My Theory

[Rev]

I have a theory regarding the techno-organic nature of the Maximal from Beast Machines, it goes like this. They are silica/metal based lifeforms as oposed to our carbon based nature. Still a 100% organic design but based on different materials that can interact in different ways, "It's life Jim but not as we know it"

Anyone else got any interesting theories that put a technical spin on a fictional multiverse or want to comment on this one?

[Dr. James Hook]

Fact of the matter is, organic, when you're talking chemistry, means a carbon compound. If you have something that doesn't contain any carbon, it's not organic. (This is why 'organic' food drives me batty - just about all food contains carbon, unless you're talking about table salt! I wish they would just call 'organic' food 'pesticide-free' or 'hormone-free' or whatever. Much less confusing terminology.)

Moreover, terrestrial life actually does contain a lot of metal. You can pick up the iron in someone's blood with an airport metal detector if you tune it right. Calcium, found in bones and in signaling, is a metal. Lots of other metals, like magnesium and zinc, are important, too.

That, and there are some wasps that naturally have zinc stingers to make it easier to drill into trees to lay their eggs.

So, if they're not carbon-based, they are, by definition, not organic.

On the flipside of things, carbon is often found in steel alloys, although steel alloys are not considered organic, because the carbon is an interstitial, as opposed to covalently bonded.

[Hellbender]

"Organic" is also an art term, I believe, to describe things that look like they flow or have grown, as opposed to being manufactured or built.

However, when talking about lifeforms, "organic" seems to suggest "carbon-based" life. On the other hand, most sci-fi writers will use 'carbon-based' rather than 'organic' if there's other possibilities in their universe. And given the terminology sloppiness in shows made to sell children toys, they could have meant a lot of things.

[Rev]

Well Ive certainly been put in my place XD
Okay then, I'll expand and say that a carbon based lifeform refers to the molecules formed with Carbon as the base (namely proteins) and not merely containing Carbon like steel does, and that My BM Tfs are Silica based lifeforms. (my understanding is that Silica has four covalent bonds just like Carbon and in theory is capable of similar chemistry)

[Tarantulas]

You're right about silicon chemistry, it's right below carbon on the periodic table and also forms four stable bonds.

I always figured that the Beast Machines Maximals were some sort of kooky cyborgs or something, like Transmetals but even moreso. I dunno. I never really thought too hard about it. A wizard did it or something.

[Lynn Deanna Payne]

Silicon does have four bonds like carbon, but it has a different electronegativity and a different mass, which means that some of the chemistry that is possible with carbon is not possible with silicon. You can't just do a 1:1 swap of carbon to silicon and get similar compounds out.

I'm not going to say that silicon-based life is impossible, although my chemistry teacher was pretty dubious of the idea due to the different bond strengths, but it would certainly be a lot different than carbon-based life, perhaps unrecognisable.

[Rodimus Prime]

In the Star Trek universe, silicon-based lifeforms are big rocky turd-looking things!

Personally, I've always figured that BW Maximals/Predacons are basically robots on the inside with animal mode 'shells' (even if they're not technically shellformers) that consist of a combination of artificially-created organic matter and out and out pseudo-organic matter to give the appearance of genuine biological constructs, fool sensor readings, and protect against energy emanations that would be harmful to more purely mechanical devices. Canon seems to more or less suggest that this is the case (as exactly as canon built to sell toys for kids can support any science or semi-science or even pseudo-science based approach) as well. Incidentally, G1 Pretender shells are shown to do the exact same thing (yes, even the energy protection thing - this was the explanation for why the Pretenders and other characters with organic ties made it through the Underbase Saga injured but alive, while the purely mechanical Transformers were out for the count), showing that the idea wasn't really as new in Beast Wars as the writers seemed to want us to believe, but on the other hand, it works rather well from an in-canon technological evolution standpoint - BW Maximal and Predacon tech is a pretty clear outgrowth of the G1 Pretender and G1 Micromaster technologies.

Beast Machine Maximals are pretty much completely different animals, ha ha pun intended. I tend to take the approach that the question isn't one of silicon vs carbon, though, and not just for reasons that Bambi went into. The show seems to present them as basically semi-biological or even mostly-biological (since the whole show was a big old hippy nature vs machine allegory, anyway), which I've always tended to picture as biomatter held into necessary form and function by programmable nanotech. That is, there are microscopic machine bits in there that give all the organicness its marching orders, which, while in a single form, is what tells one body part to be the computer-brain, another body part to the spark chamber, another body part to be the eyes, and so forth, and also allows for the sort of flowing transformations you see, as the nanites reconfigure those body parts that require changing for the new form.

This also makes them a real bitch to repair, and rather bizarrely, makes them worse at converting biological material into usable fuel than the Beast Wars guys were. I don't get what's up with that, beyond bad writing. It's not hard to convert biomatter into usable fuel - most of our real world fuels are derived from ultimately biological sources if you go back far enough (cars eat dinosaurs, doan'cha'know), so it makes sense that the BW guys could do it. Then suddenly organic food sources made Beast Machine guys all crazy-like. Dunno.

