Short Wave - Could Dune Really Exist? What Scientists Think of Our Favorite Sci-Fi Worlds

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

The sci-fi film Dune: Part Two is out in theaters now. The movie takes place on the harsh desert planet, Arrakis, where water is scarce and giant, killer sandworms lurk just beneath the surface. But what do planetary scientists and biologists think about the science of these worms, Arrakis and our other favorite sci-fi planets? Today on the show, Regina G. Barber talks to biologist (and Star Trek consultant!) Mohamed Noor and planetary scientist Michael Wong about Dune, habitable planets and how to make fantasy seem more realistic. Want more of the science behind your favorite fictional worlds? Email us at [e-mail]. Listen to Short Wave on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. The last time we saw Paul Atreides, he was stranded on the harsh desert planet Arachus, trying to outrun a giant sandworm to stay alive. Run! Paul is the hero in the novel, and now film Dune. Said in the future, Paul is the heir to the fiefdom of Arachus, aka Dune. This planet is the only place in important space travel good, Spice, exists. And in part one, Paul joins Lerxes.

local fremen, the people of Aracus, against his mother's wishes. And he tries to continue his late father's mission of bringing peace to the planet of Aracus. A journey he continues in Dune Part 2, out in theaters now. It's a science fiction tale of mythology, interstellar politics, and living in a harsh world. But I got to admit, anytime I've read or watched Dune, I'm plagued by one train of thought. What about the science? How would a giant sandworm live on a planet like Aracus. Lucky for me, Mohamed Noor has also spent a lot of time thinking about

all of this. Dune, like many other science fiction, shows, seems to have these singular biome planets. And this one was very much a sort of sandy desert biome, as you saw there. In terms of life there, two of the things that we saw, in addition, of course, to the

fremen, the people who were living there, were the kangaroo mouse thing. I think it was called MEDIB or something like that. But the large and much more conspicuous one, of course, were those giant sandworms. Mohammed's thought a lot about all of this because in addition to being a biologist,

he consults for another famous sci-fi franchise, Star Trek. So he has a lot of experience with trying to figure out how to make fantasy seem realistic. I brought him and Michael Wong, an astrobiologist and planetary scientist, on the show to help me understand

if the things were seen in the Dune movies are possible in real intergalactic space. not just because we're all trekkies. I wanted to know, are there planets like Iraqis out there? Could a desert world be changed into something more habitable? Habitable for whom? So for human life, we require a certain amount of oxygen in the air. And there probably isn't very much plant life pumping oxygen into the air on such a desert world.

But you could, in theory, generate oxygen through photochemistry. That is the way that ultraviolet light from the star can interest. interact with the molecules in the atmosphere and cleave them apart and create oxygen. So, for instance, carbon dioxide, CO2 has oxygen in it. You can break that apart and create O2. You can do the same with water, H2O. That's got some oxygen in there. You can break it apart and create O2 as well.

But as we've established, Orakis is a parched world. So today on the show, we're talking Dune and Habitable Planets. We nerd out about what we love about science fiction and what could actually mirror reality. I'm Regina Barber, and you're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Michael, Muhammad, let's talk about Iraqis. It's dry. It's a harsh desert planet. And while humans, you know, the Fremen, they do inhabit Dune in this fictional universe. A big tension is whether it could be more comfortable, more livable through terraforming.

So Michael, let's start out really basic. What is terraforming and is it doable? So terraforming is basically a... an imaginary process by which you take some planet that is not like the Earth and change it on a global scale to be more like the Earth. And for Iraqis, it seems like the limiting factor for the biology there is the water. It seems like all the life there is really starved for water, very thirsty, trying to get it wherever it can. So the first step to terraforming Iraqis, if one tried to do that would be to try to find a new source of water. Now, where are you going to find water? It's a really

hard problem. You can't just, like, magically put more water onto a planet. One way you could imagine doing this is to look at the icy bodies in the system that Aracas is in. So maybe there are some comets or asteroids that contain a large degree of water. If you bring them back down to that world safely, you know, without causing a mass extinction in the process, don't know how to you would do that. But, you know, imagine that you could. Then you could put more water onto Iraqis and perhaps raise its habitability that way. People often propose terraforming in the context of, well, we've ruined the Earth, so we should go someplace else. It would be a billion times easier to fix the Earth than to create another Earth. 100% agree. Okay, so not super plausible

for us, but what about Iraqis? Like, could there be a planet full of humongous worms? So with the worms, one of the concerns I have about is, what does this thing eat? How does it derive mass and how does it derive energy? I mean, I'm assuming it doesn't have like some sort of atomic reactor inside its belly or something like that. It clearly is consuming something. But is there so much life down there underground that it can actually acquire that much mass? And the answer, you know, might very well be yes. Maybe it's, you know, it's going through and getting just tons and tons of really, really small organisms.

Now, what I thought was really fascinating about those sandworms is how they use vibrations to locate their prey. Yes. That was very cool. And that is actually something we see in a lot of life on Earth. Sharks are able to use vibrations. The water for locating their prey. But even worms themselves, you may be familiar with something called worm grunting, where people will essentially, like, hit sticks on the ground to try to bring worms up to the surface. So, I mean, this idea of basically using vibrations in the earth is not unprecedented. Michael, so in Dune, there are also these, like, plants that collect water.

Like, could you give us some examples of ways you could collect water in a desert planet? Yeah. So one actually really interesting way is by having salts crystals. So salts will actually kind of pull the water out of its vapor phase into liquid phase. So this is a process that in science we call deliquescence. And so maybe the plants are, you know, utilizing minerals in this very, fascinating way. Wow. Okay. There's actually some desert frogs that also get like condensate directly from the air. Essentially, they call it almost like sweating. And they're able to pull some of the condensate out.

