In this special episode of Writing While Disabled's second season, hosts Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston speculate about the impact of a space army made up of various species of dinosaurs, and make connections to disability and accommodations as they relate to the real life of disabled people.

If you prefer, you can watch the full episode with close-caption subtitles here.

Show notes:

• This episode was produced and hosted by Kristy Anne Cox and Kate Johnston, and edited, mixed, and transcribed by Kat Kourbeti.
• The theme song, "Funky - Upbeat Loop" by ispeakwaves, is licensed under CC BY 4.0.
• Want to send us a question? You can do so here!

Transcript​

Kristy Anne Cox: All right. Welcome to Writing While Disabled. I am Kristy Anne Cox.

Kate Johnston: And I'm Kate Johnston.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes. Here we are at the Accessible Con Bar. We are gonna do a fun episode this time. And what is our topic, Kate?

Kate Johnston: Our topic is... dinosaur armies.

Kristy Anne Cox: Velociraptor dinosaur armies, and/or dinosaur related creatures that may not technically be dinosaurs, but might possibly be used in science fiction, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers, listeners, viewers, you are at a convention and you are going to the Con Bar to hang out after that amazing panel, but this is the Accessible Con Bar! You can hear everything. You can see everything. Eye contact is or is not a thing, depending on your preferences. This is the conversation you want to be included at, at those cons, but you can't.

Well, now you can. Here on Writing While Disabled Accessible Con Bar, Special Episode: Velociraptor Space Army. Shall we get into it?

Kate Johnston: We should. Welcome pilots, poets, and platypuses. Let's go.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes, welcome plumbers and poets. Wait, no, you already said poets. Gosh darn it. What's a good contrast of plumbers?

Kate Johnston: No one ever uses poets. We can use poets twice.

Kristy Anne Cox: You know what? Welcomes are difficult for people, and for aliens.

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, Kate, you had a question to start us off, you said, "how does designing aliens help us think about accommodations?"

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: I think that's a really interesting question. Tell me what you're thinking along these lines.

Kate Johnston: I think about it in this framework: there are a certain number of things that a living being has to do every single day, pretty much, in order to continue the species. So ingestion, what are we putting in; evacuation, what's coming out and where's it go; and then we have sleeping and we have mating. I know for humans, you don't actually have to mate, but I think most people sometimes want to and then sometimes really don't, depending on who they're standing next to, often.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and in this context we might be doing animal husbandry in space, right? Like—

Kate Johnston: Or even animal wifery.

Kristy Anne Cox: Right? Artificial insemination in a zero G environment. There are a lot of things we could discuss, depending on if we're talking about dinosaurs as astronauts, or dinosaurs as animal companions.

In science fiction, I have seen dinosaurs or dinosaur shaped creatures used as animals. Right, a hoard of wolves, you release them on a planet, they eat everyone. You release them onto a spaceship, they eat everyone. I've seen a couple of things where they're mounts, usually planet side, and I haven't seen a ton of things where they're astronauts. So you were saying, why does it always have to be, we are higher than them, they're animals, we're humans. We are astronauts, they're mounts. Does that sound familiar?

Kate Johnston: Yep. It does. It does. And there's a few things I wanna say about that. One is that in the most recent episode of Love, Death and Robots, my friend Stant Litore has an episode where there are tyrannosaurs on a space station. They are used as mounts. It's a really good story, and it's the way that we usually think of them as mindless killing machines and yet the whole thing.

I think one of the reasons I'm writing the book that I'm writing is that if we think about parrots, which have little tiny brains, as being about the same intelligence level as of a four or 5-year-old— they can do math, they remember numbers, color, shapes, associative groups, they can do all sorts of inductive and deductive reasoning if you pose the questions to them correctly... Now, scale that up to a ton. How dumb do you think they really have to be? Because I don't think they do.

They are limited by not having handy hands, and that is something that we can, if we choose, augment with technology. So we can decide how these beings get to interact with their world, but I think the "they are just mindless killing machines 24/7" doesn't even explain how they would've evolved on this planet, because things that are mindless killing machines 24/7 don't. I mean, we don't have those things.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: There are things that kill stuff for fun, and kill lots of things, sure. Your basic house cat does that.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, we have army ants. But they don't do it 24/7, right? They go on the march. Yeah.

Kate Johnston: If they have a reason to be traveling and that's why they're Sherman-ing their way through the jungle. You know, tyrannosaurs — if you think about a tyrannosaur as like kind of a big lizard, right? So, you look at a monitor lizard, a big one, something that's six feet long... Those things eat like once every two or three weeks, and the rest of the time they're doing stuff. Reptile stuff.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and if we had more bird direction, then they've gotta eat constantly. So it really depends on what animal analog we're using.

Kate Johnston: I think if you're a bird, for the amount of heartbeats that you spend eating versus the amount you spend doing other things, you don't— you spend a bunch of time on your nest and gestating young and, you know, having ant baths and stuff like that. Like they don't just eat and just lay eggs and poop. They have whole other things going on.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. But they do eat a lot more than your average Komodo dragon in terms of meals.

Kate Johnston: Sure.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna go back to your question though, about how smart does the T-Rex need to be.

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: 'Cause I'm thinking about this like, big dumb animal paradigm versus the intelligent being who is our co-explorer of the universe as an astronaut, and then I guess the other end would be someone way above and beyond us so we can't possibly understand, akin to magic, whatever. Like a dinosaur, it depends on if we've uplifted them or not, right? Like, did we just bring them from their environments? Because then it's gonna be what environmental slot are they filling?

