Doctor Who s07e80 Episode Script

1 Blowing your mind! That's what "Doctor Who" is all about.
What makes it all so fun is that while all this crazy science fiction is going on, there's actual facts.
You've got space travel, you've got time travel, you've got regeneration.
These are all the powerful themes of "Doctor Who," and they're also the things that drive science forwards.
What is that? Is that a mask? Watching "Doctor Who" made me the space scientist I am today.
It opened up possibilities.
My understanding of of time travel is pretty much restricted that some telephone boxes are a lot more useful than others.
Some of the science on the show is real.
Some of the time-travel stuff makes a little bit of sense.
We drove through this.
I sometimes get asked the question, "How much of the science fiction of 'Doctor Who' is science fact?" I believe that, given enough time, almost all of "Doctor Who" could become science fact.
So, what now, Doctor? Well, time to get cracking, Doctor.
Dr.
Who 7xSpecial The Science of Doctor Who The TARDIS stands for "Time and relative dimensions in space.
" And it's a good name.
It borrows a lot from science.
The TARDIS is very British.
It's sort of a policeman's phone box.
It's the most common, ordinary object -- at the time -- this was in 1963, when police boxes were all over London.
Unfortunately, the chameleon circuit got stuck, and it ended up being a police box forever.
the potential is almost unlimited.
I mean, it has the power to go through time and space like that.
Watching science fiction, we have a certain prejudice that rocket ships are huge, they're beautiful, they're streamlined, and they're gigantic.
Wrong.
First of all, they don't have to be streamlined.
Because in outer space, there's no air.
We have nanotechnology.
In the future, we're going to have the ability to manipulate individual atoms.
Rocket ships could be paper-thin.
Ah! Ah! Aah! So why not a telephone booth? I think if there's one enormous draw for every child and every adult that's ever watched "Doctor Who," it's one simple sentence -- "it's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.
" We've seen a number of companions sort of going up to the TARDIS, looking inside, coming out, looking round the back, wondering where the rest of it is.
I think it's fairly infinite on the inside.
You can walk around forever.
I believe that there are probably characters that have -- that are wandering the hallways from hundreds of years ago.
Well? Anything you want to say? Any passing remarks? I've heard them all.
Many people are fascinated by the fact that inside the TARDIS, it's quite roomy, it's huge, but outside, it's just a phone booth.
But, you see, people forget that the phone booth is not the TARDIS at all.
It's the door! On the other side of the door, there could be an entire universe.
So, are you ok, then? 'Cause this place, sometimes it can make people feel a bit you know -- I'm fine.
Fine.
It's just, there's a whole world in here, just like you said.
Going through the TARDIS entrance actually transports you to another part of the Universe entirely.
So it doesn't have to cram itself into this phone box.
It can be as big as it likes, because it's somewhere else.
Think of a bubble.
Our Universe is a soap bubble of some sort.
According to Einstein, the soap bubble is expanding.
But let's say there's a baby soap bubble, a baby soap bubble connected to the larger soap bubble, and there's a gateway that connects two bubbles, two soap bubbles.
Well, is the gateway the rocket ship? No, it is just a door.
On the other side of the door could be an entire Universe.
So the TARDIS has this ability to become whatever you want it to look like in order to blend in with its surroundings.
Putting the outer shell on invisible.
Haven't done this in a while.
Big drain on the power.
You can turn the TARDIS invisible? It just appears in the oval office, and no one there sees it.
Oh, look, this is the Oval office.
I was looking for the -- uh -- oblong room.
I'll-I'll-I'll just be off, then.
Shall I? Always does that when it's -- ah, stop that! He said the scanner wouldn't work.
I know.
It's locked in invisibility mode.
Sir, you have to go with them now! River, make her blue again! What the hell is that? We will have invisibility within the coming decades.
We've already demonstrated the basic physics in the laboratory.
So, yeah, "Doctor Who" has got his TARDIS, and apparently he's got his chameleon circuit in there, the thing that allows them to hide when they arrive somewhere.
