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Feb. 25th, 2009 03:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vitruvian23Well, after this week's ep, I might be about ready to give up on Heroes. I'll probably give the rest of Fugitives a chance out of sheer inertia, but if it takes me a while to watch eps on the DVR, I won't be sad. Not worth staying up to watch it live any longer, that's for sure.
For some reason, though, I was thinking about a conundrum from the first season... just how are people finding all the superhuman mutants?
Chandra Suresh apparently assembled his list(s) by looking at donor genetic information from the Human Genome Project. Of course, that right there tells us that the HGP is very different in the Heroesverse than in our own. In our world, the government-funded HGP only collected white blood cells from about 40 donors, and only used the DNA from 4 of them. Even the 'libraries' part, which used more donors for blood and sperm, anonymized them so there'd be no way of telling which donors the DNA came from. The Celera private sector program had 21 donors, and only used the DNA of 5. Even the HapMap project, which is trying to distinguish variations in single nucleotides, only took donations from 270 individuals. In order for Suresh to come up with a list (one version I've seen approaches 200 'hits') like he did requires that the donation list for the HGP in the Heroesverse be much, much larger, especially considering that the resulting list seems to capture almost every superhuman shown during the course of the series.
Just how big, though? It matters, because if there are ~200 positives for superhuman ability within a given sample size, then there are a whole lot more superhumans not captured by the list, unless superhumans have some kind of fatal attraction to donating their blood to science projects.
Clearly, there's no way that the Heroesverse Human Genome Project has blood samples from the whole 6 billion and some person population of the Earth. That would strain credulity worse than people being able to fly or freeze things with their touch.
Is 6 million donors, drawn mostly from industrialized nations (note the prevalence of Americans, Canadians, Japanese, etc. on the actual lists published on the websites) a workable number? Perhaps, but that would be one terribly well funded science project - not to mention one in blatant violation of medical privacy laws given that Suresh was able to extract not just the names but the addresses of individual donors. On the other hand, note that even this super-high figure implies (again, unless superhumans have a higher propensity for participating) that there are *one thousand times as many* superhumans in the world than can be found on the list. That's right - for every 'hero' on the list, there are 999 more that Suresh would have no means of tracking. Reduce the number of donors, and the multiple gets even larger. 600,000 donors implies a factor of 10,000, and a total of about 2 million superhuman individuals worldwide. Given that Napoleon (my nickname for 'the Hunter') has only successfully quarantined two or three of them, and perhaps killed a few dozen more, he's got his work cut out for him.
Of course, all this only speaks to the lists assembled by Chandra Suresh. The Company was supposedly operating quite successfully for many years, keeping track of dangerous superhumans and incarcerating the worst of them. Since they were doing this for a good thirty years, they can't have been dependent on the HGP for their tracking data (although it's a good bet they're behind the massive size of the donor pool for the project - perhaps Bob made some sizeable contributions to the NIH at the right time). Tracking media reports of strange occurrences could work, but not reliably, not in a timely fashion, and not without a lot of false positives. The little girl, Molly, could track individuals but I believe needed a picture or at least a name, and didn't display any Cerebro-like ability to just know the names and addresses of people with powers.
Maybe the Company had a person with Cerebro-like abilities before, and the Company's lists got salvaged by Nathan before turning the problem over to the government, but it's really not clear at all that this is the case.
For some reason, though, I was thinking about a conundrum from the first season... just how are people finding all the superhuman mutants?
Chandra Suresh apparently assembled his list(s) by looking at donor genetic information from the Human Genome Project. Of course, that right there tells us that the HGP is very different in the Heroesverse than in our own. In our world, the government-funded HGP only collected white blood cells from about 40 donors, and only used the DNA from 4 of them. Even the 'libraries' part, which used more donors for blood and sperm, anonymized them so there'd be no way of telling which donors the DNA came from. The Celera private sector program had 21 donors, and only used the DNA of 5. Even the HapMap project, which is trying to distinguish variations in single nucleotides, only took donations from 270 individuals. In order for Suresh to come up with a list (one version I've seen approaches 200 'hits') like he did requires that the donation list for the HGP in the Heroesverse be much, much larger, especially considering that the resulting list seems to capture almost every superhuman shown during the course of the series.
Just how big, though? It matters, because if there are ~200 positives for superhuman ability within a given sample size, then there are a whole lot more superhumans not captured by the list, unless superhumans have some kind of fatal attraction to donating their blood to science projects.
Clearly, there's no way that the Heroesverse Human Genome Project has blood samples from the whole 6 billion and some person population of the Earth. That would strain credulity worse than people being able to fly or freeze things with their touch.
Is 6 million donors, drawn mostly from industrialized nations (note the prevalence of Americans, Canadians, Japanese, etc. on the actual lists published on the websites) a workable number? Perhaps, but that would be one terribly well funded science project - not to mention one in blatant violation of medical privacy laws given that Suresh was able to extract not just the names but the addresses of individual donors. On the other hand, note that even this super-high figure implies (again, unless superhumans have a higher propensity for participating) that there are *one thousand times as many* superhumans in the world than can be found on the list. That's right - for every 'hero' on the list, there are 999 more that Suresh would have no means of tracking. Reduce the number of donors, and the multiple gets even larger. 600,000 donors implies a factor of 10,000, and a total of about 2 million superhuman individuals worldwide. Given that Napoleon (my nickname for 'the Hunter') has only successfully quarantined two or three of them, and perhaps killed a few dozen more, he's got his work cut out for him.
Of course, all this only speaks to the lists assembled by Chandra Suresh. The Company was supposedly operating quite successfully for many years, keeping track of dangerous superhumans and incarcerating the worst of them. Since they were doing this for a good thirty years, they can't have been dependent on the HGP for their tracking data (although it's a good bet they're behind the massive size of the donor pool for the project - perhaps Bob made some sizeable contributions to the NIH at the right time). Tracking media reports of strange occurrences could work, but not reliably, not in a timely fashion, and not without a lot of false positives. The little girl, Molly, could track individuals but I believe needed a picture or at least a name, and didn't display any Cerebro-like ability to just know the names and addresses of people with powers.
Maybe the Company had a person with Cerebro-like abilities before, and the Company's lists got salvaged by Nathan before turning the problem over to the government, but it's really not clear at all that this is the case.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 11:06 pm (UTC)As for detecting those with powers, there's still the missing Molly. Perhaps the Feds or the Company have their own Molly; perhaps Chandra himself possessed an intuitive ability to find people with abilities (though if he did, that would imply that Sylar now has that ability, and we've never seen him use it). Sadly, I doubt the current writers have worked it out to any great degree, so it will likely remain a mystery.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-25 11:29 pm (UTC)