Like sheep don't need to evolve to be smarter, because it doesn't benefit them. It serves no survival advantage. T-Rexes, it really depends on their hunting strategy, and I'm not sure we're a hundred percent sure yet on hunting strategy, right? For T-Rexes? I mean, pack hunting animals tend to be pretty intelligent, pro-social behavior.

Kate Johnston: No, we don't have that information from the scientific community yet, which leaves a, you know, lovely and large space for fiction to inhabit.

Kristy Anne Cox: We don't think they're scavengers anymore. We used to think that T-Rexes were just straight scavengers, right? We're not there still.

Kate Johnston: No. I mean, they could run, they could swim. I think that there are some things that we don't think about in terms of dinosaur anatomy that we have yet to incorporate into the way that we think about them, because we are thinking about Barney and Jurassic Park, and those are not necessarily great representations of what we know about dinosaurs.

Like one of the things that I just saw go by me in Facebook the other day was, if you have a bird that has injured its foot or is injured in a way that you don't understand, you need to build up a little like donut of cardboard to sit the bird in because of the way it breathes. Birds and dinosaurs both had air sacks in their bones and in other parts of their body, and those are feeding air to their lungs. And if you leave them on their side long enough— and this also goes for dolphins— you leave them on their side long enough in a one G field, they're going to suffocate, because their air sacks on that side of their body can't inflate/deflate. So, we don't think of T-Rex in that sort of mode, and we should.

Kristy Anne Cox: So if you're a veterinarian, it's advantageous to be treating your dinosaur clients in a zero G environment, right? But if you're on the ground, you're worried about them suffocating if they lay down for too long, is what you're saying for a larger dinosaur or for any like Dromaeosaurid?

Kate Johnston: Possibly. We don't know. We'd have to find out when we grow them, whether they can do that. But it also means that we don't know, when you start looking at forced air pressure breathing units, what kind of—

Kristy Anne Cox: How would that pressure—

Kate Johnston: —does a dinosaur need? Ah-ha! Yeah. Do they actually need to have a space suit to keep all their stuff from just sort of exploding, the way ours does? Or is there internal skin, like where their skin is and how it's put together, is that strong enough to keep them from suffering a bunch of the things that happen to us in a zero G environment?

You could do this with bears too; bears have this really thick armor-like layer, of keratin under their skin, so it's really hard to like, slash a bear. That's why people shoot them and they don't attack them with knives, because it doesn't work very well.

So there's all of these things that we don't think about in terms of how do they live in just a regular thing? I mean, probably T-Rexes did not eat every single minute of the day because you just don't have that kind of prey available to you either. But if they eat once a week, then they're spending six whole days and probably 20 plus hours after that, doing other stuff. We dunno what that stuff is.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm kind of thinking them in terms of lifestyle, and this is just in my head here, they're living like a tiger, or maybe they're living like wolves, or maybe they're doing something else. But I like those two analogies, 'cause a tiger has time to lay around. Lions have time to lay around and rest, it's part of their strategy. Wolves tend to keep it busy, they've got a more packed agenda. Oh, this is interesting. So we're talking behavioral, right? We're talking biological in space, 'cause like a lot of the issues we've run into with human astronauts were because body parts reacted in ways we did not expect when living in zero G environments for long periods of time.

Kate Johnston: Right.

Kristy Anne Cox: So body parts that dinosaurs have that we don't: so their bones are different, right? Eyeballs are different. Some of the marine reptiles have that bone disc, right? An ichthyosaurus fossil has the—

Kate Johnston: Oh, a sclerotic ring. Yeah, land animals have those too.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm wondering if it would be advantageous or disadvantageous to do veterinary medicine in a zero G environment. I think the air sack leads me to say advantageous.

Kate Johnston: No. Unfortunately, I found out an awful lot recently about how the body reacts to a zero G environment and the answer in just about every way is poorly. One of the things that The Expanse did really well was that in a zero G environment, blood travels differently. So you have the problem with it stacking up over the wound and not actually clotting.

Kristy Anne Cox: Which is why they needed to get a ship with gravity to treat all the wounded.

Kate Johnston: Right. And so that's a thing. We don't know how that's gonna go.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, we haven't had a traumatic injury in space yet, thankfully.

Kate Johnston: Knock on wood. Well, not that anyone survived, no.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: All the way out there in space, at the ISS. Right, we haven't had a chance to do surgery there yet.

Kate Johnston: No. No, and I don't know that we're going to anytime soon, 'cause we don't tend to send up surgeons.

Kristy Anne Cox: Usually there's medically trained people though, like for that type of situation. In a crew, there's somebody who would be like—

Kate Johnston: No, there's not actually. This is why you have to have your appendix removed and your wisdom teeth removed, because they don't wanna have those types of things happen in space.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or like in combat. I'm thinking more combat medic type skills. I wasn't thinking like,

Kate Johnston: Sure. It's sort of a "patch you up and get you to the nearest thing". So these are things we don't know, and like we were saying earlier on, we have other issues like, we don't know what they needed to eat. You asked, did they need to have live prey? Like snakes, you may not need it to be alive, but you may need that corpse to be moved around so you think it's alive and that's why they strike, and that's why you don't use your hand to do that, you use a forceps.

So they may need to have the prey shooting gallery, when they make a hit, it delivers you a, a frozen embryo or something. So yeah, there's a whole thing about that. How long are they in torper after they eat? So if we all have like a dining room situation, a mess hall, and everyone eats and then they go down for their two hour nap afterward, what happens if you get attacked during dinner? You have to think about how you are going to rotate your army, how you're going to use when they are the most alert for their job.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, if you have to carry that many chickens with you in space, let's just say they eat chickens, right? How many chickens per day does a Velociraptor need under these environmental conditions, with this workload? What is the method of transport? How fast are we getting from solar system to solar system or planet to planet? How much of your spaceship is just chickens? I feel like you're gonna need a lot of chickens.