We've got a laser here that we built ourselves, and it produces very, very intense pulses of light.
And what we discovered is that we shine those pulses of light on tiny, tiny crystals, nanostructures, it can make them vanish.
They're still there, physically, all the atoms that make them up are still there.
But you just can't see them.
This is the stuff we use for the experiment.
It's an indium gallium nitride multiple quantum well.
Okay, well, it's in there, it's absorbing the light, and we shine the other laser at it, and that stops the little electrons in there moving, and it goes transparent.
The reason we know it's vanished is that the light goes through it and we see the spike on the oscilloscope here.
When I was a kid, you used to be able to get specs that you were supposed to be able to put on, and you'd be able to see through things.
What we've said -- what this -- you know, if you want to think of it in those terms, you could say, well, if these specs had this little laser that did what this one does, then it could be real.
You know, you could have your laser, you turn it on, and it makes things vanish.
If I were to give the TARDIS a rating, one to five, where five is definitely feasible, and one is impossible, I'd probably give it a two.
I would love it if, one day, we could have a TARDIS.
But looking at where we are scientifically today, I don't think it's very likely.
And I might even put it as low as a one.
I have tried to read up on it.
At one point, about a year after I started running "Doctor Who," I thought, "I'll try and read up about this.
" And, oh, my goodness, it's difficult.
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, the faster you move, the slower time beats inside your rocket ship.
That means travel into the future is possible.
In fact, every time our astronauts blast off into outer space, they actually go into the future just by a tiny fraction of a second.
If you could approach the speed of light, then time would slow down dramatically.
Eventually, time would stop altogether.
Doctor Who has a technology centuries, maybe millennia, more advanced than ours, in which case, going right up to the speed of light is child's play.
When that happens, time slows down inside your rocket ship.
So if he wants to go to a nearby star, for example, it takes four years for a light beam to reach that star.
But in his TARDIS, it may take four seconds.
In the opening sequence for "Doctor Who," you see the TARDIS tumbling through a tunnel.
Now, to my mind, that tunnel could represent a wormhole.
And it's taking the TARDIS from normal space through this wormhole, which is basically curved space and time, to somewhere else.
To travel from one part of space-time to another part of space-time, you can take the linear route, which is what we do -- we travel through our lives, going, sort of progressing through time.
But at the same time, sometimes we can consider distorting space-time.
So, rather than having your flat sheet, you can distort space-time, and having two events which might be quite far away from each other, brought together closer, and then you can travel between them with a wormhole.
Hold on tight.
Everyone, hold on! Whoa! Oh! What is this? For instance, there's one case where there's a London bus traveling along.
The Doctor is on board with a number of other people.
They go through a tunnel in London and end up in the desert on another planet.
Look, look, if you must know, I was tracking a hole in the fabric of reality.
Call it a hobby.
But it was a tiny little hole! No danger to anyone! Suddenly it gets big, and we drive right through it.
And wormholes could work this way.
We drove through this.
You could travel from one planet to another planet in a matter of seconds by traveling through a wormhole.
And that's? A door.
A door in space.
And no matter how fantastic these ideas are, we measure them in the laboratory.
This is not science fiction.
It's science fact.
Get used to it.
History.
Time travel into the future -- that's a snap.
Time travel into the past -- that's hard.
That's real hard.
As a scientist, we have difficulties with time travel, because of what we call paradoxes.
And the difficulty comes if you start traveling backwards in time.
For instance, if I go back in time to, let's say, the 1950s, and I sort of meet my father and by accident I kill him That means -- if I kill him before he's met my mother and had me, what happens to me? All the things that you could mess up in the past that would make the present from which you traveled impossible, therefore you could never have made the journey, therefore you couldn't have messed up the past.
I mean, all that is just glorious stuff.
What do you want? Who let you in here? Do not call for help.
This room has been sound-screened.
You have been found guilty.
Our best theory of the nature of time is Einstein's theory of relativity, and that says it could be possible to travel back in time, provided you don't change things and make them turn out any differently.
