Decipher SciFi: Recent Episodes
Decipher Media
Decipher SciFi explores the how and why in science fiction with conversations about technology, humanity, and the future. This is not a review show, nor will you see much criticism or snark. It is a rationally optimistic look, through film, at where society and technology are and where they are headed. Also, butts.
Spaaaaace
Clouds in space…? Microsoft Azure Space and Azure Orbital. Making space cheaper and more accessible with satcomm as a service.
VR
The new Oculus Quest. Past predictions. Pulling the VR market in the direction of affordability? Pandemic winter VR. Hating Facebook while embracing their VR product. Getting better at not getting sick. Experiences of unreality.
Conferencing
Virtual chewing noises. Missing irl conference-going. It’s like a vacation for adult nerds!
Food
Food preservation. Preserved dairy variations by latitude. Jerky! Appreciating controlled rot. Earthworm jerky. Roasted grasshoppers!
- About Chapulines: Wikipedia
- Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube
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AI everything
Creating a thinking, feeling artificial intelligence to do really important things for humanity like… sorting through your e-mail. N-dimensional AI chess. Rapid takeoff scenarios.
Personal Assistants
Natural language processing developments. The rise of proactive digital personal assistants. Predictive local, personal information.
Digital relationship
Virtual aural closeness. Presence and audio AR. Developments in form factor, interface, and functionality. Understanding the acoustics of spaces, materials, and your biology. Room mapping. Love, infinite attention, and generosity.
The Forehead
Feeling the heartbreak, right in the forehead.
- Her forehead scene: YouTube
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Forgetability
The valley of forgetability (The Core) between science-respecting sci-fi (e.g. Arrival) and totally bonkers nonsense (e.g. Jupiter Ascending).
Space shuttle
Landing the “flying brick.”
Bird navigation
Magnetite beaks. The possibility of quantum eyeball magnetic navigation HUDs. Corvid appreciation. Why birds don’t all fly into our windows and our eyeballs.
Pacemakers
Keeping your heart on-rhythm. Not as immediate a death sentence as portrayed.
Earth’s outer core
The absurd energies in the spinning of Earth’s core - a ball of iron the size of Mars, spinning a thousand miles an hour
That’s a whole lot of energy. If it doesn’t sound like much, let’s convert it to megatons: it’s the equivalent energy of five trillion one megaton bombs going off. Phil Plait on the spinning outer core
- Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Review of The Core: BadAstronomy.com
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Clouds in episode image from “Storm Clouds” by Albert Bierstadt/The White House Historical Association CC-O @ Wikipedia
Waffles
Belgian Waffle formula
Tasty waffles! Stank waffles! With lots of syrup! Solving food problems with casseroles. Gravy!
VR
Marveling at the Oculus Quest two 25% price drop from the last generation. Hating Facebook. Realizing the separateness of AR and VR development, even within companies working on both at the same time (Facebook). Can/will AR and VR converge and become ubiquitous?
WFH
Working from home. Surprisingly long hikes and arachnid attacks. Tiny child legs and tiny child wills.
Venus
Life on venus? The dense, deep, permanent nature of the Venusian cloud layer. The possible effect on drake equation. Looking forward to balloon probes in the Venusian atmosphere.
Ocean data
Ocean-floor data centers. The cost of infrastructure and cooling vs the cost of real estate. The value of removing humans from the environment because we’re so loud and clumsy and moist.
- Review: We do not recommend the $299 Oculus Quest 2 as your next VR system: Ars Technica
- Oculus Quest 2: Oculus.com
- Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus: Nature Astronomy
- Chemical that shouldn’t be there spotted in Venus’ atmosphere: Ars Technica
- Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success: Ars Technica
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Happy 5-year anniversary whoooooo
🥳🎉
Subluminal interstellar travel
Accelerating for half of the ride, and braking for the other half. The advantage of avoiding squishy human cargo for high acceleration. The difference between the Alucard and the Alcubierre drive technologies (hint: a miserable pile of secrets). Special floaty physics, magnets on your feet, and fake karate.
Exoplanets
Exploring the growing options for Earth-like life in the solar-system. Kepler 22b. Where did the megafauna go? Exogestation - growing babies on alien soil.
Meat stuff
Sourcing and preparing rat meat. Snails. Face/Off and changing your identity.
- Exoplanet Exploration - Planets Beyond our Solar System: NASA
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“Banana” image used in featured image with our brains by nicubunu CC-0
Josh, recently
Made a strong showing on the recent Saving Private Ryan episode over at LSG Media. Real human stuff in between the dick and fart jokes.
Teledildonics
Tales of coupled internet-connected sex toys are way up! Hooray for free and open source teledildonics at buttplug.io.
Nuclear things
Making long-lived diamond nuclear batteries from spent nuclear fuel. The banana equivalent dose of radiation. The trouble with battery-tech press releases. Eating enough grapes to give you superpowers. Buttplug archaeology. Tongue twisters. Forever-vibrating mummies and the Silurian hypothesis.
Simulations
The major leap in tech in the new MS Flight Simulator. Taking the fun out of games by making them rigorous simulations. The value of process simulations when the real thing is expensive or dangerous. Going all Ender’s Game on actual military simulations with Close Combat. Buying military might with lots of money.
Tabletop RPGs
Missing the humans-at-a-table element during the pandemic. Appreciating how much fun we had with Liam in our Mirror RPG playthrough (parts I, II, and III). And catching Josh 100% on the hook to GM for the podcast again in the future! Hooray!
- Saving Private Ryan w/ Josh: LSG Media
- The X-Files Podcast /w Josh: LSG Media
- Buttplug: an open-source standards and software project for controlling intimate hardware: Buttplug.io
- Strapped Into A Sinking Helicopter (with U.S. Marines) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
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Production
Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this film and James Cameron in general.
Classism
First, second, and third class on the same ship. Titans of industry. Runaway capitalism. The class divide and point of view before The Great War. The modern “royalty” by virtue of their wealth.
Technology
The pace of technological development in industries, especially intercontinental travel by steamship. Comparing the early 1900s to other periods of technological progress like the 1980s and 1990. Noting the nature of the automobiles in the film: literally the design of a “horseless carriage.” The cutting-edge wireless technology aboard the ship.
The ship
Three engines! Of two varieties. Steam-driven piston engines and steam-driven a turbine. Note: you cannot reverse a turbine. Peak power: 46,000 horsepower. 600 tons of coal daily. An anecdote about Mr. Diesel.
A collection of small problems
The nature of many disasters, probably including Titanic: a series of small problems, adding up to a catastrophic failure under the rigt (wrong) circumstances. Rich people hogging the Marconi wireless. Out of date lifeboat regulations. Loading lifeboats (badly). The reality of “women and children first.” Avoiding chaos until it’s too late.
Judgements
The inquiries from shortly after the event, and the great surprise you may experience when realizing that the company men consistently pushed blame back up the chain of command. Modern evidence changing our conception over time. Actually ultimately coming to the consensus that this particular ship on this particular voyage was mostly operated in a way that was totally normal in almost all respects and simply got very unlucky.
All told, it does seem that Titanic was really really well-engineered and did remarkably well under the circumstances.
- [4K,60Fps,Colorized] Titanic, First and Last Voyage, April 1912 AI Recovery, added sound: YouTube
- RMS Titanic Survivors True Accounts of The Sinking: YouTube
- RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts by the Engingeering Guy: YouTube
- Titanic - Alternate Ending: YouTube
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Fawkes mask in post image Multipainkiller Studio CC-BY
Prosthetics
Proactive prostheses in our future? Recognizing that we routinely do this with major joints, and with for a full cyberpunk limb-improvement future.
Big brother etc
Machine learning facial recognition. Fawkes machine learning facial image “cloaking.” The possible value of poisoned data sets. Placing individual bricks in the wall that is our ability be private and protect our data. Google correlating diarrhea.
Emulation
Finding a use for an old PlayStation Portable. RetroArch. The difficulty of old games and the power of limiting your options.
Our website
Our first outside code contribution! And just thanks to Elad Avron and Hugh Fisher 😄!
- Fawkes Image 'Cloaking' for Personal Privacy: Chicago.edu
- Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models (USENIX Security 2020): YouTube
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Fear of mutation
Our recent X-Men. Irl post-war nuclear anxieties. More mutant panic and more mutant supremacy bad guys.
Irradiating Earth
Not enough to make superpowers, but we sure did irradiate a lot. The clear mark of human civilization in the geological record. Past discussions of the Silurian Hypothesis.
Neanderthal interactions
2010 Neanderthal DNA news and the possibility of this informing the film. Extincting things more by accident than on purpose in pre-agricultural times. Consistent neanderthal pronunciation consistency issues.
The plan(s)
Causing global nuclear war so you can… rule over the ashes? At least the Magneto version of the plan didn’t destroy infrastructure.
Powers
The energy levels required for useful destructive resonance as a superpower. Brown-noting your enemies in combat. Once more determining that functional immortality is the best power that w actually want.
Submarining
Fitting nuclear submarines in your megayacht. Ice floes vs icebergs vs glaciers. Where to get the best ice for your drinks.
- How I Boarded a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic (ICEX 2020) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- Boarding a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- What if We Nuke a City? by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube
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3D tracking
Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscription model. Hoping for a shift.
Weather AI
Dark Sky, the honestly best of all weather apps, was bought by Apple and have shut down their Android app. It is a sad day. Open government weather data APIs enabling innovation. Machine learning weather models. Hyper-local extrapolation and push notifications. Weather forecasting/reporting as a demonstration of probabilities.
Website search
We took the bullet for our website visitors and implemented a site search on DecipherMedia.tv in JavaScript! The result: we still do not enjoy JavaScript. But we do have search! Future functionality improvements. Here is our internal documentation. And a reminder that our whole site is open source and available on GitLab!
Doom on everything
Our continuing fascination in seeing Doom on more things. And the less it makes sense, the better! Doom on Windows 95 in Minecraft, because why not.
Game feel
Game feel the book. Creating a satisfying input/response loop when all you’re really doing is mashing buttons. Vlambeer on mobile game “juice.” The relative difficulty of providing good “feel” on mobile games with a uniformly smooth display as an input device. Putting overtime into the design of basic repetitive game mechanics, e.g. Mario or God of War. New frontiers in game feel.
Game programming for kids
A wonderful, simple, directly productive introduction to core concepts: Scratch! Proud parent moments.
Jesus news
Apparently The Passion is getting a sequel? The wackiness of ecclesiastical minutiae. Discovering more schisms in Christianity.
- CamTrackAR: Apple App Store
- DecipherMedia Site Search: DecipherMedia.tv
- You Can Now Play DOOM on a Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft: InterestingEngineering.com
- Game Feel: GameFeel.com
- Vlambeer - 'The art of screenshake': YouTube
- Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks: YouTube
- Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share: MIT.edu
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Comic book movies
X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and Huge Jackedman.
Superhero physique
Belgian Blue musclecow
Roby GFDL
Blockbuster budgets and making getting swole your full-time job. Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mcelhenney being honest. Muscle cows and muscle dogs
Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to. #hollywood
-@robmcelhenney
Mutation
Mutations: usually do nothing or are bad. But also sometimes are good! Exploring the high variance in mutations in the world of X-Men. Picking the best X-Men power: raw force production vs longevity.
Wolverines
The honey badger of the north!
What happens when everything else gets his by lightning
Lichtenberg figures. Making puberty even more awkward. New-mutant death rates. Norwegian reindeer mass lightning death.
- How Lightning Can Kill 300 Reindeer With One Strike: Wired
- The Ultimate Warrior Being Crazy: YouTube
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Hacking
The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media.
Free Software
Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and open source and collaboration.
Unicode things hooray
Ranting about a user experience failure with Instacart. Text encoding, Unicode, emoji, and non-Latin writing systems. Emoji standardization. Lesbian emoji activism and the new beaver emoji!
Tattoos
Stephen Wolfram and Arrival Heptapod logogram creation. Ravens. Figuring out how to spell “Bomberman” in Heptatpod.
RPGs
Dungeons and Dragons is fun! The positives and negatives of play-by-post. A review of our (Chris’) failure with Decipher RPG. A desire to try again! Liam Ginty.
Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura
Percent!
“Percent” is literally just latin for “per hundred” and Christopher was this many years old when he realized this! And then we learn about per mille and per myriad and have to promise not to start using them.
Spotted dick
A rewarding pun-tastic etymological romp. Also it was really tasty!
Attribution
- “Six dice of various colours” used in episode image - by Diacritica CC-BY-SA-3.0
-
Decipher RPG Mirror illustration commissioned for Decipher Media by Amber Lee Jones
-
Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura: Kickstarter
- Hackers: social engineering, Kevin Mitnick, and hacking before the internet w/ Brian Epstein: Decipher SciFi
- Splatmoji - Quickly look up and input emoji and/or emoticons/kaomoji on your GNU/Linux desktop via pop-up menu.: GitHub.com
- Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #1: Decipher SciFi
- Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #2: Decipher SciFi
- Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #3 (the finale!): Decipher SciFi
- The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.: Slate
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Cashing in
Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl.
Console wars
Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a mascot in Sonic and dominating the console space, momentarily.
Sega does what Nintendon’t
- Sega, an intellectual
Sonic
Unused Sega mascot candidates, including extra-mustachey Teddy Roosevelt! Sonic character design history. Consistency in appearance and attitude over decades and how to undo it all in your first draft of your movie. Don’t forget creepy-ass original movie sonic with his creepy human teeth. VFX responsibilities and character re-renderings. Tiny blue Godzilla.
Release the butthole cut!
-Christopher
Speed
Sonic’s smagic speed powers. Comic book power levels where they expand to fit the plot. The speed of sound and relationship with atmospheric density. Creating “frozen time” action scenes. Setting the bar at Quicksilver. Sometimes, you can only care about the science as much as the movie does. Supersonic vs hypersonic vs ultrasonic and the mixing of and Latin. Running loops.
Hedgehogs
A long-term human domestication collaborator. The lovable version of a porcupine. Spikey defense mechanisms. Covering yourself in other animals’ poop for fun and profit. Allocoprophagy.
- Sonic the Hedgehog: The Animated Series Theme Song: YouTube
- Human Loop the Loop with Damien Walters: YouTube
- Console Wars by Blake J. Harris: AmazoniTunes
- SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE ™: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: YouTube
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Millhouse isolation
Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery.
Masks
Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for the lay population in China around the “Manchurian plague.” Masks failing to combat person-recognition (or probably even facial recognition 😥).
Viking grooming
That one time we did a viking episode with The other Lee. Our best historical understanding of Viking grooming standards, and how that very much differs from out contemporary depictions. BUT! The contemporary depictions are really fun so it’s ok. 👌
Corvids
The problem-solvingest birds. Ravens and other corvids and their respective quality as tattoo-subject candidates. Planning ravens on the chest/shoulders. Maybe a jackdaw sleeve?
Nazis
For real, fuck those guys. Cultural appropriation.
Butt stuff
Welcome to the Decipher Media colorectal new update. Christopher’s incoming bidet. Fiber supplmentation and chasing the ghost poop dragon. Young men living on Mountain Dew and waffles.
Demodex never poop and then explode with poop and die
- Christopher
Fitness
Testosterone levels over time. Testosterone replacement therapy. Dancing - fun for the whole family! Strength nostalgia.
VR Gaming
Again with the motion sickness.
Our website
The site is now open source! Go take a look if you’re into Jekyll or Ruby or Gitlab or generally just podcasting the hard way.
Art restoration
The unqalified Spanish art resotrers are at it again! And don’t forget the OG: [Monkey Jesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja%29). Hanlon’s razor.
Upcoming
As per our Colossus Roundtable: watch Person of Interest!
- Masking For a Friend: 99pi.org
- Our open source website code: Gitlab.com
- The Life and Times of Mr C by Andy P and Emily RG: Batch25Comics
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Tulsa Massacre
The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar.
Ozymandias
Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceships vs submarines. Catapults, trebuchets, and escape velocity.
Dr Manhattan
Ol’ bluey. Creating life. Exploring the universe when you can be everywhere and everywhen at once. How and why would anyone want to blue themselves this way? The Dr Manhattan formula from human to complete lack of concern for humanity.
Nostalgia
Chemical VR. An alternative route to Alzheimer’s treatment.
- Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable by kaptainkristian: YouTube
- Watchmen (2009 Film): iTunesPrime Video
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Computing
Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs.
Raspberry Pi4 model B
Michael Henzler / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 4.0
YouTube
Chapter-markers. Auto-generated subtitles and “free” transcription.
Memeseeks
The sad story of The Memeseeks Box. Learning how to frame what may be your “failures.”
The original Memeseeks Box logo art
Nicholas Lowe, used with permission
Robot vacuums
Both a cleaning tool and a defense against madness in the presence of eldritch horrors. “Because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.” Using the Roomba as a parenting tool. Deebot Ozmo.
Plastic Rain
It’s everywhere. Referring to our Wall-E episode with heaping portions of appreciation and concern for plastics.
Big tech
Withholding the sale of facial recognition tech from police. Bezos the nigh-trillionaire being able to afford his own ISS.
“Cartoon Room House” used in episode image background, by mixrobastudio/pixabay/CC-0
- Old Glory Robot Insurance by SNL: YouTube
- Frinkiac - The Simpsons Meme Engine: Frinkiac.com
- Master of All Science - The Rick and Morty Meme Engine: MasterOfAllScience.com
- Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain: Wired
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Self-driving cars
Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hacking autonomous vehicles.
Economics
Job competition in “knowledge work” when people live functionally infinitely and tirelessly on electricity. Loopholes for the wealthy.
Brain scanning
Electrical mapping of the brain. Desctructive neural scanning. Do we even have any other options for mapping our brain structure? Brain damage and resuscitation.
Digital personhood
Creating immortal and infinite digital slaves. Multiple instantiation of persons. Hormonal simulation. Physical, mental, and emotional growth when your life is “virtual.” Living longer and learning not to be the horrible old racist grandpa. Sense of self over time when uploaded. What virtual conditions could be so bad that it’s not worth “living” anymore? Waiting for democratized afforable versions of necessary technologies. “ROM hacking” your reality.
VR
Sharding (not sharting) your virtual worlds. Manipulating and filtering memories into re-experience. VR suit options: piezoelectric, pneumatic, and TENS.
- The Teslasuit literally shocked me by CNET: YouTube
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Fitness
Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands.
Gaming
Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. GTA V. Video game scale and budget madness. GTA 2 demo nostalgia with co-bff Joe.
John Carmack
Polymath went from game engines to cars to actual rockets to VR to AGI, and we wish him great luck on that last one. Doom nostalgia.
Dragon mission
Yay! Space! Dramatically lowering the cost of space travel. Fancy new flight suits. Are touch screens a good idea? Space travel automation expectations.
Language and POV
Enjoying the early fight and chase scenes in Extraction. The use of language and subtitles for storytelling. Video.
- The Hunt For Red October - Learning to Love the Soviets by Patrick Willems: YouTube
- Masters of Doom by David Kushner: AmazoniTunes
- Upload - for the next episode!: Prime Video
- Weekly Free Games: Epic Games Store
- Starting Strength by Makr Rippetoe: Amazon
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Deep water drilling
It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We drill kinda deep in the ocean but like, not actually deep. Record drill depths and the vast gulf from there to the Mariana Trench.
The ocean: scarier than space
Gravity meets Aliens. Pressures and temperatures that are more deadly than getting spaced out of an airlock. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled was barely deeper than Challenger Deep is under the surface of the ocean.
Living deep undersea
Nitrogen narcosis: it’s bad for you! Atmospheric mixture issues under pressure. Sealab I, II, and III. Aquanatical research. Sperm whales get the bends. Oh no your suit some kind of exploded. Monsters of the deep. Deep sea gigantism.
Construction
Engineering against 16,000 psi and freezing temperatures. Concrete strengths and saltwater issues.
