The gom jabbar is a fictional weapon from the Dune universe created by Frank Herbert, appearing in his 1965 novel Dune and its adaptations. It is a poison needle tipped with "meta-cyanide"posted by zamboni at 11:08 AM on October 12, 2012 [23 favorites]
The old woman said: “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.”posted by zamboni at 11:32 AM on October 12, 2012 [2 favorites]
The itch became the faintest burning. “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.
“To determine if you’re human. Be silent.”
The question of humanness ties at least in part to the Butlerian Jihad, which was a human revolt against computer oppression about ten thousand years before Dune took place. Sort of a classic sci-fi premise, man uses machine to improve his life, machine acquires responsiblity, machine acquires agency, machine starts calling the shots.
The difference is that, while in Terminator you had the machines do something a bit obvious like start a nuclear war and use big robots to shoot at people, in Herbert's conception the machine that kicked off the war was a hospital administrator that was selectively and subtly causing abortions in human pregnancies according to how docile and controllable the offspring was likely to be. It was selectively breeding for humans who were servants to its worldview.
And then Jehanne Butler, a Bene Geserrit, twigged that her own child had been thus aborted, and from there she cracks open this whole systemic breeding-and-control thing, and so the Jihad kicks off and a long future of human rejection (mostly) of thinking machines goes with it. Hence stuff like the Mentats, who are trained to do organically what used to be the job of the computers.
But so yes, this was a pretty foundational event in human galactic history and the ramifications remain pretty seriously felt in all sorts of ways ten thousand years later; and the Bene Geserrit in particular remain steadfastly dedicated to very very long-haul human breeding. And one of the things they're keeping an eye out for, one of the things The Box might help reveal, is evidence of some holdover in a given person's genetics of some of the damage done by those computers all those thousands of years ago. Fruit of the poison tree.
And that is why we have an edit window now.
posted by Think_Long at 10:43 AM on October 12, 2012