So again, there's precedent for this. Mohamed and Michael, you are both also Trekkies like myself. So let's put Aracas into a wider sci-fi context here. How does this planet compare to other fictional worlds? In a lot of science fiction, we see these single biome desert planets. If you're a Star Wars fan, you may be familiar with Tatooine. That's a desert planet, although it is in a slightly different situation in that it orbits a binary star system.

So, you know, that could contribute to some of its desert nature. Also, I think the most famous one in Star Trek would be planet Vulcan. One thing you see with the Vulcans that you also see with the Fremen is this adaptation to the environment. And this is different from what people talk about with like acclimatization to high altitudes. You know how runners will go work out of it. high altitudes so they can sort of adapt. That's a physiological adaptation. In the context of like the Fremen or the Vulcans, they're actually genetically adapted to their particular environment.

And there are examples of that even here on Earth. If you think about like people from Tibet, they actually have a variant of this gene called E-Pass 1, which actually allows them to use oxygen more efficiently, smaller amounts of it more efficiently. And that's similar to something we've seen in the context of Vulcans in Star Trek and probably something along those in terms of the heat adaptation of the Fremen. What's the most realistic fictional planet either of you have come across? So in Star Trek Andoria is, it's a planet,

but it's actually a moon of a gas giant planet. And it's an icy moon. So the Andorian people are known to, you know, live in these very frigid Arctic conditions. And I think this very poetically speaks to the idea of habitable icy moons that we've discovered right in our own backyard. So moons of Jupiter and Saturn

are known to have these subsurface oceans of liquid water hiding beneath miles of frozen ice. And the reason why they're able to have these subsurface oceans is because of tidal heating. So sometimes during their orbit, they're very close to Jupiter or Saturn, these moons are actually getting pulled into different shapes as they're orbiting their planet.

And that induces friction within the moons and keeps the subsurface ocean liquid. There's just enough heat there to melt that ice and have a global liquid water ocean. And so this is one of the greatest places to potentially go looking for alien life in our solar system. The advantage of having this water, both you have the opportunity for life to arise, but you also have an easy way to produce a lot of oxygen too because it's all right there. It's all ready to go. Speaking of moons, I love Europa. I love Titans.

I love, you know, Enceladus. Europa is around Jupiter. Enceles and Titan is around Saturn. And I used to imagine life in these oceans, like under the ice. So as an evolutionary biologist, Muhammad, like what kind of life could be there? Oh, well, the most likely life we would find. And I think Dr. Wong would agree with me on this, too, is something that's single cell. Because if you think about the first couple of billion years of life here on Earth, things were single cell.

It's much easier to get those in sort of this liquid environment. then, or potentially in gases, but I mean, with liquid you have the solvent is all right there. There's lots of materials that it's easy to build a membrane. That is a perfect environment for an origin of life, I'd say. Yeah, absolutely. Some of the leading hypotheses for the origin of life here on Earth situate our emergence at these hydrothermal vents, these gurgling, bubbling, geological factories of organic molecules at the bottom of our ocean. And there are likely those same hydrothermal structures at the bottom of the oceans of these icy moons, Europa, and Enceladus. Now, Titan is a very different case.

So Titan is this object, again, orbiting Saturn, but it has this very thick atmosphere that is full of methane. And when methane interacts with light from the sun, it can get cleaved and then react with its own parts to create these very large and complex organic molecules that essentially snow out onto the surface, but it's not snowing snowflakes of water. It's snowing snowflakes of organic molecules. And who knows what kinds of weird kinds of chemistry, maybe even weird kinds of life could be floating in those hydrocarbon lakes and seas of Titan. Right. And Michael, that actually brings me to my next question. What worlds are you most drawn to? And have we found planets outside

of our solar system like them or like moons inside of our solar system like them? Well, we've been talking about some of the worlds that I love the most, Europa, Enceladus, and Titan, you know, NASA's planning several missions to go back to the outer solar system and investigate these worlds for their habitability and potentially signs of life. So launching later this year, I believe in October of this year, will be the Europa Clipper mission. Yes. And another Star Trek connection just right here is if you watch Season 2 of Star Trek Picard, it took place in 2024 because they did some time travel shenanigans. And there was a Europa mission that launched that year.

But it actually really takes after and mirrors this robotic spacecraft that in real life NASA is sending to Europa in 2024 this year. It's like my childhood dreams are coming true. And, Mohammed, what kind of science do you actually want to see in sci-fi like Dune Part 2? Well, I always love seeing different forms of life than you would actually see on Earth. So in various franchises, we've seen, you know, life that is maybe not carbon-based. And it's truly different from life on Earth as opposed to some existing animal that we already have made big or small or a combination of two animals we have. So you mentioned Star Trek earlier.

One of the great thing in Star Trek was like the Tholians. They don't look like anything we have here. These radically different organisms that live in a different environment from what we ever see, they live at something like 400 degrees Celsius. They're almost crystalline in a way. And they do have little things that look like eyes, but we can't actually tell if that's what they use. They communicate by vibrating. They're just fascinating.

What about you, Michael? What kind of science would you like to see in Dune Part 2 and other sci-fi franchises? I think in Dune Part 2, I'm looking for a fuller explanation of all the different life forms and all of their interrelated symbiosis or. food webs that can sustain the kinds of creatures that we were introduced to in part one. Thank you, Muhammad and Michael, for geeking out with me. That was so fun. I loved it. Thank you so much. That was a great time. Thanks for having us. I always love chatting with Dr. Wong, and great to chat with you as well.

This episode was produced by Rachel Carlson. It was edited by Amina Khan and our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. Britt Hansen checked the facts, and Maggie Luthor was the audio engineer. I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.