Richard's Animorphs Forum
Animorphs Section => Animorphs Forum Classic => Topic started by: zaprowsdower on December 24, 2009, 06:08:02 PM
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It was assumed that all of the Animorphs were more or less fit for their age, gender, and lifestyle. Sadly, 10 years later a lot if not most of American teens are now overweight. So if one of the animorphs were fat and gained the power to morph, would they still be fat when they morphed back? Or would they lose all of the weight? How would they be able to explain that to thier parents if that was the case?
Post whatever ideas you might want to spitball. :)
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i'm guessing they'd get the same amount of matter back from zspace as they put out.
so.. they'd probably stay about the same weight.
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But ain't it all in the DNA?
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shouldn't your body's shape and size be written in your DNA though?
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Your ideal size and shape for your genes, but as we all know our actions and lifestyle affect that.
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oh. you learn something new every day...
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Interesting question, and its one that's troubled me as well. There are whole slews of details that morphing shouldn't be able to decide. Hair length is the most obvious, but as you've pointed out, weight is also determined by factors other than DNA. Height is another one, actually. If you're malnourished, you won't be as tall as someone who eats better, even if DNA is the same. I knew a set of identical twins who differed in height by several inches. And fingerprints also differ between identical twins, so even that is affected by environment.
My personal opinion is that the morphing technology itself has some ability to store information and make simple decisions like that. Andalites are good with computers, aren't they? So there's no reason why they couldn't design something like that.
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I always assumed that you returned to the same exact mass you were before you morphed, which would account for your weight remaining the same and the length of of your hair and nails not changing. However, it doesn't account for the healing effects of the morphing technology. Losing a limb, or even some of your blood would result is lowered body mass, which the morphing process fixes.
Dino's idea is an interesting one, but the truth is we don't know exactly how the technology works. KA would have needed an advanced degree in physics and biology to even begin to speculate on how the fine details of morphing could theoretically work.
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Morphing has to capture data beyond DNA. I see Elfangor's "acquire DNA" speech as something of a lie to children (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie-to-children), since morphing so obviously captures things that aren't recorded in DNA--like the age of an organism. Besides, there are good biological reasons to believe that DNA isn't the only biochemistry that's capable of storing genetic data. Even if you stay within the complementary-strand polymer/base framework of nucleic acids, there are both DNA and RNA that occur in terrestrial organisms plus things called TNA, GNA, and LNA that have been produced in laboratories. There's no reason to think that extraterrestrial life has to be strictly DNA-based.
We can't trust Ax to give a more correct answer, because he's more "stranded slacker student" than "Mr. Spock."
By the way, fat morphing kids would be even grosser than usual. Thanks for ruining my appetite.
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If the Animorphs taught us anything, it's that life-and morphing-ain't pretty. ;)
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Hence, my being slightly sickened by this thread... :-\
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This might be unrelated, but what happens to scars or acne? Like if you have a scar since you were a baby or whatever, does it just disappear with morphing? Or with acne, does it just disappear? :P
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Actually, if there was a fat kid in the group, I bet you anything s/he wouldn't be fat by the end of the war. The amount of energy it would take to be able to initiate a morph seems like a lot. After all, the Animorphs were extremely tired after continually morphing in some of the books.
The morphing isn't the only thing with burning calories ... all the calories while in morphs, or in general. In stressful conditions, the body doesn't want to eat as much.
I'm pretty sure any fat kid would now be skinny after all that.
In regards to morphing out of a morph, they would still be as fast as when they went in. The body didn't burn any excess material while in z-space. Nor any alters in DNA.
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To be fair, not everybody's reaction to stress is fasting. For many people, it's exactly the opposite- when their (inevitably bad) boyfriend dumps them (in some romantic comedy), they'll sit around watching older romantic movies (than the one they're undoubtedly in) and eating pint after pint of Ben & Jerry's (I wonder if they pay for that, or if it's free publicity). I'm not sure morphing would physically burn calories, either- it takes a great deal of mental concentration, but I get the feeling it returns you to the basic state you were in before morphing. You're mentally exhausted, but your body gets no benefit from it (except that your broken legs or wings or whatever are usually healed).
