A lot of the story and setting is taken almost _word for word_ from Sabres of Paradise, which takes place in the Caucuses, before the soviet union existed and before America got involved in the middle east.
> Respectfully I think this is reading too deep into it. Herbert borrowed Arabic words and concepts to build a hardy middle-eastern-adjacent culture, it's hardly the focus of the book.
Conlangs are cool and all and I haven't seen the new movie yet, but the thing that sort of annoyed me about the first one is that the book is _heavily_ inspired by a non-fiction book called Sabres of Paradise, about an islamic uprising against the Russian Empire:
And the book is _full_ of arabic, persian and russian terminology, and Islamic cultural and religious references, and the director and screenwriter have said that it's basically orientalism and ornament and they've gotten rid of it because it's distracting, but I don't think it's ornament, and I think the Islamic influences on the Fremen are a core part of the story, and it's missing a lot without it.
The book is meant to be about _our future_ and the fact that Muslims still exist and are important in the future isn't just like "flavor", it was an innovative idea at the time in science fiction and still is.
It just seems kind of wrong to expend so much thought inventing new languages for the movie when it had so much context and culture already there to use.
Room temperature superconductivity, like quantum computing, fusion power, and em drives, and other similar "magic" technologies, have one thing in common, which is that the potential consequences of their existence are positive, substantial, and relatively easy to explain and to comprehend, while the difficulties preventing those technologies from seeing the light of day are complex, difficult, and a "bummer" to hear about.
There's a lot of "somethings" that could be the case without it having anything to do with actual aliens existing. The two broad categories would be that it's an intentional cover story for something meant to be secret, either legitimate research or some kind of corruption -- or it's sincere crackpot research in the government, of which there are plenty of examples, from paranormal research to ordinary pseudoscience.
I feel like the UFO thing is fairly bipartisan, and also I don't think a particularly good distraction for anything, because nobody is paying much attention to it. Maybe it's a fun distraction for the congresspeople. I know if I was in congress, this would be the highlight of my week and I don't believe any of it.