Misc
Exothermic implosions - they’re like explosions, but backwards! Pistol shrimp. Long-range radio communications through water. ELF. Past discussions on the matter. Dumb infrared.
- Astronaut Scott Carpenter Speaks to President Johnson from a Helium-Atmosphere Decompression Chamber: YouTube
- Mom's Spaghetti by Eminem: YouTube
- Underwater Alternate Ending: YouTube
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Prank’d!
Kids and aliens and not understanding how pranks work. Losing your arm to a racoon attack, but then turning into a cyborg so maybe it’s okay.
Zombie satellites!
Joe shared with us this recent development in zombie satellite communications. The long-term orbital stability og geosynchronous orbit, and ssedpace “ruins” as the longest landing mark of an expired humanity.
Joy items
Huaraches! Coffe tools and supplies. Colbert’s long lost dinosaur mug.
Running Sandals!
CC-0
Ancient tattoos
Ancient tatoo princess art reconstruction. Mummification and skin art preservation.
- Long-Lost U.S. Military Satellite Found By Amateur Radio Operator: NPR
- The Wolrd Above Us - every active satellite orbiting Earth: QZ
- Siberian Princess reveals her 2,500 year old tattoos: The Siberian Times
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Nostalgia
Like all the things with Star Trek in them - feeling nostalgia for good Trek.
Prophecy/Not Prophecy
Conquering the Three Body Problem and moving on to the… eight body problem? Breaking your brain. Tidal forces and planetary ejection. Game theory: secret society, or open discussion?
Great filters
The great synthetic filter from beyond space and time.
If that’s the words, then that’s the words
Christopher Peterson
Synthetic life
Classifying the artificial intelligence of Trek’s synthetic life. Issues with anthropocentric terminology. Backing up synthetic “minds.” Finding out you’re a robot and also, somehow, simulation hypothesis.
Mortality
“To die is to be human” and other stupid nonsense. YOLO. “I’m gonna live forever ha-haaa. Wasting deaths in Star Trek.
Borg
Small-scale good-guy Borg. Dunbar limits and smaller collectives.
- The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant: YouTube
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Not just bread anymore..
But also mayonnaise! Definitively “The Best Sauce.” Coolio’s Ghettalian Garlic Bread. Japanese mayonnaise appreciation.
Miscellany
Dune set photos!. Sting’s codpiece. Manly housework. NVidia RTX Real-Time Noise-Reduction Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HA6R9NmZO80
Gaming and computing
Magic Leap disappointment and waiting for trickle-down from Enterprise. AR vs VR and chaning expectations. Oculus Quest sold-outness. Half-Life Alyx: game changer? Splatmoji. Programming your way into a Bash-hole.
Volcanoes
Volcanoes! Krakatoa exploded while we were all over here trying to figure out face masks. Remebering our Dracula episode w/ Joe Ruppel where Krakatoa brought on the “year without a summer.”
Rom Decomps
Super Mario 64 Decompilation. Decades later, the smoke fix. Figuring out why game decompilation is interesting. Appreciating harcore nerds.
- Splatmoji by Christopher Peterson: GitHub
- NVidia RTX Real-Time Noise-Reduction Demo: YouTube
- Avatarify: GitHub
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Books!
A larger time investment, generally… but high idea-load! That one time we did a book in the past. And that next one we’ll probably do in the future.
Context
Chinese science fiction. This book as the first Asian Hugo Award-winner. The difficulty of translating highly technical, crunchy hard scifi. Translation footnotes or the lack thereof in the audiobook. Prior movie adaptation from the same author on Decipher SciFi: The Wandering Earth. Adaptions, failed or otherwise. Minecraft engine magic.
Alien Communications
Inverse square law and power and focus difficulties. Reaching out way above our stellar paygrade and reaping the consequences. Scale-accurate “first contact” scenarios.
DO NOT REPLY
DO NOT REPLY
DO NOT REPLY
-An alien
The Three Body Problem
The frustation of having no closed-form solution to your planet’s gravitational situtation. The value of the scientific method. Recognizing that there is always a model. The complexity of a model may not be veyr connected with the complexity of the results it yields.
Civilizational advancement
Targeting the loci of technological advancement. Figuring out how to prevent that advancement in opposing far-away civilizations.
Math!
What if math… didn’t work anymore? Adrian’s initial frustration with this book. How totally exciting it is to discover math is broken when you’re not being tortured by aliens.
I am the best mathematician that has ever existed. There is no one better. Put my name on a mountain! I did it.
Adrian Falcone
- The Wandering Earth: altered goldilocks zones, Earth's heat budget, and smuggling pickles in your pants: Decipher SciFi
- Three Body Problem the Minecraft animated series: Season 2 @ YouTubeSeason 3 @ YouTube
- Division by Zero by Ted Chiang: Fantastic Metropolis
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What if Memento, but with nanites?
Movies post pandemic
Everything is either postponed or straight-to-streaming now. What do we expect the film industry to do after this debacle?
Comics!
The 1990s comics bubble. Chromium gimmick covers (Bloodshot was the first?).
Nano!
The difference between the magic of “nanotechnology” in 1993 and now. Being spoiled by Hollywood nanotech superpowers. Being impressed by self-mending t-shirts. Brute force superhero combat - no tactics whatsoever!
Flour
Just a heads-up, flour burns when spear in the air: Exploding Flour @ YouTube.
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Just a conversation in isolation!
Things
“Free time” for parents working from home with children. Catching up on movies and video games. Stress. Running marathons with bikes.
Remote learning, remote work, and video meetings. Bunnies and allergies in springtime. Skyrim! And immunotherapy and poisons.
Bread
Making bread while locked down! Peanut butter and jelly (jam!). Sourdough cultures. Making bread from actual ancient Egyptian yeast!
- Seamus Blackley bakes actual Ancient Egyptian bread: Twitter
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First contact
Aliens. Alien intelligence. Alien vessel shapes and what it says about the show you are about to watch. Moebius ships?
CETI
Crystalline FTL space antennae. The realities of lightspeed communication and why The SETI Institute doesn’t do “Communication with extraterrestrial intelligence.” Unexplained FTL comms.
Fumbling about space
When your crew is this good, you really should just send a ship without the humans on it instead. MapQuest in spaaaaaace being confounded by gravitational lensing. Dark matter… blocks your view sometimes? Rogue planets and how very very very dark it is in between star systems. Robinson Crusoe oxygen rocks (or crystals).
- Battlestar Galactica: iTunesAmazon
- Battlestar Galactica: curse words linguistics, formal code verification, and robo Jesus: Decipher SciFi
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The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Josh 💪😉
1917: trenches, trench rats, and modern war w/ Josh
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Current events
Our world is on the brink of some possibly extreme unpleasantness. Known unknowns threats to civilization. Humanity is bad at planning for statistically-likely-but-not-definite disaster.
Bullshit
The anti-scientific garbage that starts to overflow in the face of a public health crisis. Goop. Alex Jones. Snake oil. Homeopathy. Price gouging. Levels of understanding and respect for the severity of the current pandemic across age groups.
Epidemiology
R0, or basic reproduction number. Vulnerable sub-populations. Prisons. Social distancing. Hoarding toilet paper and… meat? The nipah virus.
Human behaviour
Social distancing. Hoarding steak and toilet paper.
Epidemiology
Historical pandemics. Rate of spead and pandemic reach in the premodern and modern worlds. Propaganda and the “Spanish Flu” of 1918. Wildlife as natural disease reservoirs. Wildlife farming and infectious disease overflow. Disease-spread mitigation. Getting germs in your holes Wash your hands!
- Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center: JHU.edu
- Why new diseases keep appearing in China by Vox: YouTube
- Medlife Crisis: YouTube
- Planet Money Podcast: NPR.org
- The Indicator from Planet Money: NPR.org
- Self-experimentation in medicine: Wikipedia
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The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring Ryan Stitt of the History of Ancient Greece Podcast 🔱
Alexander: succession, “The Great,” and sooo many Alexandrias w/ Ryan Stitt
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A review
We don’t normally do this, but…
Memory
Priming. Retrieval cues. Memory encoding, sotrage, and retrieval. Context-dependent memory. Getting drunk and finding your keys. Digital memory retrieval Facial recognition heuristics. Recognition vs reproduction.
Xenoarchaeology
Living amongst the runes. More AI! Deciphering alien technology.
- Altered Carbon: Zoltan Istvan on transplant immortality, identity, and consciousness uploading: Decipher Scifi
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Asteroids etc
Revisiting: asteroids vs meteors vs meteoroids vs meteorites vs who knows. Still confusing! How much space stuff hits Earth? Like, not just dust but things big enough to be impressed by. Who gets claim to Earth-impacting space rocks?
Panspermia
The idea that life can spread between worlds. Or maybe even stars (maybe not.)? The “soft hypothesis” of panspermia and the utility of primoridla ooze. The possibility of panspermia bringing life to primordial Earth. Cowboy scientists just leaving alien goo everywhere.
Periodic table of the elements
Chemical relationships via the periodic table. Actually-useful alternative periodic tables. Selenium toxicity, testosterone, and Brazil nuts. Arsenic. Marveling at 19th centtury arsenic popularity.
- Matcha! It's so tasty.: Wikipedia
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In which we discuss the first three episodes
Picard
We missed you Jean-Luc! Picard as the moral center of Star Trek, and the greatest of its captains.
Romulan supernova
Romulans. How to tell a Vulkan from a Romulan? Exploding stars. Detecting supernovae. The death cycle of a red supergiant. The reliability of physics across timelines/universes. The dangers of cleaving planets.
Federation Economics
“Post scarcity” with holodecks and replicators, and the realization that there is still a limited resource: energy. Star Trek Kardashev levels.
Synthetic life
Data. Lore. Data’s “daughter” from that one time on TNG. Bio-synthetic intelligent life. How important is embodiment?
- Star Trek Beyond: drone swarms, teleporters, and decompression w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi
- Star Trek First Contact: transhumanism technology and ant behavior w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi
- Star Trek IV – The Journey Home: whale margarine, transparent aluminum, and time travel: Decipher SciFi
- Star Trek Voyager: water, galactic scales, and coffee replicators: Decipher SciFi
- Galaxy Quest: the best Star Trek movie: Decipher SciFi
- Star Trek TNG: Netflix
- The Picard Song by DarkMateria: YouTube
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Importance
Nostalgia: wow Halo has really been around for a minute. Hundreds of hours of that one level of local multiplayer but never playing the story. Turning an RTS into a TPS and then an FPS and then getting that Microsoft money.
Figuring out the importance of Halo CE in the history of gaming. PC gaming master race. Tank-controlled console FPS games. Unseating Goldeneye. Establishing a timeline of FPS quality on consoles and PC.
First Contact
Humanity honing its warfare skills by just being jerks to other humans. Settling 800+ planets! “Glassing” enemy alien planets.
Put a ring on it
Ringworlds! But less a ring “world” and more a ring “weapons platofrm that also is fairly liveable.” The Drake Equation and the Fermi Paradox through the lens of Halo.
Armor
Master Chief vs Doom Guy. Measuring Hell energy. Mjolnir armor - a half ton and costs as much as a destroyer to produce. “Smart” and “dumb” AI delineations. Neural exoskeleton integration. PRedictive algorithms. Relating Master Chief to Upgrade. What about just putting an AI and some batteries inside of the Mjolnir armor? Falling from space.
- Halo Foward Unto Dawn: Amazon
- Uncertainty Principle: UncertaintyPrincipleThePodcast.com
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
An incredible indie success story.
Pizza
Pizza popularity in the US post-WWII. Pizza classification arguments. Bread sauce cheese vs bread cheese sauce and the DRASTIC difference between the two. NYC Pizza ftw.
Wtf is a turtle
Turtles, tortoises, terrapins, and the difficulty with colloquial names. Putting them in the water to see which ones drows. Telescoping vs hinging necks.
Toxic ooze
Realizing the horrifying reason “toxic sludge” was in all of our childhood media. Joe’s story about that one superfund site that I can’t spell. Creating better ooze monsters. Honey badger? Mantis shrimp?
Nuclear waste
Short term nuclear waste storage and the problem with active maintenance. Long-term nuclear waste storage and keeping things safe after humanity. Long-term nuclear waste warning messages. The limits of language and pictograms. Designing for “bad vibes.”
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages …pay attention to it! Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. This place is not a place of honor … no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger. The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us. The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. The danger is to the body, and it can kill. The form of the danger is an emanation of energy. The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
- TMNT decayed costume nightmare fuel: Twitter
- Why danger symbols can’t last forever by Vox & 99pi: YouTube
- 10 Thousand Years: 99% Invisible
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This movie
Yo dog, I heard you liked simulations. Server-room LAN rave parties. choosing your simulated period for fun, profit, and lack of complications.
Simulation
Plato’s shadows on a cave wall. Maybe shadows all the way down, and turtles all the way up! The simulatability of our perceived reality.
The argument
The simulation argument made distinct from the simulation hypothesis. Considering possible “great filters” that could prevent technological progress reaching the point where a reality simulation is possible.
Difficulties
The possible impossibility of simulating a whole universe in what may itself be a finite universe. Video game engine-corner cutting analogies for the reality sim. Kardashev scales and simulation ability.
Reality
But is it “real” and does it even matter? “I think therefore I am.” Mind uploading and downloading and VR “death.
- Inception: iTunesAmazon
- The Matrix: iTunesAmazonYouTube
- The Matrix - green phosphors, neuroplasticity, and rejecting utopia w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi
- The Truman Show - objects visible from space, dome megastructues, and reality testing: Decipher Scifi
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Mythology
Taking a simple mysterious mythology and explaining it for fun and profit*.
Meta
The original Highlander’s original, surprising success story. Deciding to make a sequel. Budgets and revenues and how did we get here, really?
Versions
Aliens vs time travel. The clincher: neither actually makes any more sense than the other.
People
Not only Connnor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod, but ALSO his best friend who totally just died in the last movie. but hey, lol jk it’s a kind of magic. Ol’ Ironsides hamming it up and honestly stealing the show. Recasting Highlander 2 with characters from The Room. The 80s/90s: when bad guys were really bad guys and just didn’t need a reason.
The ozone layer
The actual environmental problem that the world actually got together amd potentially resolved! Fixing the ozone layer. The “shield” in the film and blocking all of the visible light in addition to the UV.
Scenes
Some scenes from this film were truly mind-boggling and/or amazing and it’s hard to tell which were which. Ironsides ham. The car scene, OR sacrificing Yoshi to make the jump. Sean Connery being rogueish/trash on a plane. Scottish fan-death. Offscreen sword-switching antics.
-
not really very much profit tbh
-
Highlander 2 Fairytale Ending: YouTube
- Highlander 2 BTS Interviews: YouTube
- Sean Connery The Musical by legolambs: YouTube
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No spoilers this week! Just looking at all the scientific discoveries of the past decade and how that has or hasn’t played into the scifi we’ve covered.
- Privacy & Cyberpunk
… and the illusion thereof. Snowden and the shattering of the illusion of privacy in the digital age. The world becoming the less awesome-looking irl version of cyberpunk. Workers as a resources. Torture toilets.
- Machine learning
The biggest huge development in the pats decade which underlies every other things. Wowzers. Realizing the importance of the data going in, so you don’t get racist policing or image recognition. The availability of open tools, compute time, and learning resources.
- Genetic editing
CRISPR! What will eventually result from this one?
- Space
Water on Mars! So much more water than we thought. Greater accuracy in portrayals of space settlement. Increasing private industry in space.
- Physics
Hey, an update on Einstein: still correct! Also… Gravity waves! Higgs-Boson! Imaging a black hole. The contributions of computing and storage technologies.
- Human history
Confirmation of Sapiens and Neanderthal interbreeding in remaining modern humans. Discovering more extinct human varieties.
- Technology
What happened to AR glasses!? The state of wearables. Recognizing that there are senses to augment other than our visual system.
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Whoops, a movie review
So the movie didn’t put in any cool science things and the only thing left to do is review it and talk about… feelings? Different viewing experiences between opening night and subsequent viewings.
Franchises
Fan service. Coherent extended story arcs. Reconsidering the prequel triloges in light of the new one. Indie IP ownership with one person in charge vs Disney. Realizing what a truly satisfying job disney did with Marvel. What made Star Wars different?
Oy vey
Bending over backwards to justify fantasy events, and how movies can deserve this treatment. Bringing in The Emperor at the end. Bringing back Leia with scraps of cut scenes and lots of over-the-shoulder conversation shots.
Exagol
How to hide a planet. How to hide a planet engaging in major empire-level engineering and construction projects. Hiding your Sith shipyard.
Tech
Technological stagnation. Miniaturization. Bad ways to encode spatial information. Knife-based wayfinding.
People
C3PO software limitations and an argument in favor of Free Software. Probably maybe lobotomizing your long-time companion without deliveration. The sith ecclesiastical cult language. Pointless characters. The writer explains how Rose got mostly cut from the film.
The Force
Force diads. Beavis and Butthead candy sale force-healing math. Adam Driver doing all the acting.
- The Saga - Star Wars with Tommy Wiseau - The full story: YouTube
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In this Christmas story, Christopher gets very ill and then we are forced to push back our new Star Wars episode.
Sorry! Happy holidays!
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Science…?!
Some things are more art than science sometimes.
Structures anchored to geostationary orbit
“Space antennas” but what kind of signal would benefit from this design? X-Rays? Why would this not be better off in orbit? The structure sure looks a lot like a space elevator. Space elevators and geostationary orbital masses.
Falling from space
It’s hard to steer without sufficient atmospheric density. Felix Baumgartner’s jump “from space.”
High energy blasting
Antimatter nonsense. Our increasing fragility in the face of an unlucky coronal mass ejection. Protecting infrastructure both inside and increasingly outside our atmosphere.
Moon settlement
Moon surface settlements vs moon gateways vs embarking to The Moon from low Earth orbit. Awesome moon buggy chases. Pirates!
Mars settlement
Communicating with and from Mars. Interplanetary distance and comms speed. Building settlements within Martian or Lunar lava tubes.
The heliopause
Finding the “edge” of our star system. Difference in concentration of high energy particles.
SETI
Looking for signs of life around other stars. Taking pictures of black holes. Planet-sized telescopes. The absurd distances from Earth to other stars. Vegemite in Australia. Absent of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Nuclear spaceships
Project Orion. Blowing up your spaceship because it doesn’t have a nuclear bomb-ready push plate.
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VPNs
MJ’s VPN advice. VPN advertising on YouTube.
Venice
How to build a whole city on mud. Transplanting alder forests from on some ground to under some other ground. Hard clay is worse than bedrock. Measuring a sinking city’s rate of subsidence with space-based radar and GPS. Climate change sure isn’t helping any. What value should we place on artifacts of human civilization? Losing UNESCO world heritage sites. The MOSE project. Climate change and rising sea levels. What will the world do?
VFX
Advanced holography with drones! Photoreal real-time rendering. LED walls. Projection mapping. Lasers in your eyes.
Smart glasses
Inward and outward-facing smart glass technologies. Wearable ubiquity. Evolution of “smart glasses” from Google Glass to Echo Frames. Magic Leap? Bone conduction and having discrete interactions with your personal assistant.
- This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN by Tom Scott: YouTube
- Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: particle colliders, art, and magnetic monopolies w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi
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Background
Looking back after the culmination of all these threads in Endgame. Queen Amidala’s midichlorian magical umbrella.
Language
Thor knowing All-Tongue, emitting pheromones, and doing the bee dance. The difficutly of universal language or language understanding. Finnishish conlanging. The cultural and linguistic juxtaposition between Scandinavia and Finland.
Alignment of worlds
Astrology is bunkum nonsense gobbledegook. The miniscule and generally unimportant effects when bodies in space are “in alignment.”
“Magic”
Our difficulties with magical realism. Asgardian “Smagic.” Apparent technology levels and technology so advanced it looks like magic. Bringing swords and shields to a lasergun fight.