Dino's right, though- there has to be some kind of built in decision mechanism in the morphing technology itself that goes far beyond just DNA. Rachel morphing crocodile provides the perfect example. Crocodiles, like most amphibians, continue to grow over the course of their lifetime- when Rachel morphed the biggest croc in the habitat, she was also morphing the oldest. She wound up as the same croc, though- same size and everything. Morphing also apparently replicates coat patterns and that sort of thing on animals- it somehow manages to replicate the entire animal, but ignores injuries.
Maybe it recreates the animal (or original person) based on... super-Andalite-dark-magic (or, you know, science or whatever)... and then corrects anything that doesn't fit with the DNA? Hey, I kind of like that theory...
In any case, it almost seems like a given that a fat Animorph would remain fat after the morph- let's face it, morphing didn't continually alter the weight/muscle mass of the real Animorphs, so why should it for anyone else? It should, in theory, heal scars and acne.
Whatever complicated principles are at work behind the morphing technology, it certainly seemed to fit the story quite well, didn't it? :P
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I do believe morphing heals scars, at least they healed Loren's scars...
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You know what? We here at RAF should get together and write some kind of Animorphs encyclopedia, with all sorts of backstory events and explanation for how we think things like morphing work. Like scientific proposals for unexplained aspects.
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I'd say that's a great idea except I think we have way too many projects already...
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lol yeah :P
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Well, I'm guessing the Andalites know a lot more about genetics than we do. Perhaps there's some property of DNA or deeper thing that explains all this that we just don't know yet or guess at.
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How about this:
Morphing's initiated by an effort of will, right? There's clearly something important about the morpher's thinking. And morphers can only morph things that they've personally acquired - so there isn't some huge shared databank of things to be morphed into, and it's plausible that the information about the thing to be morphed into is just stored in the mind of the morpher.
Let's take weathel's suggestion that there's clearly more being stored than just DNA information. Maybe what's going on when acquiring something is just that absolutely every important physical characteristic of the thing is stored somewhere in the memory of the morpher. The act of touching the escafil device was something like a self-acquiring, and they carry with them an image of their "normal" bodies (normal in every sense, so including uninjured, right haircut, etc) that they return to when demorphing. It'd be interesting to see what happened if one radically changed their hairstyle - would they demorph into their old haircut until they got used to their new look?
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didn't rachel try the haircut thing out in book 2? I don't remember whether she succeeded or not...
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Marco cut his hair in book 10- he had long hair before that, and short after. Also, nobody ever commented on the Animorphs' lack of aging over the course of the war. Morphing technology =\= immortality.
I like Gotchaye's idea of morphs being stored in the memory, though. It might be designed in such a way that as the morph (or original body) changes, so does the memory image- the morphing relies on the brain's image of what the body should be to create the morph. That could definitely result in occasional memories, too- though it would be inefficient to get them all the time. Heck, that could explain why the only morphs that seemed to have memories were very early ones- later ones are more and more compressed to save brain space. In fact, it wouldn't just have to be saved in the brain- subtle changes could be made to every cell in the body in order to store information.
Depending on the storage method, the number of morphs one could acquire would be almost infinite. Given the Andalites' proficiency with computers, I'd say it's reasonable to assume some sort of quantum storage method. Maybe the morph "file" is stored in the very atoms of the brain. When activated, it is pulled into the subconscious of the brain and created based on the brain's judgment of what the morph should be (which could presumably exclude scars and injuries, and also age as the person/morph ages)
Maybe morphing doesn't involve DNA at all. Maybe Elfangor just said that so the kids would get the picture (and to screw with RAFians in the future). That crazy Andalite... tricky until the end...
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I do believe morphing heals scars, at least they healed Loren's scars...
I am still reading the series so can I ask who Lauren is? :-[
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I do believe morphing heals scars, at least they healed Loren's scars...
I am still reading the series so can I ask who Lauren is? :-[
well... it happens in book 49, so unless you want to skip straight to it, I don't feel I should spoil any more than I might already have...
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Here's my theory on how morphing works:
It is said in book 10 that when you morph something small, the extra mass is extruded into Z-space, then retrieved when you demorph. Ax mentions that there is a very small chance that a ship traveling in Z-space could run over the extruded mass. In book 18, an andalite ship really does pass close by the Animorphs' stored mass, resulting in their consciousness getting "shunted" to it. They find themselves in what sure looks like their original bodies.
