In the Book Ender’s Game, later in the book we become more familiar with the enemy that Ender has to defeat. This enemy is known as the Formics, or more popularly known by their derogatory name The Buggers. These aliens have been in battle with the human race three times. The book takes place during the third war. At the end of the book Ender finds the hive queen who telepathically communicates with him, telling him that the Formics attacked the human race because they didn't detect a hive-mind state of thinking in the humans. This led the formics to believe that the humans were non-sentient and attacked them.

 This means that the Formics have a hive-mind. Hive mind is defined as:

Another example of hivemind in science fiction are the Borg from Star Trek. Famous for the quote, “You will be assimilated, resistance is futile.”  The Borg is a cyborg race who believe that everyone should be assimilated and become part of the hivemind. Because of the fact that they all act under the same conscious it is like one thought that has multiple bodies. The Borg can assimilate other races, which means the Borg isn’t one race, but a collective of assimilated other races with the changes to make them part of the hivemind. 

Yet another alien race that acts similar to the hivemind, but differs slightly are the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. The Cylons, short for Cybernetic Lifeform Node, are a robotic race that has multiple different beings. One kind of Cylon is the earlier model. This model looks like a robot, easy to identify. Another kind of Cylon, the later model, looks like a human. These types of Cylons are made through synthetic biology. Not only do they look like a human, but they are made from the same material, they have flesh and blood. The thing where the hivemind comes in is that Cylons of the same model are able to transfer data between their minds. It is stated that this is not a hive mind, but as a mode of communication.

A few other famously known examples of hiveminds in science fiction are the Bugs in Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein, The Heart of Atlantis from the movie Atlantis: The Lost Empire, The Anti-Spirals from Gurren Lagann, The Xenomorph from Alien, and The Cybermen and the Daleks from Doctor Who. 

The hivemind got its name from the insects that are Eusocial, which is the social system in insects that live under four basic characteristics. According to the Nature Education Knowledge Project these for characteristics are:

Bees are a prime example of this. Because they need to collect pollen to create honey there are certain things that need to be done. The pollen collecting bees bring back the pollen and give the nectar to the receiver bees who in turn take care of the food. They use this sort of hivemind thinking to know where to collect the pollen and nectar and to collaborate. This chart shows how the process is done within the group of bees. (1)

Much like in science fiction there are the workers who go out and do the work, and then there’s the one who directs the rest. The queen bee is much like the queen Formic from Ender’s Game. 

Let’s face it; people have always been intrigued by the idea of time travel. From back in the 1800s, with the publishing of HG Wells book: The Time Machine, to modern day science fiction books and movies, there have been countless stories about time travel.

This post will be focusing on two iconic time machines.

Since the early 1960s, Britain has been airing a television show loved by many a generation. Evil Villains, a Dashing hero, his lovely companions along for the ride, kooky plot lines; what’s not to love? One of the most iconic things of Doctor Who is the TARDIS. 

TARDIS, short for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space, is what the Doctor uses to travel through space, like a spaceship. It is also a time machine. It has seen the beginning of the earth all the way to the end of the earth. The TARDIS is able to travel in time by entering the Time Vortex and travelling back and forth through the vortex

Another famously known time machine is the DeLorean, from the 1980s Back to the Future Trilogy. The DeLorean time machine was created by Doc Brown so that he could travel through history. The DeLorean was powered by nuclear reactor on the back of the car that is fuelled by plutonium, this was used to produce 1.21Gigawatts that was needed to power the flux capacitor and time travel. To travel to the future or the past, the passenger of the machine must enter the date that they are trying to get to and then get the car to 88 miles per hour. When all of these were combined, the DeLorean was able to travel through time. In the three movies, it was only used to travel back to 1955, forward into the future once (To the year 2015) and back to 1985, then to 1885 and then returned to 1985 where it was destroyed on impact.  

Both series show the effects of traveling back in time and messing with history. Marty tried to change history, and as a consequence, almost erased himself from time. In Doctor Who, the Doctor makes sure that he doesn’t mess with fixed time. There are a few exceptions to this though, if there is an event in flux (this means that there isn’t a set occurrence, and things can be easily changed without creating paradoxes or problems), time can easily be rewritten.

The idea of travelling forward in time has been much more thought of than travelling back in time, and it is much more of a feasible idea. Einstein’s theory of relativity states that time appears to slow in the vicinity of a large gravitational force.

Another way people could time travel is to use worm-holes, or an Kerr Black Hole. Because Einstein and Rosen predicted that these bridges did not obey the laws of thermodynamics and physics they could be gateways to the future or the past. Kerr Black Holes are described as a black hole on one side, with a white hole on the other. The Black hole sucks up things, its white-hole counter-part somewhere else in the universe in another time or even in a parallel universe would spit out whatever the black hole had sucked up. It was later found that black holes have a singularity in the center of them where time effectively ceases to exist. (1)

Another way to travel that is much like a Kerr Black Hole is an Einstein-Rosen Bridge. An Einstein-Rosen Bridge, also known as a wormhole, can be described like folding the universe to connect two very distant points to travel instantaneously through. With this, people would be able to possibly travel into the past or the future depending on where, and more specifically when, they have connected to. (2)

There are many theories about travelling into the future, but travelling strictly into the past with knowing where and when you intend to travel is a much less scientifically studied process. Although one way to see into the past is to look up into the night sky. The stars that you see are images of what has happened millions of years ago and light years away. There is no way that scientists have come up with specifically travelling into the past itself.

When it comes to time travel, one thing you have to be careful of are paradoxes. One of the most famous time travel paradoxes is the Grandfather Paradox. If you are able to go into the past and you kill one of your ancestors before they have their offspring that leads to you, what happens to you? What happens in general? If you kill them, they aren’t able to have their children, to lead to your other ancestors, which in turn leads to you. You don’t exist, so you cannot go back into the past to kill them. (3)