Abstract
The above is an excerpt from the screenplay of The Fifth Element, a Luc Besson sci-fi epic set in the twenty-third century. In a universe threatened by evil, the only hope for mankind is the Fifth Element/Supreme Being, who visits Earth every 5000 years to protect humans with four stones of the four elements: fire, water, earth, and air. The movie begins with a Mondoshawan spacecraft on its way to Earth to bring back the Fifth Element but the spaceship is destroyed by the evil Mangalores. Fortunately, some genetic material of the Fifth Element is salvaged and a team of scientists use the DNA remains to rebuild (bioprint) the Supreme Being, Leeloo, which is what is happening in the above excerpt.
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Notes
- 1.
It has been estimated that a copy of a human, functionally indistinguishable from the original, could be constructed from 1016 bits of information. That’s a petabyte—a lot of data, but not beyond comprehension. One petabyte = 1024 terabytes (Tb). The going price for a 1 Tb hard drive today is less than $ 100.
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Seedhouse, E. (2014). Printing Humans. In: Beyond Human. Science and Fiction. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43526-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43526-7_6
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