Battle stimulation
Dosing for war. Uppers are very popular. The Finnish soldier who was the “first documented case of a soldier over overdosing on methamphetamines during combat.”
Black holes etc
“Gravity grenades.” The possibility of man-made miniature black holes.
Vikings
“Viking burials” but not like you thought. Tumuli/barrows/kurgans. Horned helmets.
- Guardians of the Galaxy: Decipher SciFi
- Guardians of the Galaxy 2: Decipher SciFi
- Avengers Infinity War: Decipher SciFi
- Black Panther: Decipher SciFi
- Avengers Endgame: Decipher SciFi
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Western
The best genre of Star Wars media? Brandishing yourself. Old west forced sack removal.
“Real filmmaking”
Werner Herzog’s surprising(?) praise. “Real filmmaking” in the wake of the prequel trilogies. Wooden green-screen acting vs sweet puppets and actual human beings. Unreal Engine LED walls and volumetric projection and camera tracking.
Our new mythology
Star Wars as our new shared cultural mythology the world over. Concern about disney’s stewardship and the private ownership of our cultural heritage. Streamboat Willie entering The Commons.
Mandalorians
Some past famous Mandalorians, this particular Mandalorian, and martial prowess. Mandalorian history and why the Mandalorians are the only ones who figured out how to fight the space wizards for some reason?
Poop!
Pooping space. Weightless waste elimination can be tricky. Floating turds.
Freezing in carbonite
Cryostasis. Cryopreservation. Avoiding ice crystals. Replacing blood with “antifreeze”
Robo slavery
Taking the most depressing angle on droid consciousness and freedom (or lack thereof). And then to make it worse: DRM!
Baby Yoda
Extra-long postnatal development. Big brains and incomplete gestation. Cuteness. Animatronics.
Hairy rhinos!
Elasmotherium. Whooly rhinos. Hiary…. eggs? Historical rhinos. Rhino evolution. Balut.
Elasmotherium prehistoric rhino
Boris Dimitrov CC-BY-SA-3.0
Rhino sizes evolution chart
DagdaMor CC-BY-3.0
- The Last Jedi: FTL ramming, salt geology, and real green milk: Decipher SciFi
- Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
- Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi
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Decontamination protocols
NASA’s irl de-contamination measures. Private space industry without apparent government oversight.
Comets
Some of the oldest things in our solar system and maybe the oldest things that we can reach. Leftovers from early solar system formation. The possibility of finding the precursors of life. Delineating between comets and asteroids. Fuzzy definitions. “Extinct” comets. Scales & tails.
Von Neumann Goo
Sending out of infected ice-balls and hoping someone notices. Like a tree! Just send your reproductive material everywhere and who cares who it lands on or gives allergies to.
Evil Jeff Bezos
Thinly-written villains. Narcissism. Poorly designed humans and “saving” humanity.
Sound
And magnets! The frequencies in which MRI machines are loudest, and the way that doesn’t line up with Venom’s sonic sensitivities. Resonance frequencies and alien “brown notes.”
Symbiosis
Christopher’s surprise learning the distinction between the category of biological interactions that is symbiosis and its subcategories.
- parasitism
- commensalism
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mutualism (Venom, but perhaps not his compatriots)
-
Bronson: iTunesAmazon
- Locke: iTunesAmazon
- Peaky Blinders: iTunesAmazonNetflix
- Warrior: iTunesAmazon
- The Dark Knight Rises: iTunesAmazon
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Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun!
- The Terminator: bootstrapping, machine uprising, and time traveling meatballs w/ Joe Ruppel
- Terminator 2: advanced puppetry, Skynet, and liquid nitrogen handling w/ Joe Ruppel
- Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines: hacking cars and supercomputing Skynet FLOPS w/ Joe Ruppel
- Terminator Salvation: body donation, realistic time travel, and the legal shmegal defense w/ Joe Ruppel
- Terminator Genisys: surprise anthologies & time travel spaghetti w/ Joe Ruppel
Meta
Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always.
Opener
No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines.
Human upgrades
Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot. Bio-aumentation. More than muscle! Nervous system response shortcuts.
Robots taking our jobs
Robot literally taking the guy’s job this time. Learning to work with the robots. Extended robot anxieties throughout the history of the Terminator franchise. Robots surveilling and monitoring our jobs and making it easy for Terminators to find us.
Terminators, revisited
New Terminator! The Rev-9 taking the best bits of previous no-longer-canon sequels. Infiltrating and cracking wise.
Legion
Synet rebranded. AI built on human data and maybe no matter which platform becomes sentient it will come to similar conclusions and methods. Cyberwarfare platforms.
Humanity
Becoming human. Understanding humanity. What happens to a Terminator after their mission is complete? Post-mission Terminators getting creative.
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Eiffel
LPT: you can get pommes frites in Europe. Could Eiffel have been an agent? The history of the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel Tower’s science history. Cosmic rays. Wireless telepraphy (radio). Outliving its intended lifespan.
Aliens
Which government agency should you be applying to in order to research alien stuff? Remembering the MiB is an NGO.
Space tracking
Increasing ability to track nearby space objects. Tracking objects in our solar system’s plane. The difficulty of tracking interstellar objects. Being a good space neighbor. Confirmed tracked interstellar objects. Failing to pronounce “ʻOumuamua.”
A Danzig tale
justin: dude
Danzig lives next door to me in l.a.
down the street
and he is the worst neighbor ever
justin: so he has this huge pile of bricks in his front yard
and the house looks like an evil pixar house
so anyway, his neighbor was like, “dude, danzig your bringing property values down with these bricks in your yard.”
and danzig was pissed
so anyway, back and forth with his neighbor and danzig
and finally one day
i see danzig outside
in his front yard
and he’s hurling bricks into this drumpster and he’s screaming, “HERE I AM MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY FUCKING BRICKS BITCH!”
Just super loud
to no one in particular
for two hours
it was amazing
like, i couldn’t even think about other things
because it was so amazing
me: oh my god
this is amazing
justin: dude
it blew my mind
because it was danzig as just a really poor homeowner
Space security
Hacking satellites! Actually totally possible and has happened. Air Force satellites at DEFCON. DDoS in space. The possibilities for catastrophy in hacking things in space. The many ways an attacker could damage or destroy our space telescopes.
Stars!
Blue giants! They’re rather large, and luminous. And hot. Capturing star energy. Kardashev scales.
Memory
The tendency of our minds to backfill missing information. Using neuralizers without providing a cover story is probably actually good enough, really.
- Men in Black: human gestation, stimulants, and Earth as backwater w/ Liam Ginty: Decipher SciFi
- Isaac Arthur: YouTube
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Setup
Cross-galaxy teleportation macguffins. The Delta quadrant. Where are the Borg!?
Species
The Kazon, aka less-good, less-organized Klingons. Were Klingons racist? Or the Ferengi? Or the Kazons?
Water
The availability of water in star systems. Exoplanet surveys and water-rich gas giants.
Voyager
Yay Janeway! Comparing with the original actress. Imagining a Star Trek/Too Many Cooks crossover.
Replicators and teleporters
The most incredible Star Trek technology of all. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%?
Scales
Galaxy Scale. “Quandrants” actually refer to “quarters of the galaxy” which blew Christopher’s mind slightly (like this guy). And here is a map. Putting speed limits on the universe.
- The Orville: iTunesAmazonHulu
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The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring some over-the-top colonial heroism, etc
The Patriot: heroism, invisible slavery, and cutting-edge chair technology
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Titans
Awaking dormant giant monsters from within the Earth. Bio-acoustic signatures. Giant balloons! Tracking elephants by sound.
Pre-civilization civilizations
The Silurian hypothesis thought experiment, especially as part of our Atlantis coverage. The increasing disappearability of the details of civilization as they raise their technological level.
Moths
Moths: way better than butterflies! Echolocation defense mechanisms. Corresponding bat appreciation in our A Quiet Place episode. Echolocation signal jamming vs. aural camouflage. Giant moths and dedication to reproduction so complete that they will never once eat as an adult and devote all of their stored energy to reproduction. How we harvest silk from moths.
Creature combos
Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art.
- Deep Learning With The Elephants by Planet Money: NPR.org
- Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/ Miles Greb: Decipher SciFi
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The curse of the Terminator
Why do all these production companies go under after making these always-profitable Terminator movies?
VFX
Twelve months to make a fake Arnold.
Time travel
Time travel but, like, way more confusing. And possibly nonsensical. Five movie in and we FINALLY we see a time machine. Operation Cronos. Trying to count timelines and getting very confused because they broke everything.
Skynet
Skynet in the government shadows vs Silicon Valley public launch. UbiquityOS. Engineering to let the AI our of the box. The dawn of “apps” and how it was important. “Genisys does what Nintendon’t.” Skynet takeoff scenario, altered yet again.
Terminators
A review of the T-3000 and T-5000. Doctor Who. Bio-nanite replacement. Ship of Biorobo Theseus: is the T-3000 still the same person as it was?
Kyle Reese
Old Nikes! Scrappy Kyle vs jacked Kyle. David vs Goliath.
Who wants to go do my mom
- John Connor
Arnold
build_time_machine.bat . Time traveling at 1x speed. Various messy strategies for re-encasing your robot arm in flesh.
- Mortal Kombat 11 Kombat Pack – Official Terminator T-800 Gameplay Trailer: YouTube
- Scientist Man Explains Terminator: Genisys by Red Letter Media: YouTube
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The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring gangs fights in 19th century New York, etc.
On Decipher History: Gangs of New York: history of The Five Points, immigration, and archaic criminal lingo
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Is this a sequel? A prequel? Our progress in covering the entire Terminator series. The possibility of the future war trilogy, dashed.
Body donation
Donating your body to science. Body donation vs organ donation. Size and BMI standards. Medical education via cadaver. “Body brokers.” Why do blast testing on bodies? Are we learning to cure “acute dynamitism?”
Lethal injection
How to make a body unsuitable for whole-body donation. Donating to Terminator-science. Executions as disincentive. The role of the medieval executioner. How the guillotine was an early example of the robots taking our jerbs. Execution showmanship. The Ultimate Warrior was nuts.
Time travel
The only sorta realistic time travel in the whole Terminator series: pausing your exiistence and turning back on in the future! The nature of self, and the “legal schmegal” defense.
Terminators
The most human Terminator yet? Robocop vs Wolverine? Head transplant or body transplant? Terminator production volume and just-in-time delivery. The first T800. A T600 review. Austrian bodybuilders always make good Terminators.
Skynet
Technological anxieties over time through the Terminator series…. but not really in this one? Or are just jumping straight through to concern with AI takeoff? The Skynet-iest movie in the Terminator series, so far. Personifying Skynet. Explaining the human prisoner project with the design of the T800.
Madness
Amazing alternate endings that Chris is sad didn’t happen! Skinning John Connor, for fun and profit.
- Terminator Salvation the Machinima Series: YouTube
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Species
Wow there some really good movies in 1995! Geiger alien designs. Not “Alien,” but “alien.” This time, with nipples.
Ptosis
Forrest Whitaker. Chris’s history of eyelid laziness variability. Being either a dolphin or a flamingo. Eye farts?
The Arecibo Message
The limited utility of sending messages to aliens 25,000 light years away. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 toward the M13 globular cluster. A cluster containiner millions of stars. 1679 bits: not a lot of bits!
A colorized visualization of the 'Arecibo Message' sent in 1974
Arne Nordmann CC-BY-3.0
Bio-executable Von Neumann machines
Von Neumann trolls. Self-assembling bootstrapping biological systems. What if DNA is very common across life in the universe?
Containment
How to combine biological containment and prisoner containment. Lots of “fire” buttons. Biocontainment protocols. Integrating what we’ve learned from prison-escape movies. Considering the Magneto-vault.
Cocoons
Vulvic wall-pods. What the hell even is up with cocoons anyway? Cocoons are basically alien material already. The “soup method” of metamorphosis.
Fat-bergs
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Meta
James Cameron blank checks and record-breaking budgets and payouts.
Arnold
Getting re-jacked to your original shape at 56 years old. Screening your movie at Saddam’s palace.
Terminators
The broadness of the term “nanotechnology.” Upgrading your liquid-metal nanotechss32 robots.
Data Collection
Placing this movie in the data collection timeline: after the dawn of big data digital government spying, but before smartphones when we willingly began to give up all the data. But there’s a Terminator movie for that too!
Hacking cars
Direct linkages in car systems. Driving by-wire. Hacking automobile computer systems. Wired hacking and modern wireless car hacks.
Technology progression
Finally, a Terminator in the age of the ubiquitous cell phone! Still not smartphones yet, but it’s a start! Hydrogen fuel cell failure modes and the danger of tiny hydrogen bombs. MRI dangers.
Skynet
AI escape scenarios. Supercomputing at “60 teraFLOPS” and wth is a “teraFLOPS” anyway? Computing power measurement and FLOP precisions. Recognizing the actual utility of supercomputers only becoms apparent with very paralellizable tasks.
- Decipher History: Decipher Media
- Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on a Highway by WIRED: YouTube
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A small taste of our new episode of Decipher History to remind you to subscribe to the new show. This week featuring our new friend Isaac Meyer from The History of Japan Podcast!
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Weirdly prescient and quietly influential
AI portrayal in film. Recognizing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Command and control. Unintended consequences. Personal movie connections and impact decades before Bostrom’s Superintelligence. Game of Thrones??? 70s scifi cynicism.
Benevolent AI dictator
The Cold War and looming climate catastrophe. What are Colossus’ goals? What goals does it think it has?
AI Portrayal
Period conceptions of computing as centralized and institutional. Computing in the era of the first moon landing. The “big board.” Computer scientists a la Mad Men. Colossus as a Golem story. How to take over the world with no subterfuge or tact. Gendering AI.
Realism
Portrayal of telecommunications literally before the invention of networking. Packet switching was first implemented after the novel was written and only just before the film! Computer communication syntax. Computing language. Computer interfaces and code checking.
Getting weird
The books get weird. And weirder! How sometimes books are accidentally way better than their author is capable of.
Paperclip maximization
Colossus as utilitarian “peace maximizer.” Showing the monkeys the gun to get your point across.
- Works by Madeline Ashby: Amazon
- Person of Interest: iTunesAmazonNetflix
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People
Love and appreciation for the humans involved. James Cameron is amazing. Arnold, always our favorite. Linda Hamilton playing one of the most iconic characters in film. Robert Patrick doing the robot. James Cameron doing everything himself.
VFX
VFX and CG and the high shot counts for the time. The expense of CG and the appropriate use thereof. Budgets. Incredible animatronix! The value of high-quality practical FX from the 90s and how they hold up.
Ict hot stuntaz
Motorcycle jumping. Harley’s Fat Boy. Jumping into helicopters.
Technology
The Terminator series as a window into our concerns over technology in different decades. Computing miniaturization. Quantum stuff. Read-only Terminator modes, IRQ switching, and ro cassettes.
Terminators
Terminator models and designs. Possible Billy Idol T-1000, or Kyle Reese-bots. T-1000 shiny grey goo nanite flow robot.
Liquid Nitrogen
Pork chop sandwiches! Inert gas asphyxiation. Steam barriers, sugar work, and dipping your hand into hot lead.
- T2 Stunt Trailer by Peter Kent: YouTube
- The Forgotten Art of Blockbuster Cinema by Mike Hill: YouTube
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Colliders
Particle collider scales. Increasing energies. Finding the Higgs Boson. Different ways of smashing things. Straight colliders, ring colliders, and rings so large they kinda seem straight at a certain scale. Adrian’s new area of expertise. “Natural experiments” in particle physics. Imagining future colliders and subsequent discoveries. Confirmation of supersymmetry. Probing the edges of the standard model.
Collider danger
Stragelets and black holes and other things that won’t happen. Anatoli Burgorski taking a load in the eye. Magnetic monopoles and winning “Magnetic Monopoly.”
Art!
OMG the art. Chromatic aberration. Offset printing errors. Smearing vs motion blur. Animating on “twos” or “threes” and the use of fluidity as a storytelling tool.
Spider-ones
Favorite Spiderman movie?
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang: iTunesAmazon
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People
James Cameron’s first film! And Arnold is amazing! The possibility of casting O.J. Simpson as the T-100. Harlan Ellison lawsuit.
Robots
The thawing of the AI winter of the 70s. Robots finally showing up in our lives and in the workplace. Terminator bootstrapping. Robotics and machine learning.
Skynet
The possibility of AI becoming “self-aware” or “conscious” and whether we even know what those things really mean. Big data feeding skynet.
Terminators
Jacked-up and oiled beefcake “infiltration” models. Franco Columbu. Robotic Ahhhhhnold blending in. The “rule of cool.” Feeding and maintaining a terminator’s “living tissue.”
Persistence of information
The persistence of human knowledge after the nuclear apocalypse. The fragility of magnetic storage media. Storing your data under a mountain. The weakness of encryption over time.
Time travel
How to not sound crazy when telling people in the past that you’re from the future. Meatball time travel. Using the “living tissue” time travel rule to transport large weapons into the past. Stuffing a whale or elephant. Realizing that maybe (probably), no one (not even SkyNet) has the slightest clue what they are doing with the time travel.
- Harlan Ellison and the Terminator: YouTube
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Plagiarism
John Carpenter, this movie, and Escape from New York plagiarism. Metal Gear Solid also as an Escape ripoff. Running popular media through a “Hideo Kojima filter” to see what comes out.
Space Shuttles
Side-mounting your spacecraft. Flying a brick. Deorbiting and landing in the space shuttle’s “orbiter.” Wiggle-worm descent. Having only one chance because all of your fuel was spent getting out of orbit. Returning to shuttle-like designs with mag-lev mountain-ramps.
Inert gas asphyxiation
Nitrogen! Biologically inactive gas asphyxia vs potentially-toxic: CO2, CO, etc. Hypoxia.
Falling out of space
The slim odds of hitting the ISS when accidentally de-orbiting. Space is… small? Understanding what “orbit” really means. HALO/HAHO jumping, Baumgartner’s Stratos jump, and the incredible difficulty of jumping out of orbit ffs. Copyrighting all of the “totally radical” stunts.
Breaking the sound barrier
The difference in the “speed of sound” at different atmospheric densities. Terminal velocity at high altitudes. Air is more “sticky” than you might expect. Why didn’t Felix Baumgartner “burn up” on reentry?
Orbital decay
“Jumping down” from a space station and how that is not sufficient for deorbiting. Megaconstellations and space junk.
- How to Land the Space Shuttle... from Space by Bret Copeland: YouTube
- Escape From New York: ultralight aircraft, escape pods, and fusion reactors: Decipher SciFi
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Forces
Height and reach advantage and impossible momentary punching force. Punching with horsepower vs just straight up hitting people with horses.
‘Murrica
James Brown and showboat Apollo. The Khaleesi naming scheme.
Sports Science
The rising tide of money in sports. The “big bang of body types.” Steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.
Brain Injury
The particular badness of boxing for brain damage. The possible safety increase in taking off the gloves in MMA. Just about any sports injury is better than brain damage. The brain compared to Jello. The extra danger of rotational brain injury. Cumulative microconcussions.
Robots!
Surprisingly not a cynical product placement.
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One Small Step
Worrying the minimum amount about your speech. The difficulty of quoting noisy radio transmissions.
Because it is haaaahd
Recognizing the small temporal distance from the first powered flight to the first moon landing. The cutting edge of the early space program. Test piloting. Gemini.
The edge of space
Defining the edge of space. The “Karman Line”: transition from atmospheric lift to orbital velocity. Complications and redefinition of where “space” begins. Geopolitics, ruining everything since forever.
The “right stuff”
Badass engineer pilots. Moving fast and breaking things. Selection testing. Giving prospective astronauts ice-water wet willies. The importance of simulation in the early space program and the difficulty of simulating things we haven’t actually ever done or seen up close.How hard it really is to stay conscious under high-g stress.
