Cybernetics

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Revision as of 04:58, 3 July 2006

The science of replacing lost or damaged limbs or organs with mechanical analogues.

Often seen as a second option to tissue replacement through Genetic Engineering, cybernetics has several advantages and disadvantages.

The advantages: There is a slight increase in durability. However, there is an attendent decrease in flexibility, and the need for maintenence. Immediate availability. Most cybernetics that are not immediately to hand can be constructed in a relatively short period, with a turnaround of days at most. Cloned replacements, on the other hand, can require a period of several months to grow and test thouroughly for defects. As well, if people are without an organ or limb for extended periods of time while growing replacements, there can be a period of recalibration as they grow used to their newly returned facilites.

Disadvatages: Expensive: Comparatively expensive, the high level of technical competence at all levels of creation cause increased costs. Visible: Although some efforts were initially made to attempt to replicate human texture and appearance, the difficulties in mimicing these traits while retaining the ability to feel sensation, pressure, and temperature are limited, and in those attempts made there was always something immediately visible just... off. Therefore, most cybernetics chose functionality over fashion. Reduced sensitivity. While all attampts are made to replicate human sensation, it is not always possible to do this prescisely. As such, sensation through cybernetic replacements can sometimes be quite different to that expected or experienced.

Curiously, due to military practice of providing its members who become injured with cybernetic replacements in order to reduce their convalescence time, there has grown a pattern of military members retaining their prosthetics as something to set them apart. This is in much the same way as members of other social subgroups have adopted patterns of clothing, tattooing, or other visual medium of differentiation. Possibly it is due to this reason that Military grade cybernetics are generally of much higher grade than civilian grade.

Although popular culture frequently shows Augmentation through cybernetics, particularly in the popular Jake Danger series of cartoons, the reality is that cybernetic augmentation carries so many attendant difficulties and is so immediately visibly obvious that is would be impractical to carry out.