Kate Johnston: A lot of chicken. I'm gonna eat every chicken in this way. Not only that, but if they're gonna be eating all those chickens, what's coming out the other end? And what is it in sheer tonnage?

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, do they have sphincter control? Like, ducks definitely don't.

Kate Johnston: No.

Kristy Anne Cox: So if we're assuming a duck situation, then you need velociraptor diapers.

Kate Johnston: A lot of cloaca-trons.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, cloaca-trons, is this like a little, uh—

Kate Johnston: I don't know. I just made up the word. So we can be anything we want, but yeah, it's something like a Roomba that would follow you around and just scoop your poop up.

Kristy Anne Cox: A Roomba? Hahaha! See, I think that's a terrible idea because from what I understand, we already have a problem of little floating mystery pellets in the International Space Station.

Kate Johnston: We do. Yes, we do.

Kristy Anne Cox: So it would just be that on a much, much larger scale, which makes their diet super important, 'cause you wanna keep the consistency— oh, this is going gross places. People, I'm sorry. Writing While Disabled, we're writing right now, we're disabled, we have no boundaries about what is and isn't appropriate.

Kate Johnston: But think about how many people in our audience have a disability that affects their digestive system!

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my gosh. What is acid reflux like in zero G? Do we know this already?

Kate Johnston: Uh, we don't, and it's probably not good. This is already the reason we know that we don't want carbonated liquids in space because it tends to sit right up under that valve and just spew carbon dioxide and acid up your windpipe at you.

Kristy Anne Cox: So I can postulate on this a little bit because I have dysphagia, right? So after the brain injury, I lost full control of the part of your musculature that keeps you from choking when you're eating.

Kate Johnston: Lovely.

Kristy Anne Cox: I also can no longer hold my breath underwater without pinching my nose, which I thought was interesting.

So having lost those two very specific skills, I'm thinking in zero G, that would be even a bigger problem. We evolved to have our food generally pulled downward. Right?

Kate Johnston: Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: What about birds? Because they have gallstones too, like parakeets, that little pouch where they grind up their seeds.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Crop.

Kristy Anne Cox: Crop, yes. Do dinosaurs have crops?

Kate Johnston: We don't know. That's a soft tissue, and I don't know that we know that. We have found some gastrolids with fossils that make it look like, yes, there was probably a pouch here, which is where all these little rocks work, 'cause they're abnormally smooth, and we dunno why they would be there, but we don't actually know. And so yes, they might have crops, in which case there may be a little pebble dispenser somewhere on the ship, to keep everybody healthy.

Kristy Anne Cox: And then those little cuttlefish chew bone things that you put on the side of a parakeet cage that they need to chew to keep their beaks. Like dinosaurs with beaks need to have beak maintenance. Dinosaurs with claws need to maintain their claws.

So if I'm a dinosaur astronaut and I am on the deck of my ship, I think I need claw holes with a button at the bottom. What do you think? Because I think it would hurt to constantly be pushing human buttons with a claw tip.

Kate Johnston: Okay. I actually was thinking about that. So, here's that thing about the way animals think that it's not the way we think about things. So specifically velociraptors and other Dromeosaurs, wouldn't their keyboards and keys be sized to the end of their snout, rather than their claws? Because my cats will shove their face into the crack of a door and shove the door open, rather than reaching out a paw and pulling it open, because they don't think about their hands that way.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, for opening a door, yeah, but I don't imagine snout typing is very efficient, right?

Kate Johnston: But it's what they've got and it's what makes sense to them. It's just gonna be a giant thing, or they're gonna have very few things that it does.

Kristy Anne Cox: That depends on who designed their spaceship.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, but they don't think about doing key typey things with claws, because they're really curved too.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah. In CJ Cherryh's Chanur series, there is a human astronaut who is brought on to a ship of lion people, and he can't use any of their keyboards or devices because they have retractable claws, and they just kind of like push their claw into a hole until there's enough pressure on whatever the cone shape or whatever it is that it works. So he has to use an ice pick.

That's a disability. We're interrogating the way different bodies need different accommodations in different environments, and he is effectively disabled in that environment. Not because there's anything wrong with him, but because this environment is designed to accommodate people with five fingers and retractable claws that are a lot more sensitive, more nerve endings.

I don't know, 'cause Velociraptors and all the Dromeosaurids, their claws aren't being used for the same purpose as lions. How sensitive would their claw be? Because if you're ripping something—

Kate Johnston: That's good question. Like, parrots are really sensitive.

Kristy Anne Cox: But then meanwhile you have like ducks and other waterfowl who can stand on ice and sleep that way, and it doesn't hurt their feet, or at least enough to stop them from doing that. So I assume their little claws are also not that sensitive. I guess it would depend on the environmental needs that those claws evolved for.

So Velociraptors, they used their claws, we think, to kind of latch on a little bit while they were eviscerating them with the back claws, right? So if I'm following that through, what gear does my Velociraptor astronaut need? Does he have a vac suit?

Kate Johnston: We don't know if he needs one. This is where fiction comes in. You can go either way with that. You're just going to have to have an explanation, you know? You're gonna have to say he's wearing only mag boots, because even though he has claws, he can't dig into the side of the spacecraft. So he is wearing mag boots and maybe a sternum magnet, and then the claws, if you think about it, they can't do this— they cannot pronate.

Kristy Anne Cox: Viewers— Kate is moving her wrists down to the side.

