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The Truth of FictionMartha Rodriguez and Lauren Wood Technology has always played an important part in the lives of human beings, from the first sharpened stick to the computers we use today. As time passes, human ingenuity helps improve simple types of technologies into more complex systems. In fact, many of the technologies we use began as fantasies. The ideas begin as products of the human imagination which may never become a reality, but nonetheless are ideas which often inspire future research and inventions that may even become part of our everyday lives. Japanese-style manga and anime are two of the mediums which some cultures have used to express the ideas and/or expectations that people have of future technology, and one of the most common topics discussed in these media is Cyborgology. In most science fiction anime there is at least one cyborg present, even if she or he is not the main character of the story. These characters either reflect current cyborg technology in our world, or a technology which has not yet been considered for research. One of these anime is Cyborg 009, released in 1968 (the manga version was released in 1964). There have been two remakes of this anime, bringing back the old concept and improving it. The story is based around nine humans who have been involuntarily transformed into cyborgs by Dr. Gilmore, who is working for an organization called “Black Ghost”. Each cyborg is given a name according to the order in which they were modified. They range from 001 up to 009, who was the last cyborg built and therefore the most advanced out of all nine,
possessing most of the abilities of his previous comrades. These cyborgs were built with one purpose in mind: warfare. The idea that “Black Ghost” is trying to start a world wide war in the anime is believed to have derived from WWII; WWII was believed to be the beginning of a high-tech era for warfare, and the themes that this anime explores support that belief. Although in reality warfare has been changed by technological advances, it has not gone as far as to manufacture living beings into this type of cyborg simply for war's sake. In Cyborg 009, the cyborgs have been taken and improved into super human beings with completely unrealistic abilities. Their names are given in the order they were engineered, and according to Wikipedia, each member has a specific power: 001 has psychic abilities; 002 can fly; 003 has super hearing; 004 has built-in cannons and guns; 005 has super strength; 006 can shoot flames out of his mouth; 007 has the ability to morph into other things; 008 is able to survive underwater; and 009 has super speed & some aspects of the previous cyborgs. The types of technological advances that militaries have produced until this day are not the kinds which give the soldiers super human abilities, such as super-human strength or built-in guns. All the guns that militaries across the world use are external, and in no way have they been implanted inside the human body. The weapons are already designed to work efficiently with the body, without having to directly become part of the body itself. This type of enhancement may not seem cyborgian, but indeed it is. The term "mundane cyborg" refers to the fact that using any type of technology makes one a cyborg, ranging from the computers one uses to the clothes on wears. The fact that we are constantly using objects and tools as extensions of ourselves make all of us mundane cyborgs. This is how the weaponry that soldiers carry and use makes them cyborgs, even though they are not directly being modified. Bulletproof vests, machine guns, night vision goggles, and even war tanks make today's soldiers into mundane cyborgs not entirely unlike the cyborgs of the anime. Unlike the cyborgs in Cyborg 009, though, today's cyborg soldiers can put down their weapons and become humans again, for the most part. Another type of cyborgian modification that this article will discuss relates to mundane cyborgs as well. One of the only types of body modifications that have been accepted by societies today have been prosthetic operations, which replace body parts that have been lost. The anime Full Metal Alchemist touches on this element; the show features two brothers who have lost their limbs due to an alchemical accident. The older brother, Edward, loses his arm and his leg during the accident, while the younger brother, Alphonse, loses his entire body. Through alchemy, Edward is able to place Alphonse's soul inside a metal knight's armor, enabling Al to survive. Edward's lost hand and leg are replaced with their world's most advanced prosthetic technology (Wikipedia), each of which is made out of metal and much stronger than his original limbs.
Placing a person's soul into another object -- inanimate or not -- is only possible in fiction. But prosthetic limbs are a reality which has existed longer than can be tracked. From the wooden pirate leg to the most advanced prosthetics used today, whoever has used one is a cybernetic organism. Prosthetics are placed on people who have unfortunately lost a limb or other body part due to accidents or other types of misfortunes. In anime, as well as in other science fiction stories, prosthetics often bring more to the wearer than a normal limb, like supreme strength or other types of super abilities. But in the real world, prosthetic limbs are created to give the wearer as much normality as possible. According to the article “Artificial Limbs in the High Tech Age”, prostheses in the military are not used to improve the soldiers, but instead used to return the soldiers to normal functionality. The German company Otto Bock HealthCare created a prosthetic called the C-Leg, which responds to the wearer very similarly to their real limb. Unfortunately, even with a prosthetic limb, the person will never return to complete normality. Current technology has not been able to create a prosthetic limb which equals in efficiency to a human limb, while in fantasy this technology surpasses the abilities of our own bodies. Prosthetic technology has a long way to go before it reaches the technology that exists in sci-fi, although the world seems to eagerly look for that day based on the anime that show us extraordinary protheses. Before we can wear an arm that will give us super human strength, though, we need to be able to wear one that will respond to our commands the same way that a real arm would. We have looked at two anime that present hopeful ideas about cyborg technologies. Although each one features cyborgian enhancements that are nowhere near realistic, they do also present societies with goals to reach in warfare and prosthetic advancements -- and it may also be true that science fiction's ever-present tendency to look towards the future has contributed to the imagining and design of technologies that continue to emerge. Science fiction's connection to technology as it develops today is not minimal -- while it may be unrealistic, the fiction develops what may eventually become fact. Links/Sources:
“Artificial Limbs in the HighTech Age.” ZDNET.co.uk. 4 Aug 2005, 15:30. CNET Networks, Inc. 19 Feb 2008.
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