My theory is that the extruded mass thing happens every time you morph, not just when you morph something small. Your body is sent to Z-space, and an entirely new body of whatever you morphed is constructed to replace it (don't ask me where the mass for the morph comes from; maybe the Andalites shoved a bunch of stuff into Z-space for morphers to draw on). Your body is put into some sort of state that allows it to survive Z-space conditions, but your brain remains partially active. It is linked to the brain of the morph, controlling it and receiving sensory data. When you demorph, it brings your body out of Z-space and sends the morph back. During this process, it detects and repairs any injuries because, well, why not?
This explains why the Animorphs remain sentient even when they morph animals with brains that couldn't possibly support human intelligence. What happened in book 18 was that the ship passing by disrupted their neural link, causing their original bodies to "wake up."
So, to answer the original question, when you demorph, it doesn't rebuild your body from scratch. It just pulls your old one out of storage while taking the opportunity to repair it. So things like weight, level of physical fitness, haircuts, etc. should be unaffected. By the way, we know for certain that haircuts aren't affected. In book 2, Rachel tries to fix a bad haircut as she demorphs, but that doesn't work because "morphing doesn't work that way."
That said, the acquiring process does appear to record more than just DNA. In book 30, Marco acquires some middle-aged guy and when he morphs him, ends up just as fat and out of shape as the original person was.
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so how does it determine what needs to be repaired and what's just a haircut or cut fingernails, or missing teeth, or even surgery?
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Well, hair and fingernails are dead (the parts you cut are, anyway). They really can't be injured. As for the rest, *shrug*. Obviously, this is more complicated than either leaving you the way you were before the morph or reconstructing the entire body based on your DNA. There would have to be some kind of decision making involved. But any morphing theory would have to take into account how it records some non-genetic information (like height, weight, and coat patterns) but ignores others (like broken wings).
You know, I'm starting to get annoyed at regeneration/healing powers in general. They bring up so many issues...
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What about braces? They're tight, so you'd probably be able to morph and retain them, but what about when you get them off? Are your teeth pushed back to their original pattern?
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What about braces? They're tight, so you'd probably be able to morph and retain them, but what about when you get them off? Are your teeth pushed back to their original pattern?
Isnt the shape of your teeth decided by environmental factors too, such as how much sugar you consumed as a child and if you sucked your thumb or not. With that in mind though, your fillings would probably pop out as the holes in your teeth were being healed.
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What about braces? They're tight, so you'd probably be able to morph and retain them, but what about when you get them off? Are your teeth pushed back to their original pattern?
Isnt the shape of your teeth decided by environmental factors too, such as how much sugar you consumed as a child and if you sucked your thumb or not. With that in mind though, your fillings would probably pop out as the holes in your teeth were being healed.
That would be so awesome! No more dentists! I have a cavity? Oh well, time to morph. ;D
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I'm not what you'd call obese, but I weigh 135 pounds in a 5"3 body. I'm a little pudgy. X3 So no stereotyping fat people or getting disgusted by them morphing. ; ) They're just...people like anyone else. Sometimes people with different reactions to stress or people with lousy metabolisms. XD
Fat people morphing would probably enter the morphs in exactly the same way as the others, and morph back just as they were. Though there might be an added .000003% chance that they'll bump into something in Z-Space. But other than that I can't see why it'd be too much difference. Though your points about why morphing works the way it does in general are quite valid.
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Yeah, I saw this topic and knew I had to register here ;D
First post: AWAAAYYY!!!
At first I was gonna say that morphing is all DNA based and that they would most likely retain their mass when they morphed back, but on reading the replies, I have two theories:
1) Morphing is a WEIRD (and alien) science. Like y'all were saying, acquiring DNA records the age and appearance of the morph and heals any injuries, disabilities and scars that aren't genetic. That being said, morphing seems to take a snapshot of the animal or person you've acquired (hair length, muscle, possibly even weight) and provides the morpher with a genetically healed copy. Free of scars or injury, unless they're from birth or hereditary.
2) It's been noted that when morphing a creature smaller than your original mass, your excess mass is stored in Z-Space, being recalled to the host upon de-morphing. That would mean whatever your mass was when you morphed would be the mass you retrieved from Z-Space after 2 hours.
My big thing is that morphing would save you a LOT of dentistry, haha! Morph those cavities away!
My own question is: Do you morph away piercings and tattoo's?