Kate Johnston: Demonstrating that palm down is the way that Dromeosaurus joints looked. They could not rotate their hands very far inward so they could climb a tree, for example. They didn't have the clavicle and sternum construction that would make them strong in that direction.

Kristy Anne Cox: It depends on if these are uplifted dinosaurs, where they have some traits that have changed over time, or if they have prosthetic arms which, if you've got these short arms, the imagination for me goes to, they're holding cannons or they've got mechanical arms to do things. And I like thinking about prosthetics in the terms of disability, but I also like thinking about who designed the accommodations and do they suck because I'm imagining like, you're out walking on the hull of a ship in grav boots, some human thought this was a great idea to accommodate you, the Velociraptor pilot, but you're in grav boots and that doesn't work for you because your body is different and it really sucks. And then I'm thinking, why does it suck? Because he wants to pounce on the other astronaut and eviscerate him and he can't, he's stuck to the ship with magnetism, curses.

Kate Johnston: In the Dinosaur Space Navy story that I'm writing, I have a whole thing about choosing what your augments are gonna be because that tells you where in the army structure you're gonna go. But one of the intro moments that they're having during training is, one of the instructors is basically going, "if you wanna scratch your nose, get it all out now because the minute we put that canon on, you ain't doing that no more."

So yeah, there's a lot of that. I was gonna say, I had an ex who used to use her cellphone with her nose, because she had to have the phone so close to her face 'cause she had really bad eyesight, so she would just operate it with her nose because it was right there. So not all animals use things the way you might think they would.

Kristy Anne Cox: That is true. And I like the idea of exploring muzzle, 'cause I'm rejecting the idea of a muzzle keyboard based on me imagining these giant buttons, but maybe they would be using that like trace typing, like on a cell phone. So I'm imagining now, you're a giant T-Rex in a T-Rex shaped spaceship, and he is got what? A touch screen and he is texting his mom by tracing the words instead of pushing each button. Is that what you're thinking? Are you thinking individual?

Kate Johnston: No, I'm thinking of individual. Like, dromeosaurids weren't that big, and the end of their face is not huge. It's like the size of your fist. And so I can see, in the same way that dogs use those buttons.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Kate Johnston: Talk like that, like a dog.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. What about prosthetic arms? What if we gave our Dromeosaurus, let's say it's a Utah Raptor, we've rigged him up with fully cybernetic arms that are capable of typing on a human keyboard. Why did we do that? Because we're humans and we're thinking about everything from that perspective. I wanna think about why that

Kate Johnston: I didn't realize that if it's male, it's gonna spend the first week just scratching its crotch, right?

Kristy Anne Cox: The evolutionary purpose of itching, that's gonna take us down a whole rabbit hole.

Kate Johnston: Well—

Kristy Anne Cox: Don't scratch the rabbit hole, but,

Okay, so some human engineer has given you, a Utah Raptor, two amazing cyborg arms. They have canons built in, they can type on a human keyboard. What sucks about it? I feel like keyboards require you to look at a certain direction with a certain type of head and neck shape, right?

Kate Johnston: Have you ever talked to somebody with a prosthetic limb?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yes.

Kate Johnston: I would imagine that grafting something onto your bones never stops really hurting. It's a low level ache that you can just deal with, but it's always there in the same way that people with titanium knees, when they are in the winter, they can feel that inside their body.

Kristy Anne Cox: Readers and writers and listeners, I wanna hear from you. If you have a prosthesis and you have thoughts on this, I would love to hear your take on this.

Okay, so you're gonna have probably physical sensation of some sort, and it won't be like with an amputee where you have like the ghost limb, because we are adding an extra limb to you, or length that doesn't exist. It's not like your instincts are hardwired. It would be equivalent of like, wearing stilts, or like operating a surgical robot. So you're adding complications and length and dimensions. Your proprioception is off.

Kate Johnston: Right, and I would imagine that you would wanna be able to take them off at some point. Like you wouldn't want them hard wired or hard attached. You would want there to be an interface.

Kristy Anne Cox: Have you ever used that claw thing that you can get for disabled people? They market it as if it's for dumb people, but really it's for disabled people. It's like a claw, you wanna get something out of the top cupboard and there's—

Kate Johnston: Oh yeah, I have a clamp.

Kristy Anne Cox: So I got one out the other day and I was pretending in my kitchen that I was a Dakota Raptor, and I've got this claw and I could not get a can down from the top shelf to save my life, so I'm not gonna make it in the Space Marines. I am a civilian Dakota Raptor, clearly. But it's really hard to operate that. It's gonna take me hours of practice before I can do that. And that's just in earth gravity.

Kate Johnston: And that's using your actual hands. Imagine if you were trying to use your shoulder muscles to do this, which is what artificial arms do, that's how that's done. You open and close the grippers by how your shoulder is articulating. So that's definitely a thing to think about is like, how would you decide what nerve nodes, whatever you are going to map onto this prosthetic arm— and they're already using theirs, so you're gonna add new ones for them, and that'll be definitely a period of learning and experimentation for them to figure out how to use all this stuff.

And like I've said a gajillion times before, and I will continue to say it, they also have to deal with the fact that if they are in an environment where someone is building them augments, how are they going to keep up with the pace of technological change? Because there's always gonna be a bigger and better gun. And when you get out of the service, what happens? Do they take those away? Do they give you civilian ones? What happens? What kind of society do you come from and how well are they going to take care of you?