Mind you, while there were aspects of Beast Machines I enjoyed, I don't actually care for their take on Transformers, because the whole 'biotech > mechanical tech in every conceivable way' mindset that's been prevalent in sci-fi for the last couple of decades drives me batty, and sometimes I just like my thinking, feeling robots to manage to be thinking, feeling robots without having to 'justify' it by making them all biomassy, but that's largely a personal taste thing.

Edited because my spelling sucks. Shockingly, Microsoft Word doesn't recognize 'biomassy' as a real word!

[Starscream (Movie)]

As long as we are being scientific about our toy-selling transforming robots (which is a favorite past-time of mine) I would like to point out that cars eat trees, not dinosaurs. By the time we had dinosaurs, bacteria had figured out how to eat dead trees so they wouldn't turn into car food. Dinosaurs mostly turn into rocks, which are not delicious for cars, but are super-nourishing for natural history museums.


Also, biomassy should totally be a word. Someone write to Webster's.

[Rodimus Prime]

Well, okay. Trees, not dinosaurs. But the general gist of my point still stands: it's not weird that fully mechanical or even just psuedo-biological robots can convert biological matter into fuel because they often do already, which makes it all the weirder that the 'technorganic' robots couldn't!

[Shanodin]

*ahem*

As the person who plays the only Beast Machines Maximal represented, I think I should weigh in on this discussion. Science aside (and let's face it, TF does to science what Shockwave does to logic), there are some key holes in your theory, holes poked by the canon itself.

Beast Machines Cybertron has an organic core, ie, it is at heart a planet just like earth. We see trees, fruit, and plants growing below the ordered and mechanical surface. This plant life is weak and young, but it is real plant life. It is not a technorganic blend.

Yes, Beast Machines is blatant green vs machine propaganda. I get this. It is also about balance. When Megatron (figurehead for sterile godless mechanical order) and Optimus (figurehead for the hippie dippy trippy world-worshiping crowd) both fall into Cybertron's core, they are absorbed into the planet and so restore balance to it. The entire planet becomes a blend of the mechanical and the organic.

From Botanica's wiki entry:

In plant mode, Botanica is colored in brilliant green and gold. She is tall and lithe, with a collar of vines around her neck, and more vines that wind from just below her chest to meld into a root-like system in place of feet. Her arms are bifurcated at the elbow, and her eyes parti-colored- one green, one gold. Her head, chest and arms are gold, the rest green.

In robot mode, she more closely resembles the lily flower she took her alt-mode from. Her gold head rests in the center of a green "petal," beneath which is another petal, lilac in color. "Leaves" form her shoulders, and instead of splitting at the elbow, her hands are split at the wrist. Her torso is in greens and purples, and she has a long elegant skirt in the same scheme, which replaces her roots. Her robot mode is almost entirely translucent, and her whirling spark can often be seen within her chest. She still doesn't have feet. She floats!

She doesn't have sigil.

Her transform is unique enough to be worth mentioning. It is less a traditional transform, and more along the lines of a fluid shapeshift. Her arms and vines fold in and up and retract or fuse into parts of her robot mode. The whole process is rather elegant, even compared to her fellow Maximals', and is accompanied by a soft burst of white light.

Examination of reformatted Botanica in both modes brings up a few things. In plant mode, her skin is soft and pliant, and appears shot through with tiny wires and filaments. In robot mode, the wires and filaments are still visible, but her form seems much less flexible and she floats. Her body conducts electricity in both modes; she can weld items with her collar lines in plant mode, and fire chain lightening in robot mode. She has a very fine network of fluid lines, much like our blood vessels. As Rodimus mentioned, BM Maximals are very hard to repair, and have to be treated much in the way one would treat a human or animal.

My extrapolation based on canon is that the Oracle reformatted the BM Maximals by fully integrating their BW shells and their robot forms- and then separating them again into two different forms. This is why a) the transform is not a shifting of parts about, but a full form slip and b) why they have no subspace capabilities- subspace has been co-opted to store an entire other body, and the consciousness simply slips between the two. (this will probably never come up in DZ, BTW, unless something odd happens)

That said, they are technorganic. If they were entirely just non-carbon based, then they wouldn't need that distinction. They'd be a technological mechanism mimicking an organic organism. Botanica wouldn't set off a normal metal detector any more than we would, unless it was more finely tuned, and she has organic tissue blended with living circuitry.

And again, as the only BM Maximal player, I think my opinion on body makeup is kinda the one that matters at the moment.

[Skystrike/Skylar Stringers]

Well, the dictionary says a machine is “an apparatus consisting of interrelated parts with separate functions, used in the performance of some kind of work: a sewing machine.”

I think the whole organic vs machine thing is more dependant on what kind of machines we’re talking about these days. Machines aren’t only metals and plastic anymore. If we make a machine entirely out of organic components (e.g. wood), would it still not be a machine?