Moon landing
Monocular depth cues. Light and shadow, unfamiliar objects, and depth perception. Equatorial noon on the equinox when stuff looks creepy: Lahaina Noon.
Lunar Laser Ranging Experiment
Retroreflectors and really really powerful lasers. Tiny photonic returns: 1 out of every 10¹⁷ photons shot at the moon mirror make it back for our detection. Multi-mile laser beams. Confirming relativity ftw.
ROCKS
… from the moon! And some regolith to boot. Vacuum transport for moon samples and how we work with them on Earth’s surface without contaminating. The difficulty of maintaining a a very strong vacuum vs nonreactive gasses. Detecting the provenance of proposed moon rocks. NASA’s moon-rock cataloguing system.
Moon-landing video
Viewership numbers. NASA’s custom video encoding and the incredibly analog conversion methods employed to bring it to television.
What if
What if it didn’t work out? The Nixon speach made ready just in case. “In Event of Moon Disaster.”
What now
Why we have no rockets now to match the power of the Saturn V. Loss of engine-production expertise. Looking at near-future Moon and Mars missions.
- Where does NASA keep the Moon Rocks? by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- Apollo Television by Bill Wood: NASA
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Alita
“The movie with the cyborgs and the kicking and the punching.” There are two kinds of film: people in a room talking and people in a room kicking and punching. Robert Rodriguez lands firmly within only one of these groups. Accidentally fitting Alita into the Robocop universe. Shooting and punching people in their robo-bits.
Cyborgs
Robots arms everywhere. But maybe not just for show? Cyborg arms as the cyborg future cliche. Replacing your limbs proactively for fun and profit. Replacing all of your joints, but not just with hinges. Defining “cyborg” more precisely in consideration of the definition of “cybernetics.”
Cybernetics is a transdisciplinary approach for exploring regulatory systems—their structures, constraints, and possibilities.
-Wikipedia
“Real” cyborgs
We are already cyborgs, we just don’t ourselves enough credit. Cyborgification as performance. Designing a new hearing aid to help us talk to bats.Imagining all the ways in which implanted and attached technologies would help improve the human experience. And what do we get? Always super-strong robot arms. Realizing you would need the whole-system upgrade to support the forces exerted upon/by your super-arm.
Doing it right
Don’t be a cyborg bicep bro. Taking the short route to functional cyborg limbs by using existing neuromuscular wiring. The difficulty of inventing new appendages or body formats.
Photorealistic CG humans
Wow dude this was actually pretty great. Sidestepping the uncanny valley slightly by going with anime eyes. Aperture and catching more light. Legolas with dinner-plate eyeballs. Neoteny.
Nonsensical murder sports
Future cybersports: more violent spectacle, less athleticism. Sports and functional immortality.
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‘Murrica
Jacked Christian Bale, Scottish Gerard Butler, and brash American hero Matthew McConaughey. Fighting a dragon with an axe. Appreciating the brash American caricature.
Dragons
Dragon VFX. Drawing the line from here to Game of Thrones. Animals that use a spray attack (or defense). Skunks, ants, horned lizard, snakes, even bombardier beetles and their boiling butt juices. Dragon classification (vs wyverns, etc).
Fire etc
Actual napalm is a hell of a thing. Remember the Anarchist’s Cookbook and how innacurate and unsafe everything was. Practical fire FX in the movie and how well it holds up. Hundreds of gallons of propane per dragon blast. Burninating all the food on a planet.
“Hibernation”
Hibernation vs other states. Dormancy Torpor. Estivation. Endotherm and ectotherm dormancy. Classical and modern ideas of what counts as “hibernation.” EXTREEEEEEME dormancies. Water bears/tardigrades.
Eyesight
Vision difficulties at twilight. The Purkinje effect. Shifting spectral sensitivities based on brightness. Progression through photopic, mesopic, and scotopic vision. Appreciating the idiosyncratic nature of our vision and understanding why emulating what we see is so difficult with a camera lens.
Twilight, my only weakness. How did you know?
-A Dragon
Castles
Buying up castles in the Romanian countryside. Castles come in different sizes but no matter how you measure that’s a really big dragon.
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Review
Battlestar was so good! The importance of Ronald D Moore’s work on Deep Space Nine. The genesis of the “gritty” scifi drama juxtaposed against Star Trek’s utopia. Judging the best scifi captains: Adama? Picard?
Frak!
The difficulties with “frak.” “Fraking” vs “fracking.” Changes of spelling. Designing the curse words of scifi futures. Appreciating Nick Farmer’s “Belter.” The nature of “swear words.” Comparing the sounds of made-up brand names to test linguistic form/function clustering.
Anti-AI security
Computers are good at computers. Fully securing your “hello world” program. Code testing and integration. Formal verification to mathematically guarantee computer code, and the incredible expense thereof.
Robo Jesus
Creatures coming into sapience in a world with the scientific method and body of knowledge and still turning to “God.”
- Diaspora, The Free BSG Space-Sim based on Freespace 2: Hard-Light.net
- Caprica: iTunesAmazon
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Striking Vipers
Human sexuality
The bright and exciting future of who does what with whom and how. Polar bears. How we might have handles this VR technology as teenagers.
Colbert is the bear
Gaming
Nostalgia for days-long gaming binges with Doritos and Easy Cheese. Ubiquitous full-spectrum VR experience. Neural mapping. Popular physics plugins , game engines, and the possibility that McCallister and Striking Vipers etc run on the same software.
Bodily bacteria
Dirt subscription boxes. Maintaining your skin microbiome. Showring? Soap vs detergent. Probiotic yogurt: “one for me, one for the undercarriage.”
Dishwashers
Knife-down safety is actually important(!). Dish detergents and plate dirtiness. Clever dirtiness-measurement technologies.
Smithereens
Driver Rating
“2 stars, car was clean”
Rachel, Jack, and Ashley Too
Virtual performance
Virtualizing irl performers. Pepper’s Ghost. Lifelike real-time rendering technology. Real-time raytracing. Motion capture cost and complexity drops.
Brains etc
Machine learning vocal production. FMRI vs EEG vs whatever awesome thing they have in Black Mirror. Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity.
- Head Like a Hole by Devo: YouTube
- Human brain mapping and brain decoding by Jack Gallant: YouTube
- Deep image reconstruction from human brain activity: PLOS
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This film
Zach Snyder’s strengths in creating comic book panels on film. Slo-mo blood spatter. Abs and glistening man-meat.
Western civilization
Ancient Greece and “western civilization.” The birth of “democracy” in nearby Athens. Juxtaposing your historical culture with the “other.” Like George Washington crossing the Delaware but with way less man-meat. And 100% less codpieces.
Sparta
The dawn on the Spartan state. The nature of the Helot slave class. “Land-bonded” slavery vs chattel. Ancient Greek and Spartan combat methods. Heavy infantry. Training by doing crunches all.day.long. Ancient combat analogues with early UFC.
The Persian Invasions
Greece as a poor backwater on the edge of the Persian Empire. The Ionian Revolt, The Battle of Marathon, The Battle of Thermopylae, Battle of Plataea.
Professional soldiering
The incredible change that was the development of the professional standing army. Modern soldiers and modern combat compared and contrasted with ancient. Dying gloriously. Army sizes at Thermopylae as recorded closer to the time vs modern estimates.
Modern understanding of Sparta
Ancient sources and the lack of writing from the actual place and time. “The Spartan Mirage,” and the crafting of the Spartan image. Any training as a unit is better than none.
Phalanx
The universality of shield walls and spear hedges, aka the “spiky steamroller.” Strategically busting out in individual slow motion. Spear-length evolution. Learning whether “dragoons” are at all related to dragons.
- Josh's show's on LSG Media: The X-Files Podcast (always)Science Fiction Film Podcast (sometimes)
- Hardcore History - King of Kings, by Dan Carlin: Part 1Part 2Part 3
- Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield: iTunesAmazon
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Robot laws
Asimov’s laws as a storytelling device and what you get when you alter the formula. “Humans are the true robots.”
Automata
The difference between “automata” and “robots.” Ancient Greek, Arab, and medieval church automata. Automata and robots making humans realize we need to explain what makes us special. Realizing that, on the whole, we probably aren’t really. Cartesian dualism as a stop-gap measure. Moral progress. Appreciating that we stopped seeing other animals as automatons and vivisecting them.
Modern automata
NASA getting into the automata game for difficult environments. The Automaton Rover for Extreme Environments. Mixing electronic and (mostly) mechanical components for robustness against horrible, deadly, no good, very bad atmospheres. Sending data back home from limited electronic or even completely mechanical systems.
Solar storms
Various phenomena caused by disturbances in the sun. The Carrington Event. Imagining the losses in the trillions from a Carrington-strength event in the modern day. Civilizational collapse with worldwide disturbance/destruction of telecommunications infrastructure.
World population
Realizing that several billion humans on Earth is actually like a real real lot of people. Very many. So many that even a 97% reduction leaves millions. Oy.
Desertification
Defining deserts by rainfall. Defining desertification by a land’s inability to hold water.
- Automata by In Our Time: BBC
- Ghost in the Machine by Radio Lab: WNYC
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Star Trek
Best Star Trek movies. Liking things because they are familiar. The odd-even Star Trek movie rule. Mathematical proofs. Dismissing the reboots.
Cosmic horror
Giant cylinders and plumbuses. Finding out you are as an ant in the universe. Spreading across space and building giant robot suits to fight the larger incomprehensible creatures.
Time travel
Using time travel to solve problems despite the consequences. Time travel anachronism stories. Bad time-travel sales pitches. The Mooreeffoc Effect. Would you go to the future? Only going forward because medicine in the past is always so bad. Time travel vaccinations.
Whales
The possibility of cetacean “language.” “Save the whales” in the 80s. Whale oil being supplanted by kerosene as industrial fuel. Stinky whale candles. The Napoleonic origins of margarine and the economics of fuel and margarine. Industrialized whaling. “Factory ships.” Realizing we are running out of whales. Continued industrial whaling, namely by Japan and some of the Nordic countries.
- Whaling: Wikipedia
- Whale Oil: Wikipedia
- Margarine: Wikipedia
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville: iTunesAmazon
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Criticisms and controversy
So yeah, Mel Gibson is bad. But then the movies are… really good? Trying to get past his framing. The tug of war between historical accuracy and entertainment. Anthropological criticism.
Deciphering history
The problem with burning nearly the entire written history of a people. Deciphering scant ancient texts. The remaining resources: art, stelae. Mayan hieroglyphic writing.
Periods
The Maya pre-classic, classic, and post-cassic periods. The scale of the height of Mayan civilization. The abruptness of its fall. The period in which the film takes place and the ways in which it is not actually entirely apparent. Classic-period pyramids in the post-classic era.
Science and math
The mixing of astronomy and astrology in the Mayan tracking of the heavenly bodies for religious purposes. The Mayan written mathematical system. “Inventing” zero. Extensive calendaring and that whole 2012 kerfuffle.
Civilizational decline
The factors that may have contributed to the Mayan collapse. Plaster and mortar production. Deforestation for fuel.
Aztec/Maya
The possibility for cultural confusion in the film. Aztec and Maya sacrificial practices.
- The Case Study of Apocalypto by Richard D Hansen: ResearchGate
- Apocalypto by History Buffs: YouTube
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In which we discuss Game of Thrones right before the finale
The books
Appreciating GRRM. And appreciating him double and triple as the show goes on.
The setting
The middle ages. The “dark ages” and how much is that a misnomer? Magic and dragons stagnating technological progress. Volcanoes beat dragons in rock-paper-scissors. Air force exclusivity. Ancient artillery. Ballistae and Scorpions and the peak of human weaponry until the weaponization of gunpowder.
Winter is coming
Figuring out ways to make the seasons less predictable. Unsatisfying suggestions in axial precession and funny orbits. The possibility of the interplay of biology with climatological processes.
Disappointment and Predictons
Trying to understand, as we reach the conclusion, why the show feels so unsatisfying now. Why every turn of events feels so unearned. Predicting who will get the throne as of “The Last of the Starks.”
- Game of Fuckin' Thrones by Anamanaguchi: YouTube
- Nightflyers (SciFi!) & Other Stories by GRRM: iTunesAmazon
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We got so much feedback over time from supporter Jeremy that we’re dedicating a whole Questions & Addenda episode to covering them. Just like that one time.
Star Wars: The Last Jedi [episode page]
Guerilla space warfare. The Star Wars Geneva Convention. Chinese gun powder weaponization. Resources and impoetus in the development of killing technologies.
Ready Player One [episode page]
Speed-of-light internet latency. EVE online strategies for fun and profit. “Sharding” as first-named in Ultima as a technical and storytelling solution.
Wall-E [episode page]
Wasting potable water. Saltwater pipe corrosion. Graywater toilets. Fermenting your pee and eating rotten shark that smells like pee.
Upgrade [episode page]
Automation in combat. “Cute aggression.” The “call of the void,” and the fear of the call of the void.
Doom [episode page]
Could you really spoil Doom, though? Navigating by the ecliptic in space. Playing Descent.
The Predator [episode page]
Savantism before the invention and eventual ubiquity of writing.
2036 Origin Unknown [episode page]
The wonder of centricities and the Greek pantheon. Using the wrong words for things. ASCII vs Unicode.
- The Art of Fermentation by Sandor Katz: Amazon
- Media used: Heavy Metal Riff by tgfcoder: CC-BY
- Media used:Retro Robot Thinking Sound by orginaljun: FreeSoundCC-BY
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A review
Spoiler alert: we liked this movie
Phase 1
Appreciating the establishment of the characters of Iron Man and Captain America. That grenade scene. Joss Whedon writing and directing teams of characters learning to work together. Realizing the first movie in the MCU came out in 2008. Realizing just how long ago 2008 was.
Phase 2
James Gunn appreciation (ps Super was really really good!). Guardians introducing a new level of comedy into the MCU.
Phase 3
Guardians dad feels. Our favorite MCU movies. Appreciating Spiderverse even though it doesn’t count.
Money and The Mouse
The huge money-making power of this franchise. A review of budgets and revenue in the MCU. Feeling conflicted about enjoying these otherwise-impossible projects while Disney slowly buys up the entirety of western media.
Time travel quantum gobbledlygook
Time travel. Single-timeline time travel vs branching-timelines. The classic scientific “Loki-Hypercube paradox.” Timeline diagram for Avengers: Endgame. Avoiding the Novikov self-consistency principle for paradox avoidance. The “Deutsch proposition.” Robbing Peter in one timeline to pay Paul in another. Playing the time travel genie to wish for more wishes.
Characters
Character growth. Going over Cap, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, etc. Observing how these characters have grown over time.
Past Coverage
- Guardians of the Galaxy: Groot language, intelligent animals, and where do trees get their mass?
- Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2: space jumps, empathy telepathy, and ❤️ Yondu
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Avengers Infinity War: space mapping, Dyson spheres, and the purple coin purse
-
Avengers: Endgame timeline diagram: imgur
- Marvel movie budgets and box office revenue: Reddit
- "The Limitations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe" by Patrick Willems Part 1: YouTube
- "The Limitations of the Marvel Cinematic Universe" by Patrick Willems Part 2: YouTube
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This movie
Not well reviewed. Will Smith’s “painful failure.” The real twist is the lack of explanation for things. Jaden Smith wisdom.
Accent and language
The future “language” in the film. The difference between accent and dialect. how languages change over time, by example. Trying to understand original spoken Shakespeare and generally succeeding. Trying to understand original spoken Beowulf and completely failing. The mutual intelligibility of Old Norse and Old English.
Creatures
Surprise! There are aliens and they want to kill us. Engineered animal-weapons (the “Ursa”). Improving the Ursa design: giving guns to blind animals for fun and profit. Komodo dragon-mode leeches. Evolving from parasite to hunter. The combat techniques of butt-spiking murderbirds (shrikes).
Pheromones
“Smelly handshakes.” Mammary pheromone response in human infants. Getting used to stinky things. Tales of accidental moth pheromone pranks.
Quarantine earth
Surprising evolutionary directions in the absence of humanity. Even a thousand years later, baboons still don’t appreciate getting hit with rocks.
Atmosphere
The dangers of low atmospheric oxygen. Using the top of Everest as marker for O2 danger. Climbing Everest in shorts.
- Lion scent-marking with non-scientific audio: YouTube
- Eddie Izzard "Babies on spikes" bit without any context: YouTube
- "Butchering Bird" (the shrike): YouTube
- In Our Time - Pheromones: BBC
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Likenesses
The legal precedent set by Crispin Glover’s lawsuit against the production; folks are more careful these days as a result. “Grandma Tarkin.”
Rick & Morty
Rick & Morty’s original short lampooning Doc & Marty.
The future
The fun, friendly future where the alleyways are safer than the streets. Worrying about your future children and feeling disgusted by your teenage self. Pelvic thrusting fight technique.
Daniel Barker, former scene kid
Time travel technique
Buying The almanac. Varieties of time travel: mutable, immutable, and branching. The way BTTF mixes these options at its leisure. The butterfly effect. Coping with the scale of possibilities. Strategic infanticide and Godwin’s Law.
Spacetime travel
Taking into account frames of reference. Appearing suddenly in near-vacuum if you don’t properly calibrate your time machine to also account for space travel. The importance of accurate time measurement e.g. Doctor Who The Movie. Destroying “the universe” but only the local area as causality here could not affect far away galaxies due to expansion. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Rational Optimism
Dan’s message welcoming Marty McFly to the future. Recognizing the overarching improvements in the wellbeing of humanity in the face of the negative newscycle.
Future things!
Bricking your self-lacing shoes. Keeping your shoes from joining a botnet. Self-smoking shirts. The periodic nature of futurism where “the future” always looks basically like now but with neato accessories. Hoverboard hoaxes and disappointments.
- VFXcool: Back to the Future Trilogy by Captain Disillusion Part 1: YouTube
- VFXcool: Back to the Future Trilogy by Captain Disillusion Part 2: YouTube
- Uncertainty Principle: UncertaintyPrincipleThePodcast.com
- Welcome, Marty: Uncertainty Principle @ Soundclod
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Rise of the nuclear monsters
The era of nuclear nervousness and the nuclear monsters in cinema. “Take an object, and biggify it.” Nuclear power in the 1950s. The possibility of “unmetered” energy. White Sands, gypsum, and the Trinity test.
Nuclear optimism
The nuclear success hit list and the optimism of the early 50s. Recognizing downsides. Converting hydrogen into helium, but like really violently. Eclipses, occlusion, and we didn’t realize it at the time but Joe was right to use “occultation.” Las Vegas atomic bomb parties.
Nuclear fallout
The fallout from southern Nevada testing traveling directly as far as northeast Utah. The bitter, metallic taste of nuclear fallout. When Kodak accidentally discovered a-bomb testing.
A sense of scale
The scale of nuclear weapons since the first atom bombs. Considering the time when “duck and cover” made sense. Using NUKEMAP for a sense of scale.
Ants
Issues with upscaling. Myrmecology. Antennae and wayfinding. Evolutoniary history and their waspy ancestors. Ants as superorganism. Formic acid attack spray.
- Wargames: computers in the 80s, weapons to end all wars, and dinosaurs w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
- Superman IV: Superman hair materials science, denuclearization, and pushing the moon w/ Jolene Creighton: Decipher SciFi
- NUKEMAP: NuclearSecrecy.com
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DCEU
Aquaman as a sign of possibility the of interesting things going forward in the DC Extended Universe. Sexy Jason Mamoa. Underwater Superman.
Atlantis
Unlimited power when everyone else thought the world was flat. Appreciating the innovation that was realizing the Earth was mostly spherical. Ancient Greek steam turbans. Eating raw fish and seaweed. the origins of sushi. The careful application of lava for removing parasites.
