• Question: Why cant we shapeshift?

    Asked by Dylon to Ed, Kerrianne, Nina, Oli, yoyehudi on 4 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Oli Wilson

      Oli Wilson answered on 4 Nov 2017:

      It’s probably easiest to think about the answer to this by looking at a real-life shapeshifter. There aren’t many better examples than cuttlefish – here’s a a cuttlefish pretending to be a crab, for example, and it’s *amazing* at disguising itself! https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/06/cuttlefish-mimics-hermit-crabs-catch-fish/

      To shapeshift like that, you need to have a great brain to understand what you look like normally, what you want to look like, and how to change yourself to match. We’ve got brains that can do that – our brains are pretty awesome. What we don’t have is bodies that can make it happen alone.

      Cuttlefish can change colour in less than a second, and can show at least 12 different patterns. Their skin has three different layers that all mess about with colour in different ways, and they’ve also got special muscles dedicated to changing their texture – they can make themselves bumpy, spiky or smooth. We don’t have any of these things!

      That’s why, if we want to be as camouflaged as a cuttlefish, we have to use things like clothes and paint – as well as our brains – to make it work. And, when we do that, we’re actually pretty good at it 🙂 https://youtu.be/V5r_WSQaMIM?t=31s

    • Photo: Ed Bracey

      Ed Bracey answered on 15 Nov 2017:

      We’re made up of cells and our bodies are very particular about keeping those cells in the right place.
      If they get into the wrong place and start dividing, we can develop cancers.
      To be fully able to shapeshift, we’d have to be able to control where each cell in our body was.
      This would mean having a brain that could control the position of each cell.
      That could mean having nerve cells that could connect to each cell and tell them to move to different places.
      That would mean the nerve cells would have to move with the other cells to keep control of them.
      Who knows, perhaps we might be able to develop tiny wifi receivers in each cell that we could use to control where they go remotely, all controlled by the brain at the centre of the blob of wifi cells!

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