We can even go so far as to make a machine entirely out of living organic tissue, say, GMOs. A living machine. They are still consisted of different parts (albeit, fleshy) with separate functions created to perform a task -probably the edible kind in the case of a lot of GMO's, but nobody says tasks always have to be noble.

It makes the whole living organism vs machine concept entirely null to be honest, since a machine can be a living organism and a living organism can be a machine. There’s no need for ‘balance’ either, since both concepts are not mutually exclusive in the same way that good and evil can be.

I personally think it would make more sense if it was the value of sentience vs ... something else. Or 'human style morality' vs 'paperclip maximizer'?

[Springer]

To do something totally different to sell toys!

*Dodges thrown objects*

[Rodimus Prime]

Just because biological organisms are a sort of machine and because mechanical/metalic machines can be thought of as having a sort of 'life function' does not make the whole 'biological vs non-biological' concept 'entirely null', because these things are not exactly the same thing. If you make your definitions broad enough and your categories loose enough, yes, you can categorize them together, but if you take just about any two anythings and make your definitions broad enough and your categories loose enough, you can categorize them together. That's like saying that the whole concept of orange vs apple is invalid because they're both fruit. I don't always like to make my definitions that broad when discussing these things, and the fact that you can make tyhe definitions broader doesn't make the process of having the discussion invalid.

In more quantifiable terms, specifically, in game terms, Beast Warriors are not the same things as Beast Machine Maximals are not the same thing as the more purely mechanical Transformers, even if they are all Transformers and have a sort of common life-energy.

[Dr. James Hook]

Here's the thing. Yes, all living beings, even little bacteria, are machines, insofar as they do work upon their surroundings. Not work like job work, but energy exchange. However, while all living beings are machines, not all machines are living beings.

It actually gets kind of weird, trying to apply the traditional definition of a living being to Transformers. There are a lot of definitions of life, but I think it's not unfair to settle on something like a sufficiently complex being capable of reproducing, except in cases of sterility. So yeah, mules are alive; they're just sterile. Quartz is not alive; it's not complex enough, even if crystals grow. Viruses are not alive; they need to hijack other things to reproduce.

Transformers can reproduce on their own, see Ratchet and Wheeljack building the Dinobots, the Constructicons building Trypticon, and super-genius Grimlock building the Technobots - none of them had Vector Sigma, the Matrix, or the AllSpark to help them. However, the vast majority of Transformers are effectively sterile, because they're not smart enough to build new Transformers from scratch. This doesn't make them less alive; non-reproducing ants and termites are certainly still alive, because there are other members of their species who aren't sterile.

So Transformers are living machines, because they're complex and they can make more of themselves without hijacking the reproductive functions of other creatures (viruses, boo).

But I've gone off-topic. There's certainly a difference between a techno-organic Transformer, a Beast Wars era Transformer, a Pretender, and a 'normal' Transformer, a difference in what they're made out of, and the original question was, "Well, what are techno-organic Transformers made out of?"

Certainly, if the 'organic' part if to be trusted, a lot of carbon compounds. If the 'techno' component is to be trusted, one would assume some amount of wires, integrated circuits, et cetera, which seems to bit with Botanica pointing out the wires under the skin.

So I would suggest that techno-organic Transformers are particularly well-integrated cyborgs, who have a mix of organic tissue and non-organic components on a particularly fine level.

[Skystrike/Skylar Stringers]

To do something totally different to sell toys!

Hush, we’re over-analyzing stuff here!

Just because biological organisms are a sort of machine and because mechanical/metalic machines can be thought of as having a sort of 'life function' does not make the whole 'biological vs non-biological' concept 'entirely null', because these things are not exactly the same thing.

I wasn’t really arguing that they were the same thing. They are different according to the material that they are made from. You can have different kinds of machines in the same way that you can have different species of animals. However, what material a machine or a living organism is created from doesn’t really have an impact on whether or not they are machines or living organisms. It might affect what they are made to do, how efficient they are at it and what they can do and whether or not they are environmentally friendly (for us? For the Cybertronians?), but does not affect whether or not they are machines/living organisms.

I was really more addressing the issue in BM, that says organic and machine somehow need to be balanced, as if they were dark and light sides of the force. The show’s creators were definitely going for ‘created artificially vs created by nature’ but what is ‘created naturally’ on a world created artificially? What is the purpose of creating a balance between two concepts that actually overlap each other at times rather than being opposites- and especially in a setting that doesn’t even need it?

Its like trying to ‘balance’ desert animals with parts of sea animals because the desert is too dry and we think they need more sea.

So I would suggest that techno-organic Transformers are particularly well-integrated cyborgs, who have a mix of organic tissue and non-organic components on a particularly fine level.

Definitely this. They could still be entirely organic if their wires and stuff were made from organic compounds rather than inorganic compounds but the organic/inorganic blend would make more sense considering the history of the race.