Hello, sorry, is this your office? Had a sort of collision with my vehicle, faults on both sides, let's say no more about It.
The Doctor could go back into the past and have a conversation with Adolf Hitler, but provided he doesn't make things turn out any differently and doesn't allow history to change, then that's a possible solution.
It's when he messes with it and makes, you know, the outcome of the second World War turn out differently, that's a paradox, because that's not the way things are.
Thank you, whoever you are.
I think you have just saved my life.
Believe me it was an accident.
All he really does is shove Hitler in a cupboard.
We never really face the dilemma of what would happen if he killed Hitler.
Of course, what would happen if he killed Hitler is, somebody else would have taken over the Third Reich, and history might have been even worse if they were a bit less mad than Adolf.
So, who knows? There's only one version of history in our Universe.
You see, you see? Time travel! It never goes to plan.
Imagine our universe is like a page in a book.
And we're the words on that page.
We're stuck to that page.
We're confined to our universe.
But there may be many other pages in the book, parallel universes, running alongside our own, that we might be able to access if we had something that could travel through space and time.
It's another beautiful day in London.
There are reports of sunspot activity and solar flares causing interference across all radio signals, so apologies for that.
"The wedding of River Song" begins with all of time happening at once.
You have modern-day London, but you have ancient Romans riding around on chariots.
In Buckingham Palace, you've got Winston Churchill, and he is acting as Caesar.
Had an argument with Cleopatra.
Dreadful woman.
You have pterodactyls flying about.
Lots of different things are happening all at once.
So, scientifically, what could be going on there? The only way we can try and understand this from the modern scientific perspective is if this were a parallel universe.
However crazy it is, if parallel universes exist, there will be a universe somewhere where this scenario is acted out.
So, on a scale of one to five, is time travel possible? I'd say, give it a four.
I'd put that at probably or a two or three.
I would give it somewhere between a three and a four.
Hello.
I'm the Doctor.
We started trying to think our way into the process of, what would it be like if, suddenly, explosively, you turned into somebody else? You imagine it would be sort of traumatic, it would alter you.
All those things are, I think, tricky, but, you know, we use, I suppose, things that feel right and seem right to try and sell what is a fantastically clever way of substituting your lead actor.
Arms! Hands! Must be sort of interesting to be reborn that way into a different body and feel the same but look different.
Eyes -- two.
Nose.
And I've had worse.
Chin.
He was checking to make sure, he's like, "okay, he's got all of his body parts, okay, good, good.
" And still not ginger! "Is he ginger? Nope, still not ginger.
" I'm a girl! No.
No! I'm not a girl! He thinks he's a girl because he has long hair, but it's just awesome, crazy Matt Smith hair.
Geronimo! Watching Doctor Who regenerate from cells, you say to yourself, "Ha! Impossible.
" But actually, we do it in the laboratory already.
We're starting to understand, there are certain types of cells in the body, called stem cells, which can grow and evolve into different kinds of cells.
Today, you're in a car accident, you get a new door, you get a new fender, you just call the body shop.
We will have a human body shop.
One day in the not-too-distant future, we will be able to grow whole organs -- hearts, lungs, kidneys.
So you can extrapolate that thought and say, "one day, we might be able to grow, artificially, a whole human.
" Is regeneration possible? I'd put it at a 4.
5.
I'm fairly optimistic with regeneration.
The fact that we're understanding the genome now, I think, gives us a lot more possibilities.
So I'd put it at a fairly optimistic three.
Given enough advances in technology, I don't see any reason why that couldn't be possible.
So I'd give that a four or a five.
I forget who said this -- was it Stephen Hawking? Might have been Stephen Hawking, saying there are two possibilities, both of which are awesome.
Either there is other intelligent life out there, or there isn't.
And both of them are just extraordinary thoughts.
At the heart of "Doctor Who," the idea is that the Universe is full of exotic life forms.
Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated.
Repeat -- Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated.
When you're watching "Doctor Who," the aliens are, they're pretty much, I like to call, "haters.
" Prisoner Zero will vacate the human residence or the human residence will be incinerated.
