Stargate SG-1: True Science Page #5

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Let's talk.

There are all kinds

of different ways to go with aliens,

and so we have a very talented group of

artists and designers who work on the show and we

basically, you know, go to them and say,

"Draw us some pictures, and come up

with something that looks cool,"

and then it becomes a question

of balancing costs and design.

But if you want a character

that's going to be funny

and interact with your regular

actors on an ongoing basis,

then it's always best to have an actor there.

It's the best way to get

a character to come out of your alien.

For some of the actors,

playing an alien was second nature.

I've always kind of been an oddball,

you know, kind of in every phase of my life,

so it just kind of fit me

that I was destined to play an alien.

I found that the best thing that

worked for Teal'c

is just to have a very very rough idea

of what was gonna go on during the episode.

I wasn't ever interested in what

they were talking about.

I would just have my own take on

everything that was going on,

and to do that, I really would not read scripts.

I would never read any lines - including my own! -

which some directors didn't really like!

But I found that my level of

unpreparedness served me well.

On "Stargate" we get inspiration for our aliens from

the natural world, and from our worst nightmares.

But some, like the Asgard, are really sweet and kind.

They save humanity all the time.

So just how far-fetched are they?

Asgards are too close to human

to be believable as aliens

who have simply come from

a distant planet

and have no connection with us.

If we actually found aliens like that,

then the scientific view would be

maybe we shared a common ancestor with them,

say two million years ago.

It would take about two million years to

evolve to something that different from us.

OK, but what might real aliens look like?

Professor Ian Stewart at the University of Warwick

was asked by the Science Museum

in London to answer just that.

If you're gonna do this scientifically, you can't just

say, "Ooh! Let's have seventeen foot creatures

with blue skins and big horns."

You have to start with the environment

in which they evolved.

For example, here on Earth we have

quite powerful gravity and very solid ground,

so many creatures have adapted by having some sort

of rigid skeleton to keep their bodies upright.

But on another planet,

life might have a very different shape.

Take Jupiter, for instance,

which has much more gravity than us,

and is a huge ball of gas with no solid ground.

As there's nothing to stand on, creatures there

probably wouldn't have skeletons at all.

In fact, they'd be more likely to fly or float,

and their whole shape and

behaviour would follow from that.

So we think you'd get something more like a sort of

balloon creature which floats in the atmosphere,

and we came up with several types of balloon creature

and called them "frisbees" and

"flashers" and "darts" and "delphins".

The frisbees are herds of enormous circular,

slowly rotating creatures, like a giant pancake,

probably the size of a football field, really big,

'cause there's a lot of room on a gas giant planet.

And then we realised on the frisbees

you could get parasites,

so we came up with little dog-like creatures

but they have a blue light on top

and they use the blue light to signal

to potential mates when it's mating season,

and they leap from one frisbee

to another to secure mates.

The delphins were a very interesting

creature that we came up with.

We realised that skeletons would not really

be made of bone like they are here.

It'd be very surprising if on a gas giant you got bone,

so we decided that what you might get

is kind of a series of hollow tubes

which are activated by hydraulic pressure,

like the brakes on your car.

And then we were looking for fast predators,

and the darts live

in the lower atmosphere and they've got

four fins at right angles like

the tail end of a dart, and a very sharp front end,

and they hunt in packs and come up to

the upper atmosphere

and they hunt frisbees.

With trillions of vastly different planets

and worlds out there in the universe,

who knows what bizarre shapes

aliens may turn out to be?

Probably much weirder than

the Goa'uld or the Asgard.

However, for many scientists, what is not in doubt

is whether aliens actually exist.

The universe is so big, there are so many stars

and, we now know, so many planets

that I would be absolutely astonished

if there are no intelligent aliens out there.

If we're the only one, it's crazy.

That life may exist on other planets

at all is fairly mind-boggling,

but that we might be able to hazard

a guess about its shape and behaviour

pushes the boundaries of what we assume is science

but not as much as our last,

most controversial thought:

how far-fetched is it to think that

we could pass through time, as well as space?

Passing backwards and forwards through time is

something we've dreamed about for generations.

The chance to see our future and revisit our past has

been one of the most exciting ideas in all of fiction.

Guess what?

It might be possible, thanks once again

to Einstein's theory of relativity.

You see, Einstein realised that time doesn't

tick along at the same rate for everyone.

He worked out that the faster you move,

the more slowly time passes for you.

So imagine if I had an identical twin

and I left her here on Earth and got into a sports car

and drove into space at, say,

ninety nine percent of the speed of light.

As well as feeling slightly car sick,

what Einstein said is that,

as I get faster, time moves slower,

at least for me compared to my sister.

So that when I returned from my journey,

I would have aged normally

but my twin would have aged a lot.

In effect, I would have travelled into the future.

And amazingly, this has actually been tested.

One of the first tests was done

when we developed atomic clocks which were

sensitive enough to be able to tell time differences

of a millionth of a second or so,

and in that case two atomic clocks were carefully

synchronised; one was put on a plane

that basically went around the world

and came back and the two were compared, and indeed

they differed by an order of a millionth of a second,

exactly as Einstein's theory predicted.

But the real jewel in the time travel crown

would be to travel back in time.

That's what fascinates people because

we'd all like to go back in time

and correct the errors of our youth,

or relive them, depending upon our mood.

And surprise, surprise - the science of this

turns out not to be too far-fetched.

Physicists have come up with

quite a lot of different potential time machines

which, according to the laws of physics,

would in some sense let you travel back in time.

So spinning the entire universe...

rolling the universe up into a cylinder...

is a magnetic black hole which makes a lovely time

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