Sym-Bionic Titan

I've decided to start this viewing with a show which I've heard a lot about, but which isn't well known. This is the Sym-Bionic Titan of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim. I chose it because it explores several premises which tend to come up a lot in scifi, but takes a rather different approach than the tired old B-movies of yesteryear. Moreover I've heard people rave about how it was great and hilarious, as well as cancelled too soon, and the Browncoat in me (c.f. Firefly) had to see what the fuss was about.

Here is the premise: Galaluna, a planet inhabited by human-like creatures, has been invaded and conquered by beast-like aliens (somewhat similar to the Zerg RTS gamers will be familiar with) called the Mutraddi. In a last minute attempt to save their collapsing government the Galalunans decided to send their princess and sole heir to the throne, Ilana, into hiding, accompanied by a single human soldier and a robot to see to her protection. They open a warp rift and mirculously stumble upon--you guessed it--Earth. The rest of the show revolves around them trying to blend in at a local high school while defending the severely technologically impared Earth humans from the Mutraddi who follow them, trying to kill Ilana. Oh and also they can mind-body sync in to this giant freaking robot which dishes out some legitimate whoop-ass on the Mutraddi and anyone else who messes with them. that's also an important point.

Forgiving, as is customary, the flawed science of warp riffs, it actually gets to a concept prevalent in scifi right off the bat: that somewhere there may exist another planet with humans just like us. Though this may seem plausible at first (it is a big universe after all), I do not believe that such a world exists, or at least not within our lightcone going back to the dawn of the universe. Why is this? Because good planets for life are hard to find, and life is exponentially harder to find--and that means anything, not just humans. The probability of ever enountering life that was even intelligent enough to comunicate technologically was summarized by Francis Drake in his famous/infamous "Drake Equation" below.

Note that this is not a predictive equation, only a semi-mathematical encapsulation that (1) there are many factors that go into creating intelligent life but (2) there's a lot of space where it might come up. Putting even low numbers in for most of the factors results in many intelligent species in our galaxy, which has spawned a lot of contraversy, because we certianly haven't heard from the supposedly thousands of advanced civilizations within our galaxy--some of which ought to be near enough for their radio transmissions to reach us. But we are enforcing a stricter condiction, namely that the intelligent life we meet be human, or at least human enough for us not to notice any great difference. This is where things get really hard. There are something around 25,947 individual genes in the human genome. Since natural selection is a guided but fundamentally stochastic process, demanding this be reproduced exactly is a lot. Even in a simplistic model where each gene has an equal chance of being put in any 'place' (biologists please forgive my butchering of your discipline) for any one gene, there's only a one in 25,947! (= a giant number) chance it will happen 'right'. We are here because that's how it happened to occur (natural selection being truly random, anything might have happened; we are the result of what did). That's fine, but demanding a higher multiplicity than unity of such a statistically unlikely event is not realistic.

Here's what I think might be more plausible. We are poised to be able to send human beings on extremely long term voyages, even within this century. Whether this be by cryogenics or more likely by the construction of large 'generational' spacecraft, it is likely that were these humans to reach their destinations, much of our current culture and technology would be lost. After a few generations, this might continue, to the point where little of human culture before the time the settlers arived at their new planet. One might even imagine that thousands of years from the time of settlement, humans will believe themselves to have come from the planet they settled, with their true origins lost to the mists of time (this is of course assuming they never re-create a science like archaeology which would make it clear they did not originate from that world or at least would not explain their origin naturalistically). In Asimov's Foundation series, for instance, Earth is little more than a myth or legend.

Now suppose we have group of humans A and B on two different 'seed' worlds. Suppose A progresses faster technologically than B (perhaps B is being run by Republicans), and therefore A is capable of perfecting space travel, at least to within the neighborhood of B much faster--do you see where I'm going with this? So when I see something like Galaluna and 'Earth' in this scifi show, I immediately think of the 'seeding worlds' idea. This is to say, that although it might not be realistic for humans to have evolved on both 'Earth' and Galaluna, it is realistic to think that the humans from 'Earth' and Galaluna are the decendents of humans emerging from the true Earth--or whatever you call this planet which birthed us--who were put on some form of generational spacecraft and came to the new 'Earth' of the show and Galaluna separately.

But back to the show: just as Ilana and her crew become comfortable, the Mutraddi, now commanded by a defected Galalunan general, find where she is and send a big magma monster after her. Although all hope seems lost at first, they find that their robot, Octus, can implement a program whereby the three are mentally fused to form a giant Sym-Bionic Titan, from which the title derives. After a worthy climax, they win the fight and the threat is removed...for now. Having watched over half of this now, the plot becomes repetitive, and except for two or three times you end up with a robot fighting a big monster--meh.

The Sym-Bionic linking idea is interesting, and new to me, though needless to say there is some other enthusiast who has read of it in some esoteric real SF story. I have often pondered what it might be like to fuse human and cybernetic minds, producing something with human intuition and 'gut feeling' while retaining the machine-grade accuracy of the cybernetic mind. It would be the perfect interface--think and the machine does, and you could in turn give the machine perspective which only human minds are capable of doing. Intuition, sparce data recognition, etc, coupled with the pure numerical power of a machine. Truely a powerful tool.

In sum Sym-Bionic titan so far has had some interesting points to make, but is clearly a cartoon sci-fi show and is not capable of the great plot twists and magnificent surprise endings or resolutions of most respectible sci-fi. Still it is very fun to watch and I feel sorry it was cancelled so soon.