Twenty minutes to the end of the world.
Well, the Earth is invaded almost constantly on "Doctor Who.
" And, and he's always there to save us.
You will tell the Doctor -- Tell him what? What he must know.
And what he must never know.
In terms of storytelling, you've got to have nasty monsters.
There's no good of a Doctor who didn't have adversities.
Because this is the stuff of storytelling.
"Doctor Who" at its core is scary.
I mean, it's a lot of things that are really quite cool, when it comes to scaring children.
Traumatize a generation, that's what it's all about.
In science fiction, there's that moment when the flying saucer lands on the White House lawn and he comes out, and we're all right there on the edge of our seats, wondering, "What do the aliens look like?" I don't think that it's life that is necessarily walking on two legs, with eyeballs, and breathing oxygen and needing water to survive.
We don't know whether they would have eyes, even.
Why should they be sensitive to electromagnetic radiation, or light? Why would they communicate by exchanging sound waves? My colleague Stephen Hawking has stated that we should not advertise our existence to aliens in outer space, because we don't know their intentions.
For example, look what happened to the great Aztec empire when they met the Conquistadors and Cortes.
Cortes wiped out the Aztec civilization in a matter of months.
The dominant civilization or intelligent civilization tends to be the one that's going to take over.
But we're basing all of these ideas on our own experience.
I mean, this is the danger with science fiction.
Personally, I think that if they're that advanced that they can reach us from distant stars, they can choose what planet to plunder.
They don't have to exploit the Earth.
There are plenty of uninhabited planets with minerals and resources that they can plunder.
Why bother to mess with the restive natives we have here on the planet Earth? If it's a question of whether life exists elsewhere, I'd give it a five.
I'd give it a 4.
9.
I'm going to give life elsewhere in the galaxy four.
State your identity! You will identify first.
Identify! It's like Stephen Hawking meets the speaking clock.
Illogical.
You will modify.
Daleks do not take orders.
You have identified as Daleks.
One of his great nemeses -- the great nemesis -- the Daleks and the Cybermen, of course, are cyborgs.
A cyborg is a being made up of both biological and mechanical parts.
The Doctor is coming! They're usually not very happy.
They're usually very angry.
All, repeat, all Cybermen to Torchwood.
The ultimate cyborg on "Doctor Who" is the Cybermen.
And they are a tragic race who tried to improve themselves and eventually replaced everything in their bodies, leaving themselves with no soul.
The Cybermen were born of a sort of horror of spare-part surgery, or the fact that you might have machine augmentation to a decaying body.
Now, part of me wants to say, "Well, what would be wrong with that? That's good, that's what science does.
" But there is, I suppose, a sort of primal bit of you as a human being, saying, "you're interfering with nature.
" What happens in there? What's "upgrading" mean? What do they do? I think they remove the brain and they put it in a suit of armor.
That's what these things are.
They're us.
Next.
This is your fault! I think what I find most scary about the Cybermen is that they are us, but we have been converted into something else, converted into sort of a destructive killing machine.
In one episode, it started off fairly innocuously enough, with James Corden and the Doctor sort of working in a department store.
And people keep on disappearing.
Aah! No, I'm not intelligent! You don't want me! Do not fear -- we will take your fear from you.
You will be like us.
And eventually they work out that it's the Cybermen stealing people and creating more Cybermen.
James Corden is actually captured by a Cyberman, and he's drawn in, and the process of conversion, I think, is very, very painful, from the screams of terror you hear coming out.
Make it stop! Please make it stop! And you realize that, you know, he is one step away from losing his humanity and becoming a Cyberman.
Craig! And the only thing that stops that process from happening is, he hears his baby crying.
And suddenly he sort of fights back.
What is happening? What's happening, you metal moron -- a baby is crying, and you'd better watch out, because guess what -- ha ha! Daddy's coming home! Alfie! The Daleks, of course, are cyborgs, this idea of, of part biology, part technology.
And that's something that resonates deeply with people.
Lord and creator of the Dalek race.
