyday objects – from nature to architecture

But if we are to have a future of cyborgs, the movie presents (sometimes realistically) a range of concepts that are fascinating to consider: will these cyborgs still need to eat, to sleep, and how will a mixed society of humans and cyborgs function.

Alita: Battle Angel is a vision of one such possible future, and is a worthy addition to the canon of films that provoke us to think about just what our world of tomorrow will look like.

Alita: Battle Angel prompts us to consider what exactly our machine and technology-filled future may look like. 20th Century Fox

About The Authors:

Michael Milford is a Professor at Queensland University of Technology and Peter Stratton is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, also  at The University of Queensland

This article is republished from our content partners at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

[outlawqueenbey]

Forgotten Amnesia

@oqpromptparty Day 3:

Robin has amnesia. He falls in love with his Regina, his doctor. (#156)

Hospitals are….not her cup of tea. Everything smells stale and bleached beyond recognition. There is a constant whispering between hushed voices, muffled words and scowls between doctors and nurses over patient charts. Not much about a hospital is very happy. Sure, people come in with injuries and leave fully recovered, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people never leave the confines of this white walled fortress, and other times they are taken out in a body bag. Pain is everywhere. Not just physical, that can be handled easily with IV's and morphine, but it's the psychological pain that lingers and claws it's grimy hands around this place. Patients in pain when they are told they will never walk again. Parents in pain seeing their children being wheeled off to surgery. Friends staring into the abyss waiting and praying to whoever that their person comes out safely.

No, hospitals are not her favorite place. But it's where her life now revolves around because of a particular patient, and the pain in her heart that refuses to go away. She's been his doctor for six years now. Walks the same hallway down to room 23 with his ever growing medical chart in hand, a glass of lemonade in the other, a favorite of his she's come to learn over their time together.

Each day is much the same, his condition hasn't improved, the car crash he barely survived has taken away all of his memories. Of his family back home who waits, his job he will most likely never return to, the friends that visit every now and again, and the family he has, who love him so much and miss him even more. Pain. It surrounds him though he doesn't feel a thing.

But every morning at half past ten she knocks on his door, hoping that it might be the day something has changed. Today is no different. With his drink in tow, she pushes his door open to find him staring rather intently out the window. A frown creasing his forehead and crinkling the lines around his bright blue eyes. It's an expression she hasn't seen before.

Sure there has been frustration for him in his recovery. The first few months after coming out of the coma. The braces around his legs and spine to keep him upright as he learned to walk again. Learning how to speak again. That was exhausting for her. But they did it. After nearly a year, he could finally form proper sentences to voice his thoughts and needs rather than shakily scribble on a pad of paper, or use their made up tapping code with his fingers on her palm. One tap meant yes. Two taps was no. That was their entire conversation. Filled with her asking him questions, and he tapping her hand. She damn near cried the first time he said hello to her. It was the progress she'd been waiting on.

But that feeling of utter relief and joy soon took a rapid downhill sink when he asked her what her name was. He didn't remember it. Didn't remember her. And that's how they figured out that the traumatic brain injury he had suffered caused extreme memory loss and day to day amnesia.

Other doctors had sighed and patted her shoulder, telling her there was nothing they could do. The brain is a fragile organ, and sometimes the damage is irreparable. She refused to believe them. Which is why she has stood in this doorway in the place she hates most, and told him her name every day.

But this look, the way he doesn't even turn to acknowledge her is jarring, and it makes her heart sink slightly. If this is another setback, she has run out of options with his rehab. They will just have to live like this, in two separate worlds, where his smile will forever have her stomach flipping over into a cloud of butterflies and that will be it. She won't leave him, but there will be no growth between them. Not anymore. He doesn't even remember seeing her yesterday.

"Robin?" She sets her charts and his lemonade down on the side table, sitting on the bed next to his hip. "Are you alright?"

He huffs quietly, scowls at the sun outside before turning back to her, scanning her face for any source of recognition. It's a longer look than she is used to. And something feels different about him. She should probably check his vitals and do her routine morning checklist of him. Hopefully he isn't declining. Her heart couldn't take that. The past six years have already taken a toll, and the threads are barely holding the beating organ together.

"I'm Dr. Mills. I just have to give you a check over okay?" She sits and reaches for her stethoscope. His eyes follow as she places the chilled tool on his chest, plugs in her ears as she listens to his heartbeat for a moment. "It's still going strong." Regina smiles, leaning back and jotting a few notes on his chart.

He doesn't say anything, just nods and follows her with his ever inquisitive eyes as she stands and moves to the other side of his bed. "You're beautiful, has anyone ever told you that?"

Little does he know, it's him who does. Every day she sees him. He comments on how stunning her eyes are. How impressive her brain is. The brilliance of her smile. Silly as it may be, she loves hearing him say them. She is no stranger to men admiring her, but he is the only one who can say something so simple and it has her heart banging a trumpeting chorus in her chest.

"Thank you. How are you feeling?"

"Fine, I suppose."

He's always fine. Every damn day, that's all he is. Just fine. One day she hopes he will say he's good. That would be such an improvement.

She places her hand in his own, "Can you squeeze my fingers for me?" He does. On both sides, and at least his strength hasn't gone down hill. Physical Therapy has done him well. She squeezes back for a moment before letting her hand slide out of his. He frowns at that but says nothing, just stares at her with that same intensity.

"I'm going to check your eyes now okay?"

He shuffles to lay back on his bed, but when she brings the retinoscope up to his face, his hand wraps around her wrist, stopping her from coming any closer. The contact tingles in a way it shouldn't anymore. "This won't hurt, I just need to look at your eyes." Just like every other day.

His eyes stay locked on hers, fingers still wrapped around her wrist as he moves her hand to the side, and he scans her face over and over again until a small half dimpled smile parts across his lips.

"Is everything okay?"

"I know you."

The words steal the breath out of her lungs. Not once, in six years since he had been brought into her care has he ever had any inclination of knowing who she was. Tears flood into her eyes as she tries to stifle the urge to hug him. It could simply be fluke. A trick of the brain that is healing. And she dare not linger on the prospect of hope. She tried that before, and it didn't exactly work out in her favour.

"I'm your doctor. I see you everyday." She smiles, patting his chest softly. "For six years we've known each other." It's been longer, but again, he doesn't know that.

Robin frowns at that. "No. I mean I remember who you are."

She doesn't exactly know what to say to that, just tilts her head to the side curiously, "And who am I?"

"Regina. That's your name. Regina Evelyn Mills."

Her jaw drops. In the past six years her middle name has never been brought up. Not once.

"You're right." She swallows thickly at the bubble of hope caught in her throat.

"You grew up in Maine, in a small town where you used to be the mayor."

A tear falls from her eyes as she nods, bites down on her lip not wanting to interrupt his break through. It takes a moment, a long frozen second in time that he turns his eyes down to her hand that is gripped within his own, the single silver band around her left finger, one that matches a ring that sits on his left hand.

"You were my wife." He whispers out.

A half laugh half cry escapes her as she reaches with her free hand to tip his chin up, finding his eyes staring up at her in disbelieving promise.

"No," She leans into his lips, uncaring if anyone were to walk in as her forehead meets his own, "I am your wife."

He closes the distance before she can, pressing their lips softly together as her tears fall.

"I...I remember you."

Fin.