Ooh, ooh. Wait, I have one more design issue: in the Space Navy thing I'm writing, they're in a situation where there's a whole bunch of people of different species, the way the army works, and they're in a ship that is foreign to all of that. So they need to figure out how to navigate through this ship, and it has like lights and buttons and, you know, okay. But how do you know how to drive it? How do you know that when you push this button, it actually does this other thing? What does green mean to the people who built this? Our lights are not green and red because we're omnivores, they're green and red because they're parts of the UV spectrum that we can see clearly from a distance and are widely separate from each other.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and also because of the colors, we can see green being the predominant color in a forest environment or a Savannah environment, right, and red being the polar opposite. So the brightest and most easy to see, signaling danger the same way animals use red.

Kate Johnston: Well, but is it?

Kristy Anne Cox: Danger? I mean, blood is red.

Kate Johnston: Like animals aren't necessarily red when they're dangerous.

Kristy Anne Cox: Not always, but some of them are, right, like a bright red tree frog, don't eat it. If it's a green tree frog, I'm eating it every time.

Kate Johnston: Oh, you're gonna die.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. Haha!

Kate Johnston: But yeah, you can't necessarily make the same assumptions. You know, that purple button, what do you think it does? I don't know. It could give us all like self cut bangs. No one wants that.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's a bowl cut for everyone, but it's feathers this time because we're dinosaurs. Right?

Kate Johnston: Right. But like—

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my gosh, do dinosaurs in the Space Marines get crew cuts on their feathers?

Kate Johnston: You know? Do you trim some of the flyers so they can't fly so they're not as annoying around in the spaceship?

Kristy Anne Cox: Can you imagine molting season? Like—

Kate Johnston: Yes!

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. Ducks completely molt out their feathers seasonally. And I'm talking mallards. So twice a year they're shedding all their feathers. Those float around, even in this gravity. I feel like you're gonna be breathing down 24/7 if you're an animal husbandry tech on one of these, if they're like on a generation ship.

Kate Johnston: So one of the very highly, highly respected and decorated people on this ship is going to be the filtration team.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, yeah, because there's gonna be poop.

Kate Johnston: There's gonna be poop, there's gonna be dander, there's gonna be whatever that powdery shit that comes off birds...?

Kristy Anne Cox: Bird powder?

Kate Johnston: Thank you.

Kristy Anne Cox: The technical term!

Kate Johnston: A scientific term called "poudre de avian"!

Kristy Anne Cox: There's gonna be a lot of things. And then food particles, right? And then you have everything the chickens produce. There's gonna be a lot of dust, you have chicken feed.

Kate Johnston: And I was thinking about people who may not have mates or their group on the ship with them. There would have to be like a room with all those rotating bristle things that you find in like cow barns, so that they could stand there and get scratched and stuff. That also helps get molting skin off. Because we don't know that they didn't molt their skin either. It wasn't an exoskeleton. Although it's fiction, you could do that.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna switch topics entirely to be sure we get to this, 'cause I think we're gonna run outta time. But can we talk strategy and tactics in different environments for your Velociraptor Space Army? Because let's say I'm breaching an airlock with my Velociraptor Space Army. Is it more advantageous for me to send in Velociraptor astronauts or human astronauts to kill all the space pirates in this space station? And why?

Kate Johnston: It depends on who built the ship, to start with. Because if the Velociraptors are too big to fit through the hallways, it's humans.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, Velociraptors are smaller than us, but like, Utah Raptors are bigger.

Kate Johnston: They're bigger than we are, and they weigh a lot more than we do.

Kristy Anne Cox: Dakota Raptors, if they're real, are definitely way bigger. We just don't know if it's one species or two species mixed together in a bag.

Kate Johnston: But this is what I mean. Space strategy and tactics has far less to do with what we think in every way than it does, "what are the physics of this issue?"

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. What if I'm on the planet, who's my infantry?

Kate Johnston: Depends on what you wanna do and what the terrain is.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. If I've got a just boring as possible, plain, two armies facing off on a plane, which is the baseline boring scenario. My infantry, I feel like armored T-Rexes feels like a good idea. I'm going to put canons in each of their hands and I'm going to armor them up very heavily and I'm gonna put a knight on the back and he's gonna have, I don't know, a tank launcher. Tell me what you think of my tactics.

Kate Johnston: What are you facing?

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm facing—

Kate Johnston: You know, if you're facing planaria, that's overkill.

Kristy Anne Cox: Let's assume I am facing a ground army, mixed units, and that this sounds like somebody who knows what they're talking about because I don't.

Kate Johnston: Okay, yeah. Basically, you wanna have bigger guns that fire farther from your opponents. But I can definitely see where if you've got a thousand pounds of very, very excited T-Rex, I think your tactics may go right down the shitter very quickly, because I don't know that they're going to have the ability to reject their instinctual impulses long enough to execute strategy on the battlefield.

Like, yes, parrots will rip you up six ways from Sunday, but if you have two parrots who don't know each other, they're not necessarily going to bond together to fight you.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. They're not gonna cooperate.

Kate Johnston: No. And so I'm worried about how the cooperation of large animals goes because generally, unless they're doing it for themselves and it's their own family group, screw you and everybody. You can get horses to do it a little bit. Rhinos? Eh, not so much.

This is what I mean though, in space battles and as you just demonstrated in a lot of battles on land too, it doesn't matter what species you are, it matters what kind of armament you have versus what kind of armament your opponents have.

Because yes, you could be a big scary T-Rex with a giant gun, however, if you're going up against parasites that are specifically T-Rex, you're probably gonna come outta that with a bunch of parasites. You know, sharks are really scary and remoras hang out on them all the time.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. You mean what, parasites are hanging on the T-Rexes?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I'm thinking corridors, narrow corridors, like in these human built space stations.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. Not going to be good for T-Rexes.