Death is coming.
Ho ho.
I can see it.
Everlasting death for the most faithful companion.
A hard-core "Doctor Who" fan, I would always say, my favorite monster are the Daleks, of course.
They just are, and really, has there been a more successful Sci-Fi monster in all of Sci-Fi? I mean, I know they look like trundling bits of '60s pop art, but my God, they work.
And they work for, you know, the new kids and the old kids.
Everybody loves the Daleks.
It's amazing.
The resurrection of the master race! There is something about the Daleks that is inherently evil.
All hail the new Daleks.
All hail the new Daleks.
They don't have hands, they don't have eyes.
There's nothing to -- it's like insects.
You look at them, and they're creepy because you don't identify with them at all.
And also, it was in the sound of their voice.
Scan reveals nothing.
TARDIS self-destruct device nonexistent.
This kind of voice that was relentless.
It would not stop, there was no intonation in the tone and it would grow and it would grow.
You are the Doctor.
You must be exterminated.
They are so angry.
They just want to destroy everything.
I like his single-mindedness.
Blimey.
What do you do to the ones who mess up? It's a robot that rants.
It's a tank that hates you.
It's a highly emotional piece of machinery.
It's got a slug inside.
Question is, what do we do now? Either you turn off your clever machine, or I'll blow you and your new paradigm into eternity.
And yourself.
Occupational hazard.
Scan reveals nothing.
TARDIS self-destruct device nonexistent.
All right, it's a Jammie Dodger, but I was promised tea.
I think the process of us becoming cyborgs has already begun.
Already, we have prosthetic limbs, because of people with injuries and diseases.
Also, we have cochlear implants.
We can actually give back the gift of hearing to people that are deaf.
And so we already have senses that can be augmented by implants.
And it's real, because they're putting chips into people, there's chips in people to identify -- they're putting stuff in your eyes, where, you know, you know, when you go to work, something can recognize your eyes.
You can already see limbs being controlled by electrical signals in the brain.
Now they're -- now they have arms that move, that actually move, like, they can pick things up.
It's not like, you know, before, the prosthetic, it wouldn't even move.
Now it's like, it's actually moving.
For the cyborg experiment, what I had was this little device.
It's actually 100 pins fired into my nervous system, and it linked my nervous system to different pieces of technology.
So one experiment we did was that, when I opened my hand and closed my hand, my brain signals were also sent out to the robot hand to open and close that.
As long as the implant is in the right place in the brain, there's all sorts of different ways and things you can be thinking about that could operate technology, that could switch on devices, that could do anything you want -- control a vehicle, perhaps -- directly from your brain.
These little robots, these have computers for a brain.
It has a goal in life -- move forward and don't bump into anything.
But it has to figure out what to do with its wheels in order to achieve that.
But what's really exciting now is that we've replaced the computers as the brains of the robot with biological brains.
We actually take brain cells -- these are living brain cells -- from rat embryos, and then place them in this dish.
We will then link it to its physical robot body.
I don't know that we're initially ourselves trying to create a dalek, but this is a cyborg of a type.
It's part technology, part biology.
The show kind of warns against that and allowing that technology into our bodies.
It's a warning, the show.
Cybermen will occupy every landmass of this planet, but you need not fear.
Cybermen will remove fear.
Cybermen will remove sex and class and color and creed.
The idea of implanting things into us to sort of improve it, it's a double-edged sword.
On one hand, it could be really great.
It can improve functionality of the human body, our frail human bodies.
But on the other hand, the idea of implants -- it has sinister overtones.
Can we -- will we end up being controlled by By people who -- who we don't want to control us? You will become identical.
You will become like us.
The potential of implants is huge.
We think of sort of mechanical things -- we think of sort of implants for arms and legs.
But if you start having implants for intelligence You could end up with a situation where you have almost two races -- the race with the superior intelligence, the superior bodies, able to do a lot more, and then us everyday people, just the organics, who sort of -- in a situation like that, how will the world be divided? I think the probability of cyborgs is 4.
9.
