Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for science fiction and fantasy enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
In Blade Runner (1982), Deckard used the Voight-Kampff test to detect Replicants. This complicated test verified if their emotional response was appropriate. But they also displayed superhuman capabilities, were shown to take a lot more damage than humans can, and so on.
Why is it so hard to detect them if they have enhanced physical capacity? Wouldn't that enhanced capacity imply some physiological difference? Or why not just test their capacity directly?
In the book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, it is said that androids can be detected with a bone marrow sample.
However, the police cannot by law do it on someone on mere suspicions. The Voight-Kampff test is non-invasive, so it's a far preferable method.
It is much easier to fake a lower capacity than a higher capacity.
How do you test for superhuman strength? All a replicant would have to do is say "this is too heavy for me!" even if it wasn't. You can't put them in situations where they would be harmed by not demonstrating superhuman strength, because anyone who wasn't a replicant would therefore be harmed.
How do you test for an increased capacity to sustain damage? You can't go around beating or shooting people and measure how well they survive.
Even a detailed physical examination is unlikely to detect physiological differences. As we saw from the scene with Chew, the body parts are organic, and the result of genetic engineering. You can't do something as simple as run them under a metal detector.
The most reliable way is to focus on what replicants can't do as well as humans, and that is demonstrate a normal range of emotions.
I do not think that anything depicted could be considered "superhuman". While the average overweight Cheetos-eating couch potato would be incapable of these feats, they're all within the limits of what's humanly possible (though at the edge). Extraordinary athletes in peak condition would be able to match them.
In other words, the structures and muscles that allow them to do this won't appear inhuman when examined. Probably not even under a microscope.
Hunting for replicatants in this fashion would be identical to getting rid of every exceptional athlete in the world.
I know this is an old thread, but I don't think we've explored one possible physical difference - resistance to high and low temperatures.
In one scene, Leon puts his hand into a deadly freezing substance, but doesn't suffer any effects. In another, Roy puts his hand into boiling water. Wouldn't their skin have to be different to withstand that?
If it was, you should be able to take a small sample of skin and see the differences under a microscope.
Why not put a frigging Wallace Industries sign on their foreheads and if people don't like this aesthetically, then make it invisible in normal light. Why not put an explosive charge in their heads that detonates whenever the owner says the key word?
There are a million ways to at least make them reliably identifiable and probably to defend ourselves from them. You give them a key word that has to be periodically spoken to prevent a charge from going off and another key word, in case they hold you in tied up to a chair and tortured that you can utter that makes the gram of TNT next to their heart maybe explode and you don't even tell the replicant it's there. Why wouldn't these ideas protect humans from replicants?
SO THE ANSWER to the question is it is a plot contrivance: the makers of replicants deliberately wanted them to seem human, maybe even wanted them to be unidentifiable so they could be used to infiltrate enemy barracks. They are hard to identify because every way of identifying them was considered by Tyrell and circumvented so that all that is available is a V-K test that takes an hour to administer and may result in the test giver being offed.