Sea mammals
Underwater echolocation. Communication by sound. The possibility of cetacean languages. Torpedo-shaped body plans and efficient insulation. Breathing fluids (but not sea water!).
Deep diving
Decompression sickness. Why you really don’t want bubbles in your fluids. The differing breath-holding techniques of whales at different depths. Whales that get decompression sickness.
Domesticating sea animals
The list of traits that make for good domesticatiion: “Friendly, feedable, fecund, and family-friendly” and how hard it might be to find the full set of traits in the ocean. The ultimate futility of trying to domesticate sharks.
- Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube
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This movie is awesome
It is! And also we’re old. But honestly this is still unironically the best thing. The legacy of the Matrix. Falling back in love with the Wachowskis. Addressing the sequels.
Cyberpunk
The Matrix as cyberpunk. Comparing against other touchstones. Philip K Dick. William Gibson’s review from the time.
When I began to write NEUROMANCER, there was no “cyberpunk”. THE MATRIX is arguably the ultimate “cyberpunk” artifact. Or will be, if the sequels don’t blow. I hope they don’t, and somehow have a hunch they won’t, but I’m glad I’m not the one who has to worry about it.
-William Gibson, lol
Old school computing
Damn kids and their pixels. CRT displays and low/high persistence phosphorus and how we wound up irl with the bright glowing green text aesthetic that informed The Matrix. Eye fatigue back in the day. Computer-touchers. Staring at people at work for fun and profit. The Solarized color schemes.
The Matrix
Taking the red pill. How easy it actually really is to explain what The Matrix is. Neo is a giant, slimy baby. The inefficiencies of using humans as batteries when you have fusion power. Grass, tastes bad.
Benevolent AI Dictators
But WHAT IF The Matrix actually has humanity’s best interests in mind? The possibility that they really tried to give us our utopia.
Virtual worlds
Plasticity and your brain’s willingness to accept new input schemes. Designing The Matrix with a “failsafe” so the humans are unadapted to their physical bodies irl. Acquired synaesthesia. Supernumerary limbs and phallic cartwheels. Upside down goggles and adaptation to a new “up.” Permanence in sensory adaptations.
Hacking The Matrix
Bendable physics. The difficulty with bending or breaking the rules of computing hardware.
- The Backwards Brain Bicycle by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- The Animatrix: iTunesAmazonYouTube
- The Pizza Matrix (it's terrible): YouTube
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Myth and history
Getting past the nonsense. The reasonable idea that civilizations have in fact existed and then fallen, without notice by modern study. Rocking Like a Hurricane in the B.C. era.
Human history irl
Humanity circa 10,000 years ago. The beginnings of civilization. Early agriculture. Making beer and eventually bread. How not to make bread by putting beer in the oven. More Rocking Like a Hurricane. Just invent pants, beer, and bread and you’re off to a really solid start. “Why are pants, different than shirts?”
The Silurian Hypothesis
The Silurian Hypothesis. Imagining the difference in civilizational detectibility over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Thinking like ze dolphin. Plastic permanence. Climate impacts written into geology. Radiological evidence.
Proto Indo European
The “Atlantean” conlang. Marc Okrand and Klingon. Language before language was written down. How we figure out anything about a language from 6500 years ago that is no longer spoken and was never written down.
Links
Atlantis: iTunes | Amazon Prime Video The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?: arXiv.org
- The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?: arXiv.org
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Indie scifi
Impressive shoestring productions. Remembering Moon. Lived-in duct-tape science fiction.
Sleep cycles
Circadian rhythms. Setting our clocks by light exposure. Light exposure and activity levels. Wearing your sunglasses at night. Different varieties of blindness and sleep rhythms. Retinal sensitivity to light.
Space prospectin’
Alien meat-testicle gems. Personal testicular security systems. Organic gemstones. Pearl production. How attractive our kidney stones might be to alien speculators. “Real” utility vs perceived value.
Wound handling
Wound sealing. Stopping bleeding in an emergency with caulking foam. Packing a wound full of tiny tampons. Failed experiments in would sealing with: beads, marbles, beans, etc. Amputation history. Ancient Greek amputation practices and efficiency records in the Napoleonic and American Civil Wars.
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A review
This was the best worst thing we’ve ever seen. I’m sorry. You’re welcome?
Space tricks
Leaving whole rocket stages to just kinda be in orbit and hit stuff. Talking in space by providing your own atmosphere thanks to your incredible, super lung capacity. Also, how that doesn’t work and Superman needs to be a close talker and hold conversations by vibrating his mouth directly on someone else’s spacesuit helmet.
Superman bodily materials
The hair that can hold at least a half ton. How does Superman cut his hair? Introducing weird gnarly alternate Superman with really long hair and uncut fingernails. Donating Superman’s bits to materials science. Making things out of hair. Totally realistic space elevator musings. Superman as a launch platform. Dissecting the Man of Steel for fun and profit. Using Superman for “free energy” (Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal).
Super-denuclearization
Superman’s built-in orbital mechanics skills. The tiny bit of nothing that would be all of 1987’s nuclear world arsenal against the power of the sun. The relative tiny-ness of the only nuclear weapons ever used in war. Proposals for nuclear de-proliferation. Going Dr Manhattan on the problem.
A bunch of stuff oh god this movie was silly
Nuclear Man’s totally fab nails. The golden crotch-trim on his super suit. Plugging a volcano. Superman’s “brick vision.” Slowing things down, because the moon has “less gravity.” It’s obvious, really. The actual disasters that await us if Superman pushed the Moon away.
- Nukemap: Nuclear Secrecy
- Superman IV deleted scene "Nuclear Man 1": YouTube
- Jolene @ FoL: Future of Life
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Life and death of a star
A hundred years to uninhabitability is a little bit quicker than we thought. Timelines here to red dwarf and all the unpleasantness in between.
Probing your star
The surprising difficulty of actually reaching the sun. The Parker Solar Probe. Taking a close peek at the corona and the young solar wind. Close as in millions of miles.
Moving Earth
Shifting circumstellar habitability zones. Moving the planet out nearer Jupiter as our sun expands. Throwing moderation to the wind and ditching the solar system. Tidal forces.
Planetary travel in deep space
Relativistic impact vulnerability. Appreciating Earth’s protected position within the heliosphere, blocked from impactors by two gas giants and its own moon.
Earth’s new home
Traveling across deep space with no sun. If you dig deep enough, mayyyyyyybe Kelvin’s “secular cooling” would keep everybody warm for the trip. Signing up for some eye shine. The three-body problem.
Going deep
Living underground. Shielding from the radiation and frigid cold of deep space with kilometers and kilometers of Earth. Learning to eat lots of algae, crickets, and fungus. Taking advantage of geothermal energy at depth. Dealing with Earthquakes while being under some of them. The safety of tunnels.
Space station
Smuggling pickles in your pants into space. And maybe some vodka or cognac. “Who wants a warm pickle?”
- The AMAZING Design of the Parker Solar Probe by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin: iTunesAmazon
- The Wandering Earth (book) by Liu Cixin: Amazon
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You folks asked us a bunch of questions. And we gave a bunch of answers!
I’ll leave the actual Questions and Answers to be listened to in the episode, but we did mention some resources etc which I’ll link below…
Past History coverage
To whet your appetite if you’re as excited as us about the possibility of Decipher History:
- Outlander with Lee from Viking Age Podcast
- The Mummy and Stargate with Dominic Perry from History of Egypt Podcast
- And a bunch of things like Conan the Barbarian Hidden Figures The Time Machine War of the Worlds and a bunch more with Joe Ruppel
Podcasting advice
“Just make stuff!” But then for technical details for other Linux podcasters, my dotfiles (application configurations) are shared openly on Github. Files and scripts relevant specifically to our podcasting are probably all mentioned here.
Free software and licenses
Creative Commons and free software and making the world better by helping more people make their stuff.
Episode image made using: A Nice Cartoon Guy Filming A Live Marketing Video by Free Clip Art, CC-BY-SA 4.0 Fake Studio by Josh Hallett, CC-BY 2.0
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Past coverage
We like this show lots! Thus, our continuing coverage:
- The Expanse: Nick Farmer on conlanging and the intersection of language and scifi
- The Expanse VFX: an interview with Cailin Munroe, VFX Producer
- The Expanse Season 2: falling into the sun, martian gravity, and human g-force limits w/ Fraser Cain
Difficulties
The oft-overlooked actual difficulties of space settlement. Not technology and logistics, but like, how hard it will likely be for the humans doing the job at first. And second. And then for a while after, too.
Plants in spaaaaaaaace
Growing fresh food in space habitats. Poop-potatoes. Wide-spectrum LEDs. Self-contained hydroponics/aeroponics.
Low-g situations
People in spaaaaaaaaace. Dealing with microgravity. Bro, do you even lift in space? Eyeball un-squishing. Figuring out how to burp. Fluid-pooling and major injury.
High-g situations.
Turning people into jelly. Differing human sensitivity to sustained g-forces in different directions. The wonderful engineering concept of the ship with omnidirectional seating that reconfigures on-the-fly for optimal g-resistance (The Razorback).
High-speed space impact
Turning into jelly and then having your jelly explode your ship, because physics. Relativistic baseballs. Long-haul space-racing and how to be your own butt-wiping pit crew.
Kinetic weapon diplomacy
Nuclear non-proliferation treaties in space. Orbital kinetic weapons and cloaked nuke-ships playing the role of the submarine as deterrent.
Interstellar highway program
Minimum viable star system bootstrap answering machine. The Fermi paradox. The odds that most of the signs of alien civilization that we might discover would be past.
- The Universe Today Ultimate Guide to Viewing The Cosmos: Everything You Need to Know to Become an Amateur Astronomer by David Dickinson & Fraser Cain: Amazon
- The Expanse Season 3: Amazon
- Guide to Space by Fraser Cain: YouTube
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Man meat
Ahhhhnold! Your average Joe, working construction just like any other regular guy who is a giant bodybuilding monster-person. We really missed this in our coverage of Total Recall 2012.
Memory
Memory “insertion” and memory “deletion” or “blocking” in mouse studies. The great distance from where we are now to trivial memory “vacations” a la Recall. Semantic memory, autobiographical memory, and muscle memory.
Tracking devices
Ideal tracking-implantation locations. The incredible utility of the anus for tracker storage, weighed against the small time window.
Mars
Building Martian settlements with as much radiation exposure as possible: glass! glass everywhere! Radiation exposure on the Martian surface. Burying your dead on Mars: a tasteful resource-wasting mausoleum indoors, a giant pile of bleached-out mummies outside the door, or arrange them in awesome poses?
Space Resources
Natural resources in space. Calculating mining cost vs cost to get it where it will be useful. Mining and transporting Helium-3 for fusion energy. Harvesting oxygen from frozen water and getting rocket fuel as a bonus. NASA’s Moxie and inventing trees for spaaaaace. Making your Martian habitat smell like a dirty fish tank, for science.
- The X-Files Podcast (featuring Josh always): LSG Media
- Science Fiction Film Podcast (featuring Josh sometimes): LSG Media
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Review
Well, we don’t normally do this sorta thing, but oh man this was so good! What the film is about, how it is about, and why it was so special. Appreciating those who do the best work of making history relatable (cough Dan Carlin cough).
Restoration
Film degradation. Scratching, exposure, shrinkage, physical tearing. The crapshoot that is video frame rates in early 20th century film footage. Crank cameras and gearing and compressed-air constant-framerate cameras. Correcting for all of this and the challenge of bringing it all up to a standard 24 fps.
Film is an illusion
The optical illusion that we perceive as movement on a screen. Persistence of vision. Video framerates and the “refresh rate” of the human eye. Motion interpolation as an offense against art and all things good. Tom Cruise fighting the good fight. Motion interpolation as a really neato technology which is actually really cool when not on by default on new televisions. Motion interpolation in VR or video games.
Academic controversy
Historian types and objections to the “enhancements” introduced by the filmmakers. Art vs education and the importance of relatability. Modernizing history. Colorization. 3d-ification. Finding it hard to complain about digital enhancement and remastering which leaves the original materials untouched.
- "YOU WONT BELIEVE YOUR EYES!" by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
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Ion Drive
Compounding acceleration in the relative vacuum of space. Incredible efficiencies versus chemical rockets, and the very low force produced making it only appropriate once spaceborn. The differing problems solved by chemical rockets and ion drives. The benefit of ion drive once out of Earth’s gravity well and going far away. Earth’s tectonic plates, slowly building up to escape velocity. That beautiful blue glow. “Ionic wind” aircraft in-atmosphere: a completely silent aircraft motor with no moving parts!
Landing in spaaaaace
Methods of landing on Mars: Aeroshells, parachutes, rockets, and balloons. Past examples. Different bodies in space and their particular atmospheric densities, atmospheric conditions, and gravitational acceleration.
Nuclear power solutions
Nuclear power vs solar cells. People’s presumption of full-on nuclear reactors rather than the smaller and less-efficient radioisotope thermoelectric generators like on Curiosity. Wondering why we don’t use tiny nuclear robots to blow the dust off of the solar robots. NASA, call us for more great ideas.
Dust storms
Martian dust storms. The low density and force of Martian dust storms, contrary to popular depictions. The visual impressiveness of huge Martian dust storms from space relative to actual effect. The (low) density of the Martian atmosphere and its make-up. How 60mph dust storms are are actually not that powerful: with low gravitational acceleration, static charge, it is very very easy it is to keep dust particles aloft.
Orbital centricity words
The revelation that “geocentric” and “geostationary” apply very specifically to only Earth and there are other words particular to the other major bodies in our solar system. All of the other centricity classifications, including Arecentric for Mars as in the film (though they don’t use it).
Hypoxia
Hypoxia and inability to give detailed instructions to your AI on how to disperse the spirit of humanity into the universe.
- How Do Ion Engines Work? The Most Efficient Propulsion System Out There by Fraser Cain: YouTube
- Why You Should Put YOUR MASK On First (My Brain Without Oxygen) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
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Philip K Dick
Giving’em the old Philip K Dick joint. Cyberpunk. Adaptation fidelity.
Even though it looks like it’s the future…
Luminescent tattoos! Bioluminescence, electroluminescence, phosphorescence, and maybe some other -escences too! A world with three boobs. Well, maybe more than that in the whole world. Hand phones. Ubiquitous smart glass. Neck-mounted face-replacing direct-eye laser projectors. Memory manipulation and deletion.
“The Fall”
Digging a hole through the Earth. Trying to find hard things to do when building a space elevator is too easy. Adding unnecessary rockets to your earth-faller to reach a seventeen minute trip time. Digging deep in the Earth and heat issues. Finding impenetrable hot rock stew even without piercing the crust. Atmospheric pressure in the center of the Earth. Making it work by vacuum tube. The one easy straight line through the Earth that avoids the Coriolis effect, and the actually useful curved lines between land areas.
3d space-scanning
Camera rocket grenades that explode into camera bullets. Like a camera, but more messy. IR scanning. Two-dimensional room-mapping by Roomba. Photogrammetry. Playing VR hentai sex games in your room, in your room.
- FACE SWAP by David Gidali: Vimeo
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Action heroes
Glistening, rippling man-meat. Sweaty pecs. Aggressive handshakes with biceps the size of coconuts. Longing for the good old days. Feeling unjustified disappointment when our heroes aren’t giant walking meat monsters. The inapplicability of the bodybuilder physique to actually getting hero stuff done. Bodylifting.
Savantism
“Savant syndrome is a condition in which someone with significant mental disabilities demonstrates certain abilities far in excess of average” -Wiki. As opposed to someone just simply being awesome at something. Josh’s recent related coverage from The X-Files Podcast @ LSG Media. Acquired savantism. Aptitude for… alien user interfaces? Trans-cranial magnetic stimulation.
Nerddom
Chess club vs computer club. Afterschool D&D. Duke Nukem and Team Fortress LAN parties at school.
Predator
Predator vs prey. Linguistically, should they be called “predator” if they hunt mainly for sport? “Predator” as a label for a biological relationship in which one creatures hunts and eats another for sustenance. The deadliest cat in the world. Humans as top “predator.” How to judge top predator when the line is not so clear cut.
Alien contact
Survey of movie alien contact scenarios and what they reveal about us. Energy required for interstellar travel and the likelihood anyone will happen by by accident. Government secrecy. Zip tie budgets and how to keep an alien captive. irl tranquilizer dart use and the inherent dangers. Why not to shoot yourself with an alien tranquilizer dose.
Building the megapredator
Selecting desirable traits from around the cosmos. Leave enough room for my stomach. Spinal juice collection. Gene manipulation. Selecting for intellectual traits: competitive science. Interpretive flex-dancing to enable armor modes.
Predator-killer
Reasonable solutions to the predator problem. The fix for climate change (fusion?). Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Terminator integrated with The Predator, Aliens, and Blade Runner. How awesome was the original predator?
- The X-Files Podcast: LSG Media
- Meet the Deadliest Cat on the Planet: YouTube
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Doctor Who
Not a lot of Doctor Who experience at the table here. Recognition of the Moffat era. Finding a single, self-contained Who unit to use as an entrée. James McAvoy.
Millenium
Pedantic note: the millenium wouldn’t really start until 2001. Colbert gets to be the jerk for once.
Y2K
Numeronyms. Alternate terms: CDC, FADL. How we got here (there, then?). Limits on data storage and memory over time that make two-digit date storage actually seem kinda reasonable. Y2K38, aka the Unix millnium bug. The horrors of datetime in software and can you imagine the pain of writing this code for time travel. Standard datetime epochs: unix epoch, planet epoch, and time-since-the-big-bang epoch. We’re gonna need a lot more memory.
Multiple hearts
Doctor Who has got a lot of heart. But also he has literally two hearts. Animals irl on Earth with multiple “hearts.” Octopus (3), hagfish (4). The role of auxiliary “hearts” in these animals. Human heart grafting in heterotopic aka “piggy-back” heart transplants.
Atomic clocks
The history of time-measurement accuracy. From sundials to Hugens’ pendulum to modern atomic clocks. Appreciating GPS and understanding how atomic clocks are integral to their function.
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Adaptations
Appreciating the book(s). Bigtime. Adapting Douglas Adams. Remembering the text adventure video game exists.
Dolphins
Dolphin intelligence. It’s not about how smart they are, it’s about how they’re smart. Mammalian sameness as an avenue into better understanding life in the sea. Dolphin communication. Dolphin “language” and the possibility of translation. The Dolphin C.H.A.T. interface.
Betelgeuse
Big star! Red supergiant, 9th brightest in our sky. “Brightness” outside the visible spectrum. Dying stars gnoshing on their planets before going off.
Life form dominance
Metal boxes, taking over the planet and slowly digesting the soft squishy things inside them. Street Fighter-style car-breaking. How to judge the “top” species of a world.
Babel fish
Universal translators. A visit from Nick Farmer from the past, when we asked him about universal translators in our Q&A #2.
Space is big
Mind-bogglingly big! The bigness of space and the difficulty in finding a sense of scale from a human perspective.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
-Douglas Adams
AI
Doors deriving sexual pleasure from providing their service. Polar opposite extreme AI demeanors. Deep Thought and AI constraints.
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Game: BBC Radio 4
- DRONE Solar System Model by Mark Rober: YouTube
- VFX Artist Reveals the True Scale of the Universe by Corridor Digital: YouTube
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Akira
Hey this movie was really important! Time and place. Budgets. Omg so pretty.
Subtitles
Subtitling adult anime for the west. Translation vs localization. Different industries and approaches to localization. Software localization in comparison to film localization. Fansubs online before the likes of Crunchyroll.
Motorcycles
Horsepower! Sweet motorcycles. High-speed motorcycle attacks. Turning people into “mushwater.”