You know, I give it a five, because it's already happening.
It's being done.
The technology is there.
The question is how far we'll take it.
Scientifically, I think we could probably -- the probability is a four or a five.
But ethically, I think that's what's going to, hopefully, hold us back, and we will use it wisely.
I can't speak to whatever wondrous day -- I think it was in "Fury From the Deep" -- that the Doctor first produced a sonic screwdriver from his pocket.
But what a moment of genius, because it sort of -- it sort of sums him up.
It's inherently absurd, and it's not aggressive.
The Doctor will open the ark! The Doctor will not.
You have no way of resisting.
Well, you got me there, although there is always this.
A sonic probe? That's screwdriver.
You get to a door -- ah, it can unlock the door.
It can perform medical scans, in case you want to check yourself out.
Very, very useful.
It just rises to the occasion.
It is harmless.
Oh, yes, "harmless" is just the word.
That's why I like it.
Doesn't kill, doesn't wound, doesn't maim.
But I'll tell you what it does do.
It is very good at opening doors.
I'd like to see the user manual, myself.
Because I think with every new series of "Doctor Who," it grows.
I have a sonic screwdriver, uh, from the Tom Baker era, which has moving parts and looks just like it, and is in my drawer right now.
Oh, a new one.
He's really just got the world's best penknife.
But being the Doctor, he'd never carry something that had the word "knife" in it.
Well, this has been referred to by some people as a sonic screwdriver.
What does "sonic" mean? It means, "sound.
" And we are here, using sound waves to apply forces to objects.
And we are levitating things with sound.
Every time I do this experiment, I'm amazed that here are these things -- they're hovering in free space.
In principle, we could lift much bigger things with this kind of technology.
You could easily lift humans, houses.
Quite why you'd want to do that is a mystery to me.
In the research we're doing here, we're actually interested in moving smaller objects, like cells and nanoparticles.
The ability to create synthetic organs that could be readily transplantable would revolutionize human health.
So we're catching up with the Doctor, but some of his capabilities are well out of our reach.
So, yeah, I do have a bit of sonic screwdriver envy.
You good dog.
Affirmative.
K9 -- "K"-"9" -- which is, you know, short for "canine," like a dog, it's like a robotic dog that's sort of like his friend, that gives him advice, that warns him.
No affirmative possible, master.
K9 looks like a parallelogram, walks around.
It can wag its tail, and it's got two satellites for ears.
One is a directv satellite and the other's a whisper 2000 so he doesn't have to ask people to speak up at crowded restaurants.
There was an episode in a school where I think the creatures -- batlike creatures -- they turned into batlike creatures -- I think they were called Krillitanes.
They're flapping 'round the room, and the companions and some other people are trapped within the room -- and suddenly K9 has a laser in his nose and starts zapping them.
K9! Suggest you engage running mode, mistress.
Come on! They fall down, and the people are able to escape.
Affirmative, master.
Maximal defense mode.
Most of the things we see in "Doctor Who" seem like sort of the future.
They seem a long, long way away.
Whereas K9, I think, is the exception to this.
He's got a bit of computer interface, but he does travel along on coasters.
As a space scientist, I work on projects where we're making autonomous machines to travel over the martian surface.
They can climb over rocks, they can work out their own route.
They're just so much more advanced than K9.
So I think this is one example where the science fiction is actually "gazumped" by the science fact.
The little dog with the nasty bite.
Shh! Don't say we surpass K9.
He's from the year 5000.
I suppose, from the moment they've said that was possible, we've all sat and quaked and thought, "and what if they make another me?" People are always saying, when I'm getting riotously behind in my deadlines, "it would be great if we could clone you.
" And I always think, "Yeah? Would it? Not so great for me.
" I wouldn't like for there to be two of me.
What if the other one's better? Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Inevitably.
See, I'm glad we're on the same -- wavelength, you see, great minds.
Exactly.
In a recent program, the Doctor was cloned.
So, what now, Doctor? Well, time to get cracking, Doctor.
And so, you know, you talk about the real, original Doctor and the clone Doctor.