Kristy Anne Cox: But they would be good for Velociraptors. Wouldn't those claws help them navigate better? 'Cause they can grab onto like walls and stuff and kick off with those powerful back legs. Wouldn't they be really good in zero G, close combat quarters if they could figure out how to— I feel like they would be wanting to bite you though, which would be less effective in a space suit like we've got now, like NASA's current space suits aren't designed to be terribly chewable.

Kate Johnston: No. And that the helmets are not designed to let them bite you.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wonder how much bite pressure you would need as a dinosaur to crack an astronaut helmet?

Kate Johnston: So it depends on where you're biting it. Like at the edge of the glass bubble, probably not a lot.

Kristy Anne Cox: I just wanna get to the chewy astronaut inside. I'd like to eat him. What skills do I need?

Kate Johnston: You need to rip the front of the suit open. We're like shrimp. You wanna eat the body.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. So if we were just talking NASA's current space suit, I feel like they look pretty sturdy, but I don't know if they could take a Dromeosaurid claw to the rib cage. I feel like they're not designed for that.

Kate Johnston: They were not designed for that. You know who designed the first astronaut suits, right? And sewed them, mostly.

Kristy Anne Cox: Humans?

Kate Johnston: Well, no, the ladies from Playtex.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, really?

Kate Johnston: Because those suits have to be sewn together and it's like six layers, and every single stitch has to be airtight. Those ladies were already used to doing that type of construction. They basically said, "here's what we need". And they're like, "oh, all right, let's go."

Kristy Anne Cox: What about feathers in zero G? Like, let's say our astronaut only needs a helmet and the rest of their body is okay in space. Would feathers help them navigate zero g?

Kate Johnston: If they were in an oxygen or gas environment, yes, because you can use that. If you were in a zero G environment and you were trapped in the middle of a room, if you had a pair of fans, one in each hand, you would be able to flap your way to one side.

What about the four legged feathered dinosaurs? We don't have a lot of those. Most of them came from China. Microraptor and Anchiornis, they have four legs, all four legs are feathered. And I think those would be fantastic for the inside of the spaceship. And again, one of those things too is that this is a lot like D&D: not every dinosaur is a tank.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh no. Yeah, we could talk combat roles.

Kate Johnston: Yeah, right. And it doesn't need to be, like Anchiornis and Microraptor would be great pilots. They'd be fantastic, but they would stuck at infantry.

Kristy Anne Cox: But I was gonna say, if we're stepping out of just straight dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs as pilots, right? Because they're used to this underwater environment, they evolved to navigate three dimensionally instead of being a terrestrial gravity. More gravity bound, right, animals. So I imagine that they would make really great pilots.

I would think they would be good marksmen because sonar, right? Well, actually we don't know if ichthyosauruses and pleisiosauruses used sonar, but I mean, they had to find a way to find their prey. So I don't know that they would be very good at shooting things... Well no, maybe they would. I'm waffling on this. Would they be good marksmen?

Kate Johnston: Ichthyosaurs did not have echolocation.

Kristy Anne Cox: Also, they have eyes on the side of their head.

Kate Johnston: Rely on sight. Yep.

Kristy Anne Cox: But they're not flat faced like us.

Kate Johnston: We are also not ruling out that they didn't have like, the electrical sensory set up. So they had lateral lines like electric eels, and so they could sense the electricity of their prey in the water.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Kate Johnston: And that would not work outside of water.

Kristy Anne Cox: No. Well, in space, would you be able to sense electricity? No, 'cause the particles are too far apart, right?

Kate Johnston: Yeah, I think you need a medium.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. I'm saying there is a medium, there are particles, they're just so far apart, they can't carry sound... I really don't know how electricity works.

Kate Johnston: Well, the interstellar medium is much more of a small—

Kristy Anne Cox: If I'm a giant electric ichthyosaurus, and I evolved in the asteroid belt, and I'm coming towards your spaceship...

Kate Johnston: Do I know that it's electric? Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: You can sense it because electricity is surging through your spaceship and you're dying. Right? How am I doing that? Or am I not doing that? Because that's not how it would work because the interstellar medium, or the particles are too far apart.

Kate Johnston: I think as long as you don't start talking about the particles, you can get away with it in fiction.

Kristy Anne Cox: So we're hand waving it.

Kate Johnston: We're gonna hand wave that, yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I was like, "electric eels"...

Kate Johnston: I think it's a great idea. I'm willing to write the story, but it's definitely handwaving them.

Kristy Anne Cox: So, readers, listeners, tell me how do electric eels work if they evolved in the asteroid belt and they're about to kill Kate's spaceship? Please, I need to know the science, use your physics skills for good and not evil.

How much time do we have left? We have time for one more question.

Kate Johnston: I have one more comment though.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, go ahead, please.

Kate Johnston: It was the end of the in-space battles. It doesn't matter what kind of species you are, it matters what kind of ship you have. However, there may be things like cats are more likely to chase things, so you want them on picket duty. So they're looking for weirdness and the first thing they wanna do is go play with the weirdness.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And so you want that, or dogs who will just point at it and go, there is weirdness right over there. Go, go.

Kristy Anne Cox: I feel like cat base would be recon too, like ambush predators in general would be good scouts.

Kate Johnston: Mm-hmm.

Kristy Anne Cox: And recon. Yeah, dogs and wolf like psychology, if that's their group psychology, that's more like the cavalry, right? Like you're highly mobile, quick, efficient. Is it wrong for me to compare wolves to cavalry?

Kate Johnston: I mean, horses might be offended, but how would we know?

Kristy Anne Cox: Horses are offended by everything.