Funiculars
giant slidey freight elevators. Also mountainside trams. Related words:
- Funicular is Latin for cord
- Funiculus is Latin for umbilical cord
- Umbilicus is Latin for navel
Waterways
Underwater or otherwise. Rivers vs sewers. The Tokyo sewer and transport overhaul preceding the 1964 Olympics. The inefficiency of poop-sucking truck fleets. Traveling in sewers and dysentery avoidance.
Psi powers
Creepy, wrinkly children. Psi floaty chairs, the escalator of chairs! When operational, their ares a floaty chair. When they fail, they are… a comfortable chair.
Mind bullets
Obvious thing to do: government research into mind-bullets. Surprising thing: when it works. Even more surprising: when it works so well it blows up Tokyo and starts World War III.
The future of humanity
Evolutionary milestones. Latent abilities. Guided evolution. Atavism.
Laser guns
Laser rifles! Conventions against blinding weapons. Tricking the enemy into rout with elaborate eyepatches. Recognizing the obvious advantages of space lasers. Space-based light concentrators. The difficulties of penetrating atmosphere with space-based lasers. Space lasers for space junk cleanup (Kurtzgesagt).
Blobby guy
Overloading on mind bullets and turning into a big blobby guy before going all mini-singularity. Crushing your girlfriend in your fleshy bits.
- Decipher SciFi animated scifi posters: Twitter
- AKIRA: How To Animate Light by Nerdwriter1: YouTube
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Contact
“Levels” of alien contact. Converting anal probes and sex bases to contact “levels.”
- First kind: visual contact
- Second kind: evidence of contact
- Third kind: in-person contact
The Devil’s Tower
How to pronounce butte. Convention vs personal preference. The awesome nature of structures like The Devil’s Tower, jutting up all inaccessible as they are. Translation errors for fun and profit. Thinking back to Schiaparelli’s canals. Geological origins: igneous intrusions and volcanic butte plugs.
“Sunburn”
Ultraviolet effects on body tissues. What is a sunburn? Arc welding and ultraviolet exposure: “arc eye.”
Debunking things
Shying away from debunking. Appreciating folks who cross boundaries and make deeply interesting informative generally-useful critical thinking-training material, like Captain Disillusion. Credulity and our personal predispositions.
SETI
Appreciating a scientific, rigorous approach to finding intelligent life in the cosmos.
Communicating with aliens
Randomness in space signals. Encoded information, decipherable to latitude and longitude. Past sightings of alien information encoding on Decipher SciFi: Arrival (part 1, part 2), Contact. Math! alien tonal communication.
Music! The Tones!
Music as math. Considering the tiny slice of reality in which we operate. Considering the universality in physics of the mathematical relationships between vibrations. Caelum Rale’s mathematical musical perspective. Making sense of the noise of the universe and demonstrating intelligence across vast distances.
- Captain Disillusion: YouTube
- Escherian Stairwell Deconstruction by Captain Disillusion: YouTube
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Titan
The most interesting moon ‘round Saturn! Viewing the moon Titan by eye or by telescope. Protip: bincolulars are actually just two tiny telescopes.
Saturn
The Saturnian hexagonal storm vs the larger Jovian storm. Latitudinal wind gradients.
Adaptation
Adapting the world to our needs. The possibility of adapting ourselves to a world. Inhospitality. Ethiopian, Tibetan, and Andean elevation adaptation. Andean vampires?
Titan Habitability
Atmosphere. Temperature. Breathability. Tidal locking and avoiding tidal locking with Jupiter. Frozen and liquid water! Methane oceans. No shortage of atmospheres in our solar system, but we’re short on good ones.
Probing titan
The Huygens probe. Proposed future Titan exploration projects.Drones, submarines, floatydrones, sinkydrones, etc.
Weather
Titanian weather gets bigs! Large methane rainstorms, but really only after decaded or centuries of drought. Energy availability so far from the sun.
Hominoforming
Who needs oxygen? Apnea training irl. Suck-tubes. Eventually breathing methane. Cat eyes vs shark eyes and which is best for a flying lizardman.
Evil scientist
Space Moreau, or Space Mengele? Space Merengele? Individual plasticity. Creating the ultimate MMA alien creature thing. Modeling after Bas Rutten. The final mutation hogdepodge. Bat-lats. Human flight on Titan.
- What About a Mission to Titan? It's Time to Explore Saturn's Largest Moon by Fraser Cain: YouTube
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Blade
Enthusiasm!
Silver
Weaponizing silver. Colloidal silver. Papa Smurf. Blue anti-vampire aposematism. Agyria a la Paul Karason aka Papa smurf.
Spray defense
Pepper spray. Garlic spray. The difference between bear spray and self-defense pepper spray. The positives and negatives of fog-mode sprays in vampire club fighting. Johnny Knoxville pain ratings.
Scoville units
Laboratory capsaicin measurement by high-performance liquid chromatography vs the organoleptic method. The obvious unreliability of the original organoleptic (tasting) method.
Blood
Blooooood. Blood drinking. Hemoglobin deficiencies. Heme. Porphyria and the vampire legend. Blood doping.
Sun block
Vampires and ultraviolet sensitivity. “Chemical” and “physical” UV sunblocks.
Decipherment
Decipherment vs translation. Ancient manuscripts. Multispectral imaging. Machine learning supremacy. Making random noise until you know how to play Mario.
- The World in UV by Veritassium: YouTube
- Sunscreen in UV by Physics Girl: YouTube
- Red Bull Crashed Ice 2012 Uphill Race: YouTube
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Eyeball anatomy
All the important parts, wherever they are! Who really cares anyway we’re only here for two in particular: the iris and the retina. The retinal blind spot.
Creationism
And intelligent design. Are wrong. Reaching conclusions and working backwards for fun and profit. Young Earth creationism. Dan’s religious upbringing. Irreducible complexity. Faulty reasoning.
The evolution of the modern vertebrate eyeball
Fish and their goofy eyeball arrangements. The crazy Charlie eyeball progress chart. Light sensitive flat patches, pits, enclosures, open pinhole eyeballs, lenses, and flexing your sphincters. Dan’s episode on Three-D Vision. Pepe Silvia eyeball evolution.
Comparative eyeball studies
Human eyes are pretty sweet! But there other ones that do other things (at their own local summits on Mount Improbable) and are also really good at stuff! Goats, sharks, snakes (sorta), bees. Removing your lenses for fun and profit. Monet’s lens removal and ultraviolet perception.
Eyeball shortcomings
Common “colorblindness” is a misnomer, but “color discernment syndrome” doesn’t flow as well. Retinal wiring and the “blind spot.” Saccades. “Chronostasis” or “the stopped clock illusion” and the tight coupling of our eyes and our brains.
Bio-identification
Selecting scanning sites for statistical uniqueness and natural resistance to hacking. The insufficiency of fingerprints. Iris scans. Retinal scans. Bio-identification security. Ease of use.
Rationality
Rationalism/spiritualism/etc. The rational scientific worldview and self-correction. The absolution of new knowledge.
- Richard Dawkins demonstrates the evolution of the eye: YouTube
- Daniel James Barker's Podcast: Uncertainty Principle the Podcast
- Welcome, Marty - a special short episode: Uncertainty Principle The Podcast
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Sharks
A sharky public service message/pro-shark propaganda. Sharks get a bad wrap in the media. Eating weird stuff. The importance of sharks in the ocean and their roles in their particular ecosystems.
Shark behaviour
Biting the internet. Alternative shark species name suggestions. “Exploratory” biting. Claspers! The Megalodon’s likely “biiiiiiiiiig” penis. Shark skin with dermal denticles, aka “teeth paper.” Shark intelligence and how you might measure it.
The Megalodon
Irl best estimates of megalodon size vs the creatures of the film. Limited fossil data and cartilaginous skeletons. Learning from paleoarchaeological study of ancient shark relatives with more calcified skeletal material. Working backward from the modern shark bodyform. Ancient buzzsaw-mouthed monsters. The importance of teeth.
Helicoprion
ДиБгд CC-BY-SA-4.0
The Marianas Trench
Pressure and darkness at depth. Adaptations to pressure and darkness. Odd, squishy creatures. Blob fish as the gudetama of the sea.
Blob fishes, out of their element
AFSC CC-BY-NC-ND-2.0
Conservation
Shark public image management. Sharks with eyebrows.
- Melissa's Chondrichthyan-promotion organization: The Fins United Initiative
- Melissa's podcast: ConCiencia Azul
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In which we look at your survey responses and reveal where we’re headed in the coming year
- Listening habits
- RPG experience
- Nerd gatherings and meeting listeners irl
- Creator support
- LSG Media appreciation party
- Guest co-hosts
- Suggestion box
- Future expansion recommendations (Decipher History!?)
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This movie
It gets a bit weird! And we have a bit of a time summarizing it.
Storytelling
Adventure stories. Social allegory. The power of science fiction in particular to force you to reframe your perception by believably breaking your assumptions. HG Wells and Moreau. Science fiction tropes and the subversion thereof. Christopher is bad at human things.
Code Switching
Languages, dialect, and speaking to your audience. “Not having to think about it.”
Media
Mass media vs indie communities. The lowest common denominator. Kevin Kelly’s 1000 True Fans.
Milk stuff
A lament for the concentration on cow’s milk. Mare milk. Fermented milk products from cows and horses.
- Bandwidth by Eliot Peper: Amazon
- Borderless by Eliot Peper: Amazon
- Key & Peele Obama Meet & Greet: YouTube
- Key & Peele on Code Switching: YouTube
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Cronenberg
Creepy body horror. Fingers in holes. This is kinda hot.
The video game industry
Gaming in film. Brainscan. The video game bubble. E.T. The Video Game landfill debacle. AAA Game budgets before people took the industry seriously. AAA Auteur creators of the past. Auteur creators in indie games now.
Meat guns
Wooden cannons! Wow! Harvesting ammunition from people’s mouths. Bio-based squirt guns as a reasonable alternative. Blood-squirting lizards.
Alternative computing
Biological computing: mechanical, electrical, and chemical. Quantum supremacy. Nipple interfaces and umbilicals.
Neural interfaces
Neural interface placements. Spinal connections and how to interact with the sensory loop. Bodily orifice security defenses. Sphincters vs meatuses.
Reality
But how do we tell what is real anyway!? The power of storytelling, even when you know it’s not real. Railroading. Milgram experiment the game.
- War Stories by Ars Technica: YouTube
- GDC Classic Game Postmortems: YouTube
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Robot police
Keeping the peace when independent operations can make their own giant robots. Staying somewhat prepared for returning existential threats.
Jaeger graveyard
Stowing expensive purpose-built machinery. Aircraft graveyards. The economics of storing and securing out-of-production technology for later use.
Robotics
Avoiding trouble with the square-cube law by building smaller robots. Boston Dynamics and the inevitable impression of the coming robot apocalypse. Parkour Atlas. Robot kumite.
Drones
Securing mobile war machines. EMPs. Resistance to signal-jamming. Broad attack surfaces.
Brain in a jar
IRL progress towards a brain in a jar: human brain organoids implanted on a mouse brain. Sensory apparatus and feeling pain. Getting (ethically) hairy.
Rare earth elements
Actually: not so rare! But a pain in the ass to extract. The Japanese rare earth ocean-bottom treasure trove and how it will be difficult to access. Mining rare earth elements from spaaaaaaaace and how we probably need a new colloquial name for these materials. Underwater volcanoes.
Jaeger blood rocket fuel
Magical Jaeger blood rocker fuel. Gravity gun space race. Keeping Earth as a farm for kaiju blood, fueling our expansion into the entire solar system. Throwing rocks at things for fun and profit.
- Pacific Rim: square cube law, giant death robot, and Earth terraforming w/ Stephen Granade: Decipher SciFi
- Atlas Parkour: YouTube
- Rayguns and Robots (Curly Phil): Instagram
- Batch 25 Comics (Andy P): Instagram
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Criticism
Sloppy orbital mechanics and the value of science-adjacent entertainment.
Ed Harris
Forever the voice of Mission Control.
Space is dangerous
Almost as scary as the ocean.
EVA jet chairs
NASA’s MMU. The new tiny one: SAFER! Giant rectal rectangle jet chairs?
Where and how things orbit
Earth-orbital distances. Where different kinds of man-made satellites operation and how they are not likely to run into each other roughly ever. The utility of geostationary orbits. Earth orbits.
Orbital impacts
Relative velocities. Could you dodge a sniper bullet? IRL ISS escape procedures. Soyuz escape plans.
Deadspin
Glowing blood and possible alien infections. Human sensitivity to positive and negative g-forces. Trying to push more blood to your head for mental superpowers.
Orbital transfer
And impromptu deorbiting. How to crash a probe into mars (by accident).
Pressurization
Chinese space stations, then and now. Station entrance and exit procedures. Finally the Star Trek balloon analogy comes in handy! Decompression sickness/the bends during EVA. Portable life support systems. Sokol and ACES, and their insufficiency for extra-vehicular activities.
Fire extinguishers
…in spaaaaaace. Carbon dioxide. Water. Super soakers. Fire emergency procedures.
EVA Suits
Past designs and modern designs. Future EVA suit developments. Constrictive suits directly against the skin rather than creating an atmosphere around the body: the biosuit. The NASA Z Suit that looks like Buzz Lightyear, and operating EVA suits at the same pressure as your space station.
Reentry
Soyuz reentry angles. Heat shielding. Trying to point in a particular direction.
Lifting
The complete obviousness that heavy compound weight lifting is the major solution to muscle and bone loss in space. Bro do you even lift? Vacuum-based space squat rack.
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Skyscrapers
History. The industrialization at scale of steel. The state of things. Future heights. Arcologies.
Vertical cities
Hong Kong’s real estate problem. Urban verticality and resource efficiency. Living in coffin pods and sharing utilities.
Holodeck
IRL holodeck technology. Projecting images for multiple . Your own personal Dyson display cloud. Frickin lasers directly in your eyes. CastAR.
Skyscraper materials technology
Sand as a rubbish base for huge buildings. Building deep foundations in the desert. Wooden skyscrapers!? Sand in concrete and sand shortages. Varieties of sand. Engineered sand.
Fire
Fire suppression! Overheated air and air pressure for aircraft.
Elevators
Elevator cable lengths and limits. Maglev elevators. High-speed elevators.
PORK CHOP SANDWICHES
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Doom
Doom! Nostalgia.
The Martian moons
Crappy moons that can barely form a potato. Phobos and Deimos. Delineating between moons, planets, and all the other stuff. The likely origin of the Martian moons.
Space marines
Corporate space settlement and operations. Space Force. Josh reviews space marines; again. Martian weaponry.
Settling mars
Where to build? The cost of scratch settlement construction. Caves and lava tubes. Teleporting resources changes the game.
Ancient aliens
The Prometheus Problem, again. Doom humans-on-mars hypotheses: aliens developed humans on Mars vs humans originated on Mars. Species resurrection. Gene therapy. Chromosomal addition and subtraction.
Martian miscellany
Nano walls! Water on Mars! Telefragging!
- Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
- The X-Files Podcast: LSG Media
- Masters of Doom by David Kushner: iTunesAmazon
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Image enhancement
Naive vs machine-intelligent image enhancement. “Photorealistic hallucination” and honest technical names. Reconsidering the absurdity of fictional image enhancement in the age of clever neural nets. Creative, artistic “enhancement” vs rigor.
Paralyzation workarounds
Well, breaking your spinal chord sure seems to suck. Spinal breaks and the autonomic nervous system. Bodily control via brain-machine interface.
Transhumanism
Extension of human functionality by implanted technology! Increasing neural communication speed, or shortening signal distance. Gun arms. Gun arms! Vocal device command by subvocalization.
The AI “box test”
Self-serving artificial intelligence. Yudkowsky’s AI box test. Callback to Ex Machina. Additional stipulations. The true power of a goon with a wrench. How easy are humans to fool? Very.
- Yudkowsky's AI box test: Yudkowski.net
- Decipher RPG Pilot episode 1: Decipher SciFi
- Decipher RPG Pilot episode 2: Decipher SciFi
- Decipher RPG Pilot episode 3: Decipher SciFi
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Our heroes make a real mess of an airship or two, and FINALLY Bodyguard Chris manages to turn the tables and make something of his repeated failures. Emperor Colbert tries not to die before the end.
(This podcast is the finale of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty.
Previously: Part 1 & Part 2)
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Afrofuturism
Wishing there were more of this in popular media.
Invisible cities
A review of invisibility technology: spatial, temporal, and spectral light cloaking. Vibranium to the rescue.
Vibranium
Space impactors. Resource
Armor
Body armor, stationary armor. Avoiding concussive force. Reactive armor in tanks: shaped explosives that explode at the other thing that’s gonna explode! Molecular springs of carbon for storage of mechanical energy from kinetic. How not to turn into Black Panther jelly when the suit releases its energy (be superhuman).
Absolute monarchies
Bas Rutten for king. Right hoooook.
Scars and sweat
Killmonger’s scarification and scar damage to the dermis. Sweat patterns around scars.
Telepiloting
Remote vehicle control. Light-speed communications delays. AI-assisted remote human driving.
War Rhinos
Domestication vs trainability. Extinct war elephants and why we can’t have war rhinos. Dürer’s rhinoceros, drawn from notes on the first rhino seen in Europe since Roman times.
Dürer's Rhinoceros
CC-0
Click language
Xhosa! Bantu languages. The possibility of a connection to the earliest human languages.
- Decipher RPG part 1: Decipher SciFi
- Decipher RPG part 2: Decipher SciFi
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Emperor Colbert dresses down and bodyguard Chris rediscovers the joy of the bidet and the German shelf toilet. Then: daring aerial maneuvers!
(This podcast is the second part of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Previously: Part 1)
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This podcast is the first of three episodes of our pilot series for Decipher RPG where we play Mirror by Sandy Pug Games with Liam Ginty. Here is part 2!
After some particular fun with character creation, Emperor Colbert’s coronation is interrupted by a sudden attack. With RPG-Colbert still entranced in his ceremonial mask, his bodyguard Chris rushes him to safety, but… airships!
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Doggo
Man’s best friend! And one of (many of?) our best technologies. The level to which we can handicap animals for aesthetics if we put our mind to it. Domesticated foxes.
Domestication
Domestication. Plants and animals. Bending chosen qualities to better human use.
Watermelon as of The Renaissance. Yay selective breeding! We win!
Warbot design
Implicit and explicit communication channels. Dog human body language-reading. Data connections and cloudy signal processing. Adaptation of dog body-design to robots. The small design effort required to get people to treat a robot animal like an animal.
Flamethrowers
The difference between industrial and military flamethrowers. An unpleasant, sticky material: napalm and napalm-like products!
Survey!
We have one of those. Pls help by hitting the link we gave in the episode!
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Classic arcade gaming
Memories of the arcade and the Sega Game Gear. Introduction of Larry the Rat in the Atari Lynx port. How to pick from current social fears for your lazy game plot.
Zero-G research
Genetics research in spaaaaaace. CRISPR. Bremen Drop Tower.
Gorilla sign language
Koko the gorilla. Gorilla sign language. Credulity and confirmation bias. Impressive gorilla lexicons. Adventures in signing portmanteus. Yogurt aka “milkfruitcandy food.”
Animal fights
Comparing the gorilla to the grizzly bear. Relative animal size. Grizzly bears as killing machine. Gorilla conflict-avoidance techniques.
Scaling animals
The square-cube law! Relative scaling and the race between volume and surface area (volume always wins!). The creation of a bio antenna. The relatively low energy of radio waves.
Mutations, mutations, mutations
Gorilla turns into giant gorilla. Lizard turns into mega lizard. Wolf, though, turns into a wolf… with patagia and throwable quills! Possibly resembling the urticating hairs of a tarantula.
- How to Make an Elephant Explode with Science by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube
- Zero-G Experiments on Earth: The Bremen Drop Tower by Tom Scott: YouTube
- Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday by The Onion: YouTube
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Spoiler alerts
Special conditions requiring primary and secondary warnings.
