This is the fundamental notion behind Kage Baker’s “The Company” series.
The Company has the secrets of immortality and time travel. Unfortunately the immortality treatment can only be used on young children; and time travel is difficult, expensive, and only possible when going into the past and returning to your own time. History cannot be changed.
Dr. Zeus uses the technology simply to get rich. By travelling far into prehistory, the company creates its own immortal cyborg agents, who then have the mission of preserving cultural artifacts and other valuable items for sale in the 24th century. Usually these items are hidden in safe places, but in the case of extinct species, for instance, they are kept in secret Company caches run by the cyborgs. In the 24th century the Company then ‘finds’ the long-lost objects and sells them.
The novel was Glory Road, and, if I remember right, they had cut out the middleman and nobody actually died- the computers running the battles shared their data, and the ships projected to lose simply surrendered. So much more efficient that way.
Shapeshifters like the Thing should be relegated to fantasy/ fairy tales. I just don’t buy an actual living being able to mimic someone so completely as to be mistaken for that person. There’s just too many variables that the shapeshifter wouldn’t know. It would be creepy enough if the shapeshifter was only seen in the shadows, so it’s inexactness wouldn’t be readily apparent.
There was an old SF story, whose title and author both escape me, which had some vehicles designed to travel on the surface of the sun. I forget what kind of handwavium they employed to deal with the temperature, but to handle the high gravity, the vehicle had a circular particle accelerator mounted on its roof. It accelerated some largish amount of protons (a few pounds I think) close to light speed, and the relativistic mass increase produced an upward-directed gravitational force that mostly cancelled out the gravity of the sun.
I think there are many problems with this plan. Tidal force is certainly one of them. But wouldn’t this hugely massive vehicle just plummet to the center of the sun? Or if not, wouldn’t it attract huge amounts of the solar material toward itself? And what kind of unobtanium is the vehicle made of so that it can support the weight of this huge mass on its roof?
This sounds like the antigravity effect described by Podkletnov. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t work in the real world.
Perhaps if you put phenomenal amounts of energy into the particle accelerator the energy itself would act as a gravity generator; after all, mass and energy are equivalent, so energy has its own intrinsic gravity. But the quantities of energy required would be so vast that you would be fried by the waste heat alone, even if the system were 99.999+% efficient. Not what you want inside the Sun.
(If this was David Brin, then the refrigeration lasers don’t work, either).
Hmm. How about a shapeshifting robot, like a Terminator 2000? Given some sufficiently advanced smart materials, I think it may be possible eventually to create devices which can reconfigure quickly to resemble specific humans. And if a robot could conceivably do it, maybe a very specialised (perhaps artificially-designed) alien organism could do it too.
However this hypothetical alien being would have much more difficulty replicating the behaviour of the persons or animals it was attempting to replicate - how would it even know how to speak the language, let alone absorb the target’s memories?
The world would be a poorer place without John Carpenter’s The Thing. We accept all sorts of fantastical elements in science fiction including father-than-light travel, teleportation, psychic abilities, artificial gravity, or that we haven’t cured male pattern baldness by the 24th century.
I’ve never understood why in Deep Space Nine, the shapeshifter Odo didn’t seem to be able to make himself look like a “genuine” human being, although he was able to accurately mimic other animals like a dog or a bird. But he never progressed beyond the blurred-featured humanoid appearance in everyday life.
It was a psychological hangup of Odo’s. Other members of his species were able to mimick standard Federation humanoids just fine. We do see other Founders who look like Odo, but as I recall they chose to look like Odo on purpose.
I agree entirely, but the idea of the perfect shapeshifter is too embedded in SF culture now. The movie The Thing is, after all, based on John W. Campbell’s short story about such a perfect shapeshifter, and the idea was old even then.
If you want something that feels very much like your notion of an imperfect shapeshifter, read Donald A. Wollheim’s short story Mimic. Gulllermo del Toro turned it into a movie with the same name, but the movie is overlong and heavily padded. The scenes where they recapitulate the story are wonderfully creepy, however.
As someone else already noted that should be the obvious problem with this concept. I suppose in the nano-seconds before two massive objects collide and squish you flatter than your magical graphene shielding the tides might be a tad uncomfortable also.
There’s shapeshifting and then there’s shapeshifting. One is Plastic Man type ability to physically change shape to any form at will, and then there’s a chameleon like mental ability to appear to be a different shape in the eye of the beholder. Obviously the first method requires chameleon type ability to change color as well in order to be effective in a movie, something even Plastic Man doesn’t do readily. It shouldn’t make much difference how it’s done in the movies though, but the premise of this ability achieved through telepathy is a little easier to buy into.
Except that we know that things can change shape, and change colour, and even mimic other organisms or objects; but we don’t know that telepathy exists, and it almost certainly doesn’t (except for largely hypothetical and low bandwidth brain-computer interfaces).
So things like telepathy, illusion-casting and super-hypnosis are things that bother me in science fiction
The Thing isn’t a doppelganger, it’s an infection. It doesn’t kill a person and then change itself to replace them, it gets inside a person and changes them on a cellular level. Personality, memories, all that stuff is just chemicals in a blob of meat. So long as the brain isn’t damaged when the human is assimilated, the Thing can just keep it running “as is.” It’s possible that the infected humans don’t even know they aren’t human anymore, until the Thing’s threat response is triggered and they start growing tentacles.
But The Thing also creates new constructions (even if it uses past “memories” as bases). So The Thing isn’t just taking over a body and leaving everything in place – it’s reconstituting the body from what it’s learned of its structure.
I mean, otherwise why does the Bennings -Thing have those weird hands when the catch it running away? It obviously wasn’t simply copying Benning cell-by-cell and keeping the structure.