Kate Johnston: Well, I mean, camels are worse. Camels are offended by, you know, air existing.

Kristy Anne Cox: Another thing that I wanted to talk about was mounts, right? So we've kind of gone into astronauts, but like if we're talking dinosaurs as mounts, as cool as it is, is there a practical reason for me to ride my Dakota Raptor into battle in zero G, alone while I'm drifting through a battle in space? Or while I'm working on my ship? Like why do I need a mount? Because I want to have a mount, so why do I need my mount in space outside the ship?

Kate Johnston: I have no idea.

Kristy Anne Cox: So emotional support reasons. Probably.

Kate Johnston: Do you have a communication system?

Kristy Anne Cox: I mean—

Kate Johnston: If you do, it can just talk you through it.

Kristy Anne Cox: He's the cutest Dakota Raptor you've ever seen.

Kate Johnston: I mean, the only reason I can think of is if you were placing something really big that you needed him to hold onto, or her to hold onto, while you welded it or whatever.

Kristy Anne Cox: Muscles. They're big muscular animals. So if I need to turn a wheel on a door... I feel like that's a thing that happens a lot in space, is somebody has a door on their airlock and there's a wheel for some reason, and you have to turn it, like an old submarine. I feel like muscles might be good, right? Like I can tie a rope to it, and then have him pull. If I'm too weak to turn that wheel, is that gonna help? Is his musculature helpful in space?

Kate Johnston: Maybe. This would again be related to, how does its body work? Because that rotating motion of an airlock wheel, that's a really weird motion and it's a really odd way of applying force to something. And I don't know that their shoulders or elbows or wrists are gonna do that very well. I think the articulated arms would help.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, no, I'm gonna have him with the saddle on. I'm gonna put a bungee on, and I'm gonna hook it to, you know, different parts of the wheel, pull it a little bit, then hook it to a different part of the wheel, pull it a little bit...

Kate Johnston: If you've got enough room on either side of it, sure. I wouldn't use a bungee, I'd use something rigid.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, yeah, obviously something like— okay, so if you're riding a jet pack in space, that's a useful tool. So he could basically be a jet pack if I strapped enough jets to him, right? Or would it be more efficacious just to strap them to a surfboard?

Kate Johnston: It's up to you. I just think that the amount of jet fuel you would need to move 1,200 pounds rather than 200 pounds is going to be an issue.

Kristy Anne Cox: So these are the problems that come when you start with an idea, because it's awesome.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Then you try to figure out why it has to be that way in the world building.

Kate Johnston: Hi, and welcome to fiction writing! But yeah, no, I get that. And it's like that thing of, you know, you wake up in the middle of the night and you're like, "oh my God, it's such a cool idea!" And you wake up in the morning and you look at it and it says, "monkey, dumpster, mouse, scissors". And you're like, what?

Kristy Anne Cox: I know exactly what I meant.

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Writes a sonnet.

Kate Johnston: But seriously, this is something that we really have to think about. Like, when you have a ship full of Velociraptors, what do they do in their off time?

Kristy Anne Cox: Parkour.

Kate Johnston: You know, I dunno that they're playing pickleball, that's all I'm saying.

Kristy Anne Cox: Pickleball parkour.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. And then like, on my ship I have entire rooms that are just basically a big litter box.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. So I think there's gonna be diapering. Unless we have uplifted their cloacas, I think there's gonna be extensive diapering, and I think it needs to have some kind of a suction system with a really good seal, because diapering is a lot more difficult in space.

Kate Johnston: Can I tell you one of the reasons why?

Kristy Anne Cox: Please do.

Kate Johnston: Because in space there is no gravity, and unfortunately liquid tends to move via capillary action in the absence of gravity. So yes, you can wear a diaper, but it doesn't mean that that's where the urine is going. Once you exude it, it's crawling along your skin.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. Uh, I'm— I'm dead. This, this killed me. It's crawling?! It's actively crawling?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: Like an amoeba?

Kate Johnston: Kind of.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or more like molasses downhill?

Kate Johnston: There's no hill, hun.

Kristy Anne Cox: Is this "in space, everything is—"

Kate Johnston: And it's not very thick, so yeah, it's crawling pretty fast.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah. This is, I feel like... the worst possible place to end this episode. We need a different topic for our last question!

Kate Johnston: Well, I can tell you how we know this.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh my God.

Kate Johnston: Which is not helping.

Kristy Anne Cox: And I don't want to— yes, tell me! My curiosity is stronger than my despair.

Kate Johnston: We know this because many women went up on the shuttle before we knew that it was safe for them to not have periods at all while they go. And so now everybody just does a hormonal birth control and doesn't bleed up there anymore. But that's what we found out. They were like, "okay, no pads only tampons", because the space shuttle toilet is bad enough.

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah...

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: I wanna talk hatching in space. I dunno if we have time for that. Or do you wanna talk prosthetics? Is there something you wanna talk about?

Kate Johnston: Well, I wanna talk about the fact that we really, really, really, really, 1000000% do not know enough about reproduction in space to say anything about it at all. What we do have is we have several studies that put pregnant rats in space at various points in their gestation, and some of them gave birth in space and some of them didn't. But we have never actually taken, I don't think, one from the point of fertilization all the way through two weeks after birth, so we could assess the offspring.

However, we do have rats that were shot into space after fertilization but before birth, and then were monitored all the way through birth, and then the newborns were assessed and then they were destroyed. What they found was that about 30% of them were viable and looked okay. The rest did not.

Kristy Anne Cox: Congenital defects or...?

Kate Johnston: Yes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Or like gravity, I guess. I don't know what you would call them.