Robots
How to tell if you are a robot? New Study Finds Best Way To Determine If You Are Android Still Cutting Open Forearm To Reveal Circuitry Within. Self-delusion and mass self-delusion.
Earthvacuation
Earth is really well-tuned for our needs (or is it the other way around?), and humans should try to maintain this as a base of operations if at all possible.
Surviving outside of Earth
Key resources on Mars and elsewhere in the solar system (outside of Earth). Iron for bullets. Rocket fuel.
Stealth in space
There is no stealth in space. Trying to hide from Earth (on Mars). Difficulties in hiding propulsion, light-blocking, and infrared emission. Hiding “in” the sun.
Attacking Earth
Shock and awe vs the impossibility of stealth. Why a nuclear EMP attack might not be a great idea. Throw a rock at it.
Evolving consciousness
Evolved consciousness in Earth life. The possibility of consciousness emerging in “artificial” life. Attention Schema Theory. Central processing of separate signal enhancement.
- What is Consciousness? by Vsauce: YouTube
- Real Quick: LSG Media
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Love
Love! For James Cameron and Aliens. And the great utilitarian design of the spaceship interiors. Great world-building.
Hypersleep
Cryosleep? Ice sublimation and mummified Sigourney Weaver. Hibernation. How to shove pine cones up your butt, chug some Nyquil, and turn into a bear. Cryogenic specimen preservations: sperm! DIY fecal plugs for hibernation.
Private space industry
The rise of private space industry. Going dystopian.
Planetary operations
Planet? Moon? The delineation between planets and moons and looking forward to the future when we get confused again. Demoting Pluto to planetoid. Terraforming Mars. Sad news on Martian CO2 supplies for atmosphere creation. Crater settlements and whether or not you need a roof. Atmospheric density limits for human comfort and thriving.
Xenomorphs
But are they really called Xenomorphs? The throwaway line in Aliens that spawned decades of confusion.
Send the robots
Always send the robots. Unless you are an evil corporation with shady goals. Milk robots…?
Blade Runner connection
Blade Runner and Aliens are the same universe. The separate lines of technological development that yielded replicants and Aliens’ “synthetics.” Blade Runner 2049’s anime prequel and how that informs the universe crossover.
- Jurassic World, Jurassic Values by Mike Hill: YouTube
- Josh's escape room in Massachusetts: Mass Escape
- Josh's shows on LSG Media: Science Fiction Film PodcastThe X-Files Podcast
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Space settlement
The economics of leaving Earth. Settling the inner and outer solar system. The Expanse. Space cattle and other space resources (water, mineral).
Garbage - in spaaace!
Garbage in space aka space junk. Cleaning up space junk. Giant nets as a major cleanup strategy.
Garbage - on Eaaaarth!
Modern waste management. What to do with municipal solid waste. Leachate. The difference between dumps and landfills and the interesting energy-reclamation technology involved in cutting edge WTE facilities.
Plastic
Massive plastic appreciation. How plastics ushered in the modern world. A lament for wasteful use of “disposable” plastic products. Microplastics in the water. Biodegradable plastics. The discovery of plastic-eating bacteria. Speeding up nature to digest plastic now. The coming plague of plastic-eating bacteria.
“De-evolution”
This isn’t a thing! There’s no end point that is being retreated from - life just adapts to pressures, ongoing.
Handling failure
Revisiting our past failures. Combating cynicism by just kind of ignoring it.
- The Water Fountain You Pee In: YouTube
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Fandom
Identity according to interests. Fiction as personal and social mirror. Cultures and subcultures and super-niches.
The “Stacks”
Ad-hoc city large-scale construction. Kowloon Walled City.
Virtual Reality immersion technology
VR treadmills vs slippy-feet (Virtuix Omni). Looking silly. Scaling and translation from real-world input to virtual worlds. Manual and body haptics. Simulating moistness. Nard-stimulation for good and ill.
VR spatial awareness
Directional trickery in virtual reality. Tricking people into experiencing smaller real-world spaces as much larger in virtual reality. Saccade-driven Redirected Walking for VR.
Resolution of virtual worlds
Pixel densities and optical foci. Continuity of experience and detection of the difference between virtual and simulated worlds. Finding the clever “hacks” that will enable us to more deeply immerse ourselves in VR experiences.
Sharding
Virtual world scale and sharding vs mon-worlds.Virtu
Value systems
Real virtual economies and responsibility.
- Ready Player One (the book) by Ernest Cline: iTunesAmazon
- Saccade-driven Redirected Walking for VR: YouTube
- A Real Life Haptic Glove (Ready Player One Technology Today) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- The Infinadeck Omnidirectional Treadmill by Smarter Every Day: YouTube
- Kowloon Walled City interactive feature: WSJ
- The Brookhaven Experiment: Steam
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The Man From Earth
Our love for the original. Considering the sequel. People talking in a room.
Nostalgia
The coming-on of the bronze age. Grocking the rate of progress w/ Dominick Perry. “Free time” in hunter-gatherer societies. Nostalgia as a way to bridge from what was old and comfortable to what is new and scary.
Cro-magnon
Anatomically modern humans vs socially modern humans. The evolutionary advantage of controlled fire and beginning to cook food. Getting away from all-day mastication and looooooooong intestines in favor of the big brain on Brad.
Primitive Technology
Getting boy without modern technology. The earliest evidence for humans cooking with fire. Differentiating human-controlled fire from millennia ago from other sources (like iguanas, or wildfires).
Growing old
Life expectancies over time. Appreciation for antibiotics. Life expectancy vs life_span_. Evolving into a centauranarian.
Jesus
Less-than-generous portrayals of religious characters. Third-act surprises. Jesus vs the antichrist.
Resolutions
Resolutions?
- Primitive Technology: YouTube
- The Man From Earth: biological immortality, and what is a micromort w/ Adrian Falcone: Decipher SciFi
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Testosterone
Preposterous amounts of testosterone. Preposterone. Ahhnold and Carl Weathers. The muscles from Brussels in spaaaaace.
Invisibility
Picking a chunk of the electromagnetic spectrum to be invisible within.
- Spatial light manipulation
- Temporal light manipulation
- Spectral light manipulation
Predator vision
Seeing in infrared! Interactions between optical camouflage and optical receivers. Why doesn’t all the life on Earth have heat vision? Heat-tracking evolution. Pit viper heat sensors. Human heat-tracking. Biology absorbing infrared. Seeing in greyscale. Wet clay camouflage and effectiveness over time. Mythbusting. Infrared-blocking materials.
Predator physiology
Aliens vs Predator for top monster. Ears…? Bleeding. The rainbow of different blood colors available on Earth. Green blood. Luminescent blood. Figuring out why only arthropods seems to have mandibles, and lamenting the lack of them in macro predators.
Shared Universe
Appreciating that Blade Runner is pretty much officially the same world as Predator now.
Self-destructing technology
Techno-scuttling. Destroying advanced technology to keep it out of enemy hands. Super-expanding polymers. Amazon delivery drone automatic “dispersal.”
- If It Bleeds We Can Kill It - The Making of Predator: YouTube
- If It Bleeds We Can Kill It - Predator the Musical by legolambs: YouTube
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A collection of responses to feedback and addenda from supporter Jeremy. Basically, a review of some things we missed in a few episodes and an expansion on others. :-)
Volcano Fault types review. Flood basalts as hot spot lava spam. The Deccan Traps. Vulcanism as a possible explanation for dinsoaur extinction (Wargames).
The Last Jedi Progress in millitary tactics. The triumph of guerrilla tactics. Politeness in chess. Mt St Helens sound waves. High-energy events.
Black Mirror Season 4 Part 1 - Arkangel Implantable devices. API development.
Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams Lojban. Constructed languages. Esperanto.
Transformers the Last Knight Unfavorable reviews. Myth vs legend vs fable as given to us by an actual folklorist. Colonialism and the lens of cultural study. Swole Jesus. Zeus’s promiscuity. Anti-intellectualism.
Stargate “Gopher nukes.” Tactical nuclear yields. Nuclear testing and Godzilla.
Men in Black Alcohol! Low-alcohol beverages in history instead of water. A History of the World in Six Glasses, again.
Lost in Space Climate change and glacial surges.
Annihilation
The Color Out of Space - by HP Lovecraft: iTunes Amazon Tron Programming languages, where to draw the line behind low and high level.
A Quiet Place Sound localization without pitch. Inaudible High-Frequency Sounds Affect Brain Activity.
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Surviving without sound
Deafness. How loud is a fart? Cochlear implants. Alien defense engineering.
Cochlear implants
How cochlear implants differ from hearing aids. How a cochlear implant works. The difficulties of hearing loss.
Grain Entrapment
Ughhhhhhhhh. Compression and suffocation.
Echolocation
The strangeness of terrestrial echolocation. Frequency adaptations for different types of prey. Signal rate at different distances.
The creatures
Planetary orbit situations with extended periods of surface darkness. Extremophile armor development. Echolocation evolution. Space cat behaviour. Dinner Time ambulation.
Killing aliens
Feedback loops. Amplitude vs frequency and damaging the hearing apparatus.
- BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Echolocation: BBC
- Shooting Down a Lost Drone and why Dogs Tilt their Heads - Smarter Every Day: YouTube
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Dystopia
New York city post WW3. Crime in the US in the early 80s.
Airplane failure recovery
The good old days when Presidents could be bald. Plane escape mechanisms. Parachutes vs ejection seats vs ejection pods.
Jet injectors
Vaccinations by high-pressure jet. Finding out these are real-life. Polio vs Hepatitis.
Gliders
Large wingspan, light body. The Twin Towers. Clever practical FX for wireframe nighttime navigation display. Comparing budgets with Tron.
Fusion
Time projections. Cold fusion and hot fusion. Taking the shortest route and simply building a Dyson sphere. Waste production and failure modes.
- The Thing: antarctic explorers, extreme doctoring, and figuring out aliens w/ Cae & Ryan: Decipher SciFi
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Cyborgification
Remote-controlled cockroaches. Engineering cyborg cats with tape and servos. Search and rescue rats. What counts as a cyborg? Insects with eyebrows.
Non-cyborgification
Whirring servos and motors. Wearable technology and where to draw the line on cyborgs. The cyborg olympics. Determining the limits of human performance.
Thermoregulation
Mammalian heat regulation. Humans are the best distance runners AND car-pushers.
Pain
Pain response and learning. Pain and athletic performance. A PSA about injecting things int your heart - you don’t want a hole there. The best places in your body to randomly put holes.
Cyborg naiveté
But what is a penis anyway? Memory inhibition. Competitive eating. Binging and stomach elasticity. Competitive eating training.
Supersoldier Programs
Was it a success? Drugs make you a superhero.
- Universal Soldier alternate ending: YouTube
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Old-school space dogfighting
Stealth and the economics of close-distance space combat. Ship designs for different combat settings. Space vs atmosphere travel. Underwater?
Alien planets
Hostile, but really lucky to have breathable air and drinkable water. Storms. Periodic heavy meteor showers. Comet tails vs close planetary bodies for meteor shower material.
Alien wildlife
Space horseshoe crabs. Sarlac antlions. Half-Life 2 interpretations. Antlion larvae.
Drac
The aliens as portrayed by Louis Gossett Jr. Alien physiology. Evolutionary body-heat dissipation adaptations. The spectrum of binocularity in Earth-life.
Space-faring civilization
Time scales for change on the technological curve.
Alien reproduction
Hermaphroditism? Asexuality? Parthenogenesis? This pregnancy is a weird situation. One man and an alien baby.
Interstellar enslavement economics
Transporting slaves to remote mining colonies. Where are the robots? Possible Dune connections.
- Space Warfare by Isaac Arthur: YouTube
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Production
Early 80s VFX. So much rotoscoping. The dawn of computer generated graphics. Disney and art assets. Computational limitations creating art styles.
Late-70s computing
Hard drives! Huge ones.Huge mainframes. Pre-internet networks.
Anthropomorphised computing
Sentient computer antagonists. Legal protections for artificial life. Chess as the soon-to-be-obliterated pinnacle of artificial intelligence.
AI Takeovers
Master Control program.Skynets. Conflicting interests between man and machine. AI villainy is different from human villainy. Good AI to compete with the bad ones.
Maybe the only way to stop a bad A.I. with a nuclear arsenal is a good A.I. with a nuclear arsenal
Death-frisbees
Chakram! Old-school sharpened frisbee weapons of south Asia.
Accidental godliness
Accidentally creating cargo cults. Self-aware life in servitude. Responsibilities when creating intelligences.
Digitization
Digitizing three-dimensional objects. Destructive and non-destructive methods. How we scan books. Brain uploading. Human Connectome Project.
mcp:~ $ cat /dev/jeff_bridges > /dev/null
- Mainframes and the Unix Revolution by Computerphile: YouTube
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Krypton
Where did the Superman “S” as family symbol come from? Kryptonian Planetary OSHA. Retroreflective materials. Planet-‘sploding backstories. Shifting orbits. Tidal forces. Planetary superstructures.
Space baby
Intergalactic space travel. Time dilation. Launching an intergalactic spaceship from your living room.Time dilation and relative experience of time. Hyper-intellectual aliens. Space baby temper tantrums.
Space is big, but then the space between the less empty empty spaces are even… more empty. And there’s a lot of it.
-Lee Colbert
There’s only one thing that can go the speed of light and that’s… light
-Christopher Peterson
Heroes and villains by era
Zod vs Luthor. Henchman. Old-school bad guys with actual bona-fide lairs. Christopher Reeve was so perfect as Superman. Henry Caville’s magically-perfect chestbeard.
Super powers
The history of Superman’s powers of flight. Hulk jumps! Kryptonian evolution. Superman’s resistance to cancer from x-rays. Alternative vision modes, and Superman rubbing his eyes right against things for ultrasound. Kryptonite! And the Kryptonite shrimp challenge.
Evil plans
Clever villainy. Megaton yields.
CC0
Time travel
Superman already did the one real kind. Spinning the earth back and forth like a record.
- Does Light Experience Time?: YouTube
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Alex Garland
❤️. Ex Machina.
Abominable mutants
Shark-gators. Flower-deer. Man-bear-mole-pig. Dr Manhattan-style animal transformations. Big blue tree phalluses.
Horizontal gene transfer
Micro vs macro.
Continuous mutation
Plants.
The shimmer
Exponential understanding. Deciphering the puzzle of Earth life. Clams with human faces. Desctructive/transformative information processing. They’re Made Out of Meat
Micro-life in the shimmer
Boa constrictors in your gut. Tapeworm run amok. Gut bacterial colonies and fungus. Cordyceps zombie fungus a la The Girl With All the Gifts.
The Shimmerrer
Interfacing with alien life. Different levels of understanding. Von Neumann machines.
The ending
Deciphering the ending without putting the major spoilage here in this page.
- The Girl With All the Gifts: parasitic fungi, speed of smell, and the end of humanity: Decipher SciFi
- Ex Machina: ai software, wetware, and the turing test: Decipher SciFi
- The Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage by Kurzgesagt: YouTube
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Thanos
Josh Brolan was so good! And the character itself too! Coin purse chin. The story of how a light flick to the coin purse could have saved the world.
Economic modeling
Thanos breaks out the Excel spreadsheets. Productively employing the bottom trillionty billion around the galaxy. Ultimate utilitarianism.
The upper atmosphere
Atmospheric pressure. Hypoxia.
Space mapping and orienteering
Visualizing three-dimensional routes as two-dimensional on Earth-maps. Visualizing four-dimensional routes as three three physical dimensions plus time.
Star forges
Forging in the heart of a neutron star vs heart-of-a-neutron-star-adjacent. Breaking assumptions. Neutron stars. Facts and figures and analogies. Converting teaspoons of neutron star matter into 5-Dollar Footlongs. Thor jelly vs Thor Jam and their relative whelmingness.
Dyson Spheres
Disovering that Dyson’s original conception (1960) of the Dyson “sphere” actually better fits the modern description of a Dyson “swarm.” Different Dyson sphere variants. Statites.
Vision based on movement
But it isn’t! It’s contrast-based! Toad vision feature detection. Jurassic Park confusion.
Iron Man
Nanotech. Programming nanobots to eat brains - or gloves!
- Megastructures 1.1: Dyson Spheres by Isaac Arthur: YouTube
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Science words
Jumanji in space. Card-by-card science words.
Light pollution
The night sky “never looked that close before.” The majority of Americans being unfamiliar with a real view of the night sky. Light pollution. Dark sky preserves. The LA blackout and the milky way. Light pollution and the effect on wildlife. And the effects on us.
Sky glow. Light pollution!
Royal Astronomical Society CC-BY
Planetary rings
100% ring rate on gas giants in our solar system. Ring size and albido. The lifecycle of a ring system. The “Roche Limit.” Ring formation beginnings. Rocks vs ice in ring systems. Super-large ring system discoveries.
The Roche limit
Theresa Knott CC-BY-SA-3.0
Cryonic sleep
Cryonic sleep and galactic travel. Teenager sleep schedules.
Gravity Wells
Weightlessness in orbit. Orbit is falling.
Meeting aliens
As per Hawking: you might not want to!
Zorgons
Don’t forget: people are meat too! Cold blooded vs warm-blooded intelligence. Metabolic rates and bloodedness. Dinosaurs may have been mesotherms!
You are as meat as a cow!
-Colbert
Space food
Tubes and bricks. Bad roomates and sardine tubes. Kimchi rocket ships in spaaaaaace. Eating your sandwich in the bathroom, just in case your microbiome can’t handle the onslaught.
Shooting stars
IRL shooting stars. Rogue stars. Meteor shower disappointments.
- If Earth had Rings by Artifexian: YouTube
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Space travel and orienteering
Space maps. Star brightnesses and reference points. The ESA Gaia Project. Landing in glaciers. Glacier life cycles. Fjords! Callback to Seveneves.
Space imaging
Dude, we have video from a comet! How various inputs are composited into attractive imagery. Public data and the opportunities for citizen science and science communication. Spectroscopy and impactor makeup-detection. Detecting invisible glass clouds by how they scatter light. Red shift and blue shift.
“Superfreezing”
Superfeeezing, supersaturation, etc. Booby-trapped microwaved water. Nucleation points. Slushy bear. Day/night cycles and weather around extreme freezing/thawing.
The “crew”
Dad’s triage skills. Recognizing magnesium. Is it bigger than a breadbox?
Robots!
General Grievous gets the thigh ground. Fueling your nether regions with gasoline. Power-saving mode in the murder module.
“Fire seeds”
Giant redwood reproduction strategies. Living through wildfires. “Cleverness” in the unguided process of natural selection.
- "Video" from the comet 67p: Twitter
- Lost in Space (1998 film): gifted children, future vlogging, and colonizing space: Decipher SciFi
- Which Are The Real Pictures of Space? What’s a Photo and What’s An Illustration? by Fraser Cain: YouTube
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Disney
Westworld is some Disneyworld-level theme park logistics. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Westworld ticket prices.
The Wild West
The mythos. Cowboys shootin’ and rootin- tootin’. The time period. The expansion of settlement exceeding governmental reach and the perception of lawlessness.
TV vs Movie
Deep questions about consciousness and self and where they really really aren’t.
AI in the 70s
Depictions of artificial general intelligence in the period and how awesome 2001: A Space Odyssey was/is. The “AI Winter.” The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence. Heuristics. Teaching our machines to learn. Neural net black boxes. Machines created by other machines.
Smart AI/dumb AI
Collections of very convincing modules, sans consciousness, vs AGI. In what way can a computer system “understand” language?
Sensory processing
How long it takes humans and machines to adapt to moving in their environments. The speed of artificial neural networks in learning and human evolution of millennia. Computer vision in 1973! Face tracking. Human attention to human attention.
Robotics!