In my mind, they are both the real Doctor.
How can you both be real? Well, because we are.
I'm the Doctor.
Yeah, and so am I -- we both contain the knowledge of over 900 years of memory and experience.
We both wear the same bow tie, which is cool.
Because bow ties are.
And always will be.
Neither one is any more original than the other.
The cloned Doctor isn't a cheaper rough copy of the original.
What? Interesting, you definitely feel more affection for him than me.
No, no, I -- look, you're fine and everything, but he's the Doctor.
Either one of them has equal rights of claiming to be the real Doctor.
This acid is so dangerous, we were losing a worker every week.
So now we mind the acid using these doppelgangers, or "gangers.
" If these bodies get burned or fall in the acid -- Then who the hell cares? Right, Jen? There is one episode where there are people who have, I think, "ganger" and these are effectively clones of themselves.
Motor functions online.
Plumbing in.
These clones aren't generated in the usual sorts of ways.
They actually come together out of goo.
And they have the senses, they have the memories, of the person they've been cloned from.
And they use them as sort of disposable people.
They go into sort of dangerous places.
If they get zapped, it's a bit unfortunate, but you can always make another one.
And it must be that horrible feeling when you realize, "I'm the copy.
I'm not the real entity.
" Twins are clones, but they're still different, so it doesn't guarantee that if I make a clone of myself, that it's going to act like me or be like me or even necessarily look like me.
It could look just slightly like me.
You hear of people who have loved ones who've passed away.
Perhaps you want to recreate that person.
But for that, cloning isn't enough.
When you clone someone, you recreate a genetic model, like an identical twin.
But if that twin lives in very different circumstances, they won't have the same experiences that shaped the person you've lost.
What is that? So they could turn out to be a very different person.
Similar characteristics, maybe, but still a very different person.
Discarded flesh.
Faulty, probably.
Just thrown away.
Look at them.
One of my old gangers.
We can clone most farm animals.
Most pets can be cloned.
We can clone horses, dogs, cats.
But primates -- that's where the dividing line is.
At the present time, we have not been able to clone a primate, let alone a human.
I don't think that's going to happen, and if it does happen, I don't think it's going to happen for many years, because of the ethical issues.
Who is that person? Are they an entity in their own right? Can they have voting rights? Who are they? The issue, of course, is whether we'd ever want to clone.
And I think that's something that has to be in place.
Not all science, just because something is possible, is a good idea.
Just because we could build atom bombs doesn't mean we should have built atom bombs.
So having the scientific knowledge is one thing.
What you do with it is the really important issue.
Leaving all the horrendous ethical issues aside, on a scale of one to five, is cloning possible? Yes.
Five.
Well, it's five, because we can clone.
It's there.
In fact, I am a clone.
The real Dallas isn't here at all.
The real Dallas is having a lot of fun.
He's in the pub downstairs.
I say to myself, "when will we have this technology? When will we have cloning, immortality, cyborgs, invisibility?" And I say, "yeah, in a few centuries, we'll have almost all these technologies.
" I don't think we could ever become time lords.
But I think the places he visits, the futures he sees and shows us, are very plausible and possible and likely.
There was a time where science fiction seemed like so -- like it was so far away, like this was a world that we would never be able to reach.
But it's almost parallel to what's going on nowadays.
Soall of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will.
Where do you want to start? If I had one trip in the TARDIS and I could go anywhere in time, I think I'd like to go 1,000 years into the future.
To me, the future looks bright, and the future looks technological.
And I'd like to see where all our technological advances get us.
I think it'd be great to be his companion if we were just going to go to leisure planets or go visit, like, a Beatles concert.
But I don't know if I could -- after the first torture, I think I might say, "I'm going to skip this next one.
" When I was young, that's all I ever thought about.
But I think running the show is probably enough time travel for me.
But, yes, you would, you would.
If he offered you, said, "come and see all of time," of course you'd go, of course you would.
You'd spend the rest of your life regretting it if you didn't.
I would specify, "only safe planets.
"