Kate Johnston: Well, but how do we know?

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh, that's true. We don't know. We don't know.

Kate Johnston: So they had very large heads. They had large eyes, often they were mismatched. A lot of them had what we would consider in adults to be spina bifida, so the tops of their spinal columns didn't close over the spinal cord correctly. There was a lot of failure to thrive.

Kristy Anne Cox: It's interesting because we do not know as an embryo starts diversifying its parts, we don't know if there's gravity triggers that are necessary.

Kate Johnston: Well, this is how we find out.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, I mean, if the different sides of the body are no longer symmetrical, it's fascinating to think that gravity might be related to that.

Okay, so eggs though... hear me out. We know that there is a limit to how big an egg can be because shell size, oxygen through the membrane. We know that birds, having hatched a lot of ducks, they need the experience of hatching out of that egg to finish their development and not end up with major problems after hatching. And the ducklings that I helped get out of the egg ended up with leg issues very often. You have to be very patient and some of the ducklings will die in the hatching process, and it's very stressful, but that hatching is part of what they do.

We know this for butterflies too, right? They have to have the experience of fighting out of the chrysalis in order to fully develop. What if you're hatching that egg in zero G?

Kate Johnston: Yeah. That answer is, we don't know. We have done a bunch of studies in lizards and the news is not great.

Kristy Anne Cox: So no. I mean, egg rotation would be easier.

Kate Johnston: It would, but so you have all of these long termists and weird ass rich white guys who are like, "oh yes, we can just send entire populations into space, we're gonna live on Mars and blah, blah"... No.

Kristy Anne Cox: I heard about that.

Kate Johnston: You know, because you don't even know that sperm work in space, 'cause we don't know that for sure, but we absolutely do not know enough to say what kind of babies we can have, if any. The news is not great, so I actually think For All Mankind did a very good job with that, in saying that, "no, you absolutely need to be in at least some version of microgravity, one sixth or higher, in order to have a healthy baby".

I mean, we do help babies out. We have the cesarean section, they don't die. But it sounds like ducks do, it sounds like there are lots of animals who do. And I think the more variables we change about birth inputs, the greater the effects are gonna be on the resulting product. It's sort of like if you are a degree off when you send the spaceship, it's gonna be way off when you get where you're going.

Kristy Anne Cox: Right. And in medicine we are just within humans, still struggling with the differences between cisgender male and cisgender female bodies and why like, heart disease progresses differently, which is why being a veterinarian is like going to medical school a hundred different times, but in the same period, 'cause you have all these different species.

And so when you think of like, all the stuff that I learned about horses and about ducks and about cats and about dogs through my own experiences leads me to believe this is gonna be different for each species of dinosaur in ways that we'll find out when it goes terribly wrong.

I think disability would be a major part of those stories of uplifted astronauts too, because what are the ethics of uplifting somebody, right? You wanna have a velociraptor who's an astronaut, so you're going to increase their brain size. How do you decide whether or not they wanna keep their arms the way they are? Is it desirable to give them human hands? I mean, they never evolved that, that wasn't necessarily for their environment. Wouldn't that kind of be like somebody saying, I'm gonna give you tentacles and you're gonna spend the next three years learning to use them? Do you want that?

My answer would be no, because I don't wanna do physical therapy for three years to learn how to use tentacles right now.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. But if your choice was, you can either have stumps or tentacles...

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, that's different.

Kate Johnston: I know, but that's the trade off we give disabled people more often than not.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh yeah.

Kate Johnston: You know, and we really don't think about that. And we should.

Kristy Anne Cox: Well, and the choice needs to be the bodily autonomy of the person, which I don't feel like that's there for uplift stories that I've seen, or like stories where humans have augmented dogs or cats or whatever species to make them just as smart as us. Generally humans are the ones driving all of that for the first, what, 80, 90% of the process at least. So the ethics there...

Kate Johnston: Oh yeah. Like, what if the dog doesn't wanna be uplifted? What if they don't want that? What if they're perfectly happy being what they are and who they are and how they are.

Kristy Anne Cox: I mean, there's a lot of disability related thoughts that readers, listeners, viewers, we're gonna leave you with these because I think we're over our time limit. But I want you all to think about disability related issues, dinosaurs in space, velociraptors in space, space armies, any of the topics we've talked about. Questions.

Kate, what do you want them to think about?

Kate Johnston: I want them to think about a story that I read and now I can't think of who wrote it or what the name of it is, but it's about a dancer, a ballerina, and she has this uplifted dog who basically, it can't talk, but it can say a couple of words, right? And it's her security. Basically all the new dancers are all augmented with genetic whatever, and so they have a perfect 10 turnout without destroying their knees. And so she is one of the very last of the original bio dancers, and she's been fighting this, and the rest of the story is, you know, do you fight this? How do you fight this? When do you stop?

Kristy Anne Cox: Yeah.

Kate Johnston: And a lot of it is through the point of view of the dog.

Kristy Anne Cox: Oh wait, is the point of view character the dog?

Kate Johnston: Yeah.

Kristy Anne Cox: That's awesome.

Kate Johnston: Yeah. That's super great. Super great. I cannot think of the name of it, I'll find it and then we will get it into the show notes.

Kristy Anne Cox: Okay. So readers, viewers, we would love to hear from you on social media. You can use the hashtag Writing While Disabled, you can also use the hashtag for our publisher Strange Horizons, so it's hashtag Strange Horizons. And you can just converse, join the conversation with us. We will look for those comments and we could definitely revisit this topic again.

But Velociraptor Space Armies, I think this was pretty great. Thank you.

Kate Johnston: Thank you so much. And you guys have a great night.