The difficulty in developing human-like robots. Our subconscious alertness to any oddness in our human-to–human interactions. The people-watching your brain does when you’re not watching.
Computer viruses
Coinage. Von Nuemann’s “self-replicating automata.”
- The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence [1973]: YouTube
- Westworld (the series): iTunesAmazon
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Will Smith
He’s the best!
Alien life
And the forms that it takes. Arthropoids. Cephalapoids. The names we give the aliens and the names they give themselves.
Aliens and stimulants
Coffee!
Humanity’s beverage history
And in particular how wonderfully wonderful caffeine is. Dwarf Fortress and ale supplies. Depressants vs stimulants and the shape society.
The “real” Men in Black
Frustration with being made a joke.
Human gestation and intelligence
Evolution, hip size, and cranial size. Bipedalism. Early homo adaptations and social assisted delivery.
Earth as universal backwater
Alien advocates for the ethical treatment of dumb humanity.
Memory wiping
Possible unreliable narrators. Neuralizers vs “memory sticks.” This is my roofie stick. Short term and long-term memory “wiping.”
- A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage: iTunesAmazon
- Mirror - A single-page PnP micro RPG for you and your friends by Liam Ginty: DrivethruRPGItch.io
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Climate control
CW7 climate change-fixer compound. “Artificial cooling.” Climate manipulation. The end of the world. “Snowball earth” capped by massive volcanic activity and leading into life explosions. Weather manipulation vs climate manipulation. Radioactive hurricanes and sharks with frickin lasers. Micro-life survival.
The ozone layer
What is that for. Chlorofleorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion.
Cold
The frozen arm punishment. Cooling rates and atmospheric density. Christopher’s experience (or lack thereof) freezing limbs with liquid nitrogen.
Food in the cryopocalypse (entomophagy)
Efficiency in energy conversion in food sources. Disgust reactions in the face of starvation. Feed conversion ratio. Indiginous food sources and feeding a growing human population. Competing with dung beetles. Christopher’s adventures in preparing wax worms. Maggot cheese and knowing your limits.
- Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained by Kurzgesagt: YouTube
- Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet by Daniella Martin: iTunesAmazon
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Pre-historic Egypt
The notability of the introduction of a massive metal space-portal 10,000 years ago, when Egyptian were still just barely getting down with agriculture.
Egypt and the pyramids
When was the Bronze age anyway? Pyramid time scales. Familial pyramid-building competitions. The progression from small-scale burial mounds to “great” pyramids. Egypt vs meso-American pyramid research. Seasonal construction recruitment.
Stone and copper tooling for stonework
Stone tools. Copper tools. Early Brone tools. Limestone vs granite. Arsenical copper advantages.
Pyramid-building alien hypotheses
“Chariots of the Gods” and the origin of alien pyramid conspiracies. Judging fringe theorists.
Ancient Egyptian language and writing
The origin of the writing systems of ancient Egypt. Accounting.
Daniel Jackson
Inspiring budding Egyptologists and getting suddenly swole.
Stargates
Stargate discovery. Deep time and the chances of happening upon ready-made technology after an extinction. Permeable wormhole membranes. Stargates vs black holes. EM transmission and accretion disks. Molecular deconstruction.
Probe robots
Bomb disposal space bot. Colonization.
Exoplanets
Stargates and our knowledge at the time.
- The History of Egypt Podcast: Website
- The Trouble With Transporters by CGP Grey: YouTube
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JCVD
Green screen etc.
Time machine carrying capacity
Red smear memorials. Time travel in tiny, sweaty drug subs. It all comes down to laser machine guns.
Confederate gold
Get rich quick slowly schemes.
Smuggling from the past
Cost of moving mass through time. Burying your pilfered gold for pickup vs time traveling it to the present. Inefficient black market time travel business models.
Carbon dating
And how you can’t carbon date gold itself.
Depression Profiting
Sicilian grandmas. Skyrim health potions and time travel interest-compounding. Better investment plans:
- Put money into savings account
- …
- profit
- repeat
Making the future
Ugly self-driving cars. Greebles. Glue some crap to some crap and bam, you’re in the future.
Timecopping and paradoxes
Time loops. “The same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time.” The indistinguishability of atoms of the same isotope. Quantum word soup. “Touching” by neutron star. The grandfather paradox where you bang your grandma. Ted Chiang anti-time loop deciphering advice. It’s not gay if you don’t touch and as a bonus you also don’t explode in paradox.
“I’m gonna live forever, hahaaaa”
- Bloodsport: iTunesAmazon
- Bloodsport Mentos: YouTube
- You Can't Touch Anything by Vsauce: YouTube
- Can We Really Touch Anything? by Vsauce: YouTube
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Brain-controlled machines
Brain-machine interfaces. EEG. The advantage of the group over the individual. Humans in tandem with AI and the closing window of human cognitive superiority. Computational offloading. Wetware/hardware integration and explaining the “excessive” neural load of Jaeger drift.
Drifting
Localized neural “loops.” Neural load and body mass. Chasing the rabbit. Multiple input control vectors. Meatsack adaptations and proprioception. Human biofeedback and ambulation vs “Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments”
Square-cube business
Materials and size scales and the inappropriateness of humanoid design for your giiiiiiiiiiant robots. The square cube law. Don’t forget Godzilla and King Kong!
Kaiju
Neural loads and signal speed. Central pattern generators and “butt brains” and how the dinosaurs didn’t have them. Blue ammonia heavy metal blood. Atmospheric pressures.
Jägers
Metallic construction. Irrational fear of alloys. Possible material engineering choices. Beryllium is the worst. Graphene and spraying pencils. Incentive systems for robot design. Square cube again. Density.
Power sources
The subtlety of nuclear reactors vs nuclear bombs. Orion nuclear blast spacecraft. Carl Sagan. Energy density of fuel sources. Nuclear testing for fun and profit. Playing science fast and loose.
Alien terraforming projects
Playing the looooooooong game. Statistical Great Filter analyses. Earth is a fixer-upper. Jerk bully aliens.
- Stephen Granade: WebsiteTwitter
- Stephen on Pacific Rim again but with more physics: YouTube
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William Gibson
Cyberpunk!
Data couriers
When to move the data physically by human. CYA. The impression of security. Offline attacks. quantum supremacy. RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service).
Storage doubling
And exceeding limits. The lack of connection between physical brain material and storage of particular sorts of memory, especially temporal sequences.
Data encryption and uploading
“Light therapy” and affecting brain states. Fuzzy encryption keys for biometrics. Brute force attacks.
Lo-teks
The cyberpunk Amish. “Pants are technology!” Privacy-focused ludditism. Human brain face-detection. Limpy-Frankenstein to avoid person-tracking. Ice T memes.
Snatch back your brain, zombie. And hold it!
- J Bone
Naval "dazzle" camoflage
Naval History and Heritage Command CC-0
Non-graphical computing
VR silliness. Command-line life. Christopher tried a MUD/MOO. Abandoning cheeky abstractions. AI solving yet another problem. Morgan Freeman Espeak modules.
- Science Fiction Film Podcast #247: Johnny Mnemonic featuring Christopher Peterson: LSG Media
- Wing Commander: PC games nostalgia, pilgrims, and space combat w/ Dean from LSG Media: Decipher SciFi
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Weeeeeeeeeird stuff
Pulling a James Cameron. Sean Connery is down for anything. Weeeeeird stuff. A list of some of our favorite things
- Zardoz’ mustache
- Zardoz’s speeches both and and out of stone head
- Sean Connery’s everything
- Psychic attacks
Bullets in the air
One of the worse ways to celebrate. Coins off of a skyscraper. Mass and volume and drag. Bullet lethality reductions with different trajectories.
Eating only meat
The benefits and drawbacks. The inuit diet. Surprisingly-high carbohydrate intake when all your meat is raw. Micronutrients via organ meats. Food preservation through controlled rot. Using fats and proteins to energy.
Evolutionary humanity
Other varieties of humanity that coexisted with homo sapiens. The study of evolution. Fossil evidence and developments in mitochondrial DNA analysis. The multiregional hypothesis -> the out of Africa hypothesis.
Human evolutionary promiscuity
Neanderthals, Denisovans, and uh…. gorillas? The evolutionary relationship between gorilla and human pubic lice.
Metacognition
Don’t forget other animals are smart too! Humans are still way better though.
The boner test
Awkward science. Would you pass?
Transhumanism in Zardoz
The nature of power the “Eternals” have. Evolutionary timescales vs the application of technology. AI control.
Dealing with immortality
Boredom is for boring people. The value of freedom of will when you can’t die.
- Facts about Human Evolution by SciShow: YouTube
- Rick & Morty - Raising Gazorpazorp: iTunesYouTube
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The Cloverfield Formula
Cloverfield -> 10 Cloverfield Lane -> The Cloverfield Paradox -> Overlord
- Find a script
- Add monsters
- …
- profit
Artifical gravity. With a twist!
Like, literally a twist. Balancing huge gyroscopes on a central stem. Spinning buckets. Bucket size
Combating bone and muscle atrophy with the ARED.
How the ARED works. The danger of jackedstronauts coming back from space to take over the planet.
Particle colliders
Anatoli Burgorski took a proton bream to the back of the face. It went surprisingly well for him! Phineas Gage of the nuclear age. Linear vs circular particle accelerators. The Cloverfield Paradox.
3D printing
Impressively unimpressive food printing. Printing plastic handguns and metal lower receivers. Maybe don’t use a gun on a space station though that’s pretty dangerous.
Gyroscopes
Chris’ immense latissimus dorsi. Avoiding affecting sensitive space mechanisms by avoiding spewing mass into space around your station/telescope.
Losing earth/losing a space station
Geocentric vs heliocentric orbits. How to tell if Earth is gone/how to tell if your space station is gone.
- 10 Cloverfield Lane: iTunesAmazon
- Burning Astronaut Pee - Smarter Every Day 149: YouTube
- Space Telescopes Maneuver like CATS - Smarter Every Day 59: YouTube
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Wow this is pretty good
Chris’ varied experiences of this film over time. Color grading and the Black & Chrome edition.
Roads!
Roads are awesome. The US highway system is awesome. Eisenhower’s road trip. Road trips are awesome, too.
Deserts!
Lack of roads in the outback. Accidental un-deserting. The Namib desert. The Namib dessert is 55 million years old!
The Great Salt
The oceans? No way. Red salt planet in The Last Jedi. Evaporating the oceans.
Blood bags
War Boys stealing blood from “healthy” donors. Lack of red blood cell production from blood cancer and the need for transfusion in the late stage. Blood loss limits. Adrenaline transfer.
Parabiosis
Science vampires! Callbacks to Daybreakers. Combining mice. Kidnapping Wim Hof for his blood.
Teeth!
Malnutrition, radiation poisoning, the oral bacteriome. Dental hygiece pre- vs post-agrciulture. Beneficial dental plaques. The evolution of the human lower jaw.
Chroming
Berserker mushroom mode. Signalling. Low framerate editing effects.
Wtf cars
Car stuff with DJ Moffett! Superchargers, turbochargers, maintenance and machining.
Music
Guitar dude with his hundred-amp truck. Energy consumption of flameguy vs a literal drummer boy. Mobile FM transmitting stations. A bard that can melt your face.
- Highways and Byways a game from Brandon Rollins: Highways & Byways
- Brandon the Game Dev: Brandon the Game Dev
- Making-of Fury Road: Cars: YouTube
- Making-of Fury Road: Tools: YouTube
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Michael Bay
The spark of life
Unicron and the spark of life between worlds.
War in The Dark Ages
Trebuchets. Traction trebuchet vs counterweight trebuchet. Siege weapons vs anti-personnel. Army sizes in the early middle ages.
King Arthur
Legend vs myth vs folk tales. Staff-bearer selection methodology. Humans all look the same to Transformers.
The classic definition of myth, legend, and folktale is William Bascom’s 1965 article “The Form of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” Bascom defines folktales as prose narratives told as fiction, myths as prose narratives told as true set in the remote past before human history, and legends as prose narratives told as true set in the time of human history. (Bascom does not take up fables, but they are generally considered a type of folktale with animal characters and an obvious moral lesson.) However, folklorists today tend to focus less on the matter of form and cross-cultural classification—any one of these genres can be conveyed in non-prose, non-narrative media—and more on how people classify, communicate, and contextualize their own folk narratives. A sacred text conceived as the true and literal account of creation to one person may be considered an entertaining but completely fantastical account by another, even if the form remains exactly the same. Bascom’s attention to belief in classifying folk narrative remains an important contribution, and folklorists today consider how tellers and audiences of folk narrative negotiate belief and skepticism in the narrative event, offering proofs that the events happened as described (“I didn’t use to believe in ghosts, but I saw it with my own eyes”) or leaving room for some doubt.
Jolene’s friend Steve Stanzak who is a folklorist from Indiana University…
The size and nature of the cosmos
The number of planets in the solar system and the percentage that are “Earth-like” and might harbor life. Our expanding understanding of the richness of the cosmos.
When Worlds Collide
Speaking of which, I’m starting to feel like maybe we’ve covered.this.before. Gravity, orbit perturbations, and impending doom after the credits.
Ghost scrotum
Papryus, paper, and vellum. Goat scrotum!
Buster the Science Guy
Subverting the trope of useful scientist.
- Futurism: Futurism.com
- What is Bayhem? by Every Frame a Painting: YouTube
- When Worlds Collide: observable universe, 20th century astonomy, and modern space industry w/ Daniel James Barker: Decipher SciFi
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Immortality by transplant
Analogy with developments in head transplantation. Consciousness uploading. Preservation of identity. Conflict of human immortality with religion.
Transhumanism and Identity
The meaning of race and gender in a world where anyone can be any variety of human (and more). Merging with AI and technology in general.
Sleeving
The boundaries of the “self” and the “mind” and the meat. Hard to draw! The influence of the greater body system over the “self” part and boners. So many boners. But not from nipple stuff, no sir. ?
- Zoltan: ZoltanIstvan.com
- Altered Carbon (the novel) by Richard K. Morgan: iTunesAmazon
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Philip K Dick
Callback to some.of.our.episodes on PKD and his stories. Pulp scifi of the 50s and 60s. General appreciation for his ideas and the return of thoughtful anthologies.
Autofac
PKDpocalypse. Consumerism something something. Supreme dedication to a task. The Paperclip Maximizer and the possible danger of a highly-capable AI dedicated to its task. Universal Paperclips. The unconscious, apathetic skynet.
Real Life
PKD was all about that hash tag life. The malleability of our perception of “reality.” Am I Anna Paquin? Neurological explanations for Deja Vu. Gaslighting. Dick moves. Colbert’s joke-telling disability.
Convincing your girlfriend she’s crazy or paranoid is called gaslighting, and it’s a dick move. But convincing her she’s a robot with artificial implanted human emotions is called bladerunning. It’s a Phillip K. Dick move.
Nathan Anderson
The Father Thing
Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Stranger Things. Really really affordable spacecraft for extremophiles. Parasites cleaning up after themselves poorly. Sometimes you just gotta step up and try to murder someone. Home alone booby-trap techniques, poorly applied. Compressed parasite operating systems.
- Universal Paperclips: DecisionProblem.com
- Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi
- A Scanner Darkly: the surveillance state, drug abuse, and rotoscoping: Decipher SciFi
- Minority Report: Eliot Peper on freedom and algorithmic precognition: Decipher SciFi
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Episode 4 - Hang the DJ
The one with the dating. Like The button, but instead of one person it’s thousands. And instead of a million dollars you get a date. And still only maybe. Calculating Black Mirror horribleness for comparison between episodes. Massive data-crunching techniques.
Episode 5 - Metalhead
The one with the robot thing. Comparison with the new SpotMini.
Episode 6 - Black Museum
The one with the museum. Weird sex stuff. Don’t touch my nipples! The Schmidt Pain Index. The value of actually doing and recording research. Black Mirror trashy romance novels. Pleasure buttons. Sensory mapping. Consciousness partitioning. Liam was on Turn with this dude from this episode! Diffuse vs localized brain injury. Communicating with locked-in patients. Split brains! You Are Two! Waiting for law to catch up with dystopian technology.
Liam's appearance on "Turn: Washington's Spies"
AMC STudios ARR
- Voices from L5: Voices From L5
- Problems with Mind Uploading by exurb1a: YouTube
- You Are Two by CGP Grey: YouTube
- Blindsight by Peter Watts: iTunesAmazon
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Episode 1 - USS Callister
The one with the Star Trek. Protecting the new kinds of consciousnesses we will eventually create. Sleeping through the AI apocalypse. What our solo video game habits say about us. Posthumous digital simulations. Data sources for creating a digital simulacrum and how DNA is one of the least useful. Designing your brain-machine interface to not possibly ever lock someone in ever.
Episode 2 - Arkangel
The one with the helicopter parenting. Mundane parenting concerns writ large in tech. Becoming luddites and finding your breaking point. But then you die and it doesn’t matter. The danger of cloud services. Computer vision and visual input filtering.
Episode 3 - Crocodile
The one with the murders. Would you like a little more murder on your murder sandwich? The genius of the automatic, unmanned pizza truck. The pointlessness of human testimony. Crowdsourcing accurate memories. Memory obstruction strategies.
- Fraser’s things: Universe TodayAstronomy CastFraser Cain @ YouTube
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Our second Q&A episode, wherein we ask our friends to help us answer the the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!
Question: “Could you have x-ray vision?”
Answerer: Fraser Cain
X-ray vision. Cybernetic eye replacements. Wavelengths of light. The visible spectrum. Ghost in the Shell. Riddick. Light amplification. Gamma rays. Cancer avoidance.
Question: “What if numbers are wrong?”
Answerer: Adrian Falcone
Math. Numbers. Logic. Ted Chiang’s short story “Divide by Zero” was in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others. Adrian mentioned Faith Physics.
Question: “What if black holes didn’t exist?”
Answerer: Daniel James Barker
Physics! Black holes. Neutron stars. Gravity. Collapse.
Question: How long before all the gasoline spoils in the zombie apocalypse?
Answerer: James Peterson
The eternally-unanswered concern that zombie shows ignore always. How long after the zombie apocalypse before all the gas is spoiled? Chemical engineers vs chemists. Oxidation. Inert gas vapor displacement.
Question: Could there be a Star Trek-style universal translator?
Answerer: Nick Farmer
Please also see our Arrival episode with Nick for a ton more on alien languages. Machine learning. Man vs machine. Man vs alien languages. Universality of language. GIF communication.
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Alpha Centauri
Closest star systems to Earth. Sudden outbursts of James Cameron appreciation. Alpha Centauri {A,B}, Proxima Centauri. Sub-light space travel.
Cryo sleep
Continuation of consciousness. Perceptions of meatsackness.
Pandora the moon
Adaptive definitions of moons and planets. Learning about moons aside from our own. Disney World’s Pandora.
Bioluminescence
The utility of light in dark environs. Bioluminescence evolution on Earth. Useful wavelengths of produced light in water/air. Standard human bioluminescence. Japanese gameshow science.
Pandoran flora and fauna
Megafauna and megaflora and lower gravity. Hexapodality.
Na’vi
Na’vi anatomy. Avatar differences, e.g. 5 fingers, eyebrows. Boobs? Dr. Manhattan.
The Pandoran internet
Neural networks. Brain-machine interface vs brain-everything interface. Na’vi adaptability to remote neural control. Data-transfer
Unobtanium
Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors! Floating “mountains.”
- The Science of Avatar by the Seattle Public Library: SPL.org
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Space combat
Naval analogies and a callback to a similar discussion in our Valerian episode. Magnetic (fused) torpedoes!
(FTL) Ramming speed!
Ramming vs telefragging. Kamikaze fleets, or attaching telefrag Warp Drives to asteroids and the like. Energy levels with ramming operations at lightspeed. Ruining Star Wars combat by introducing telfragging.
Explosions in space
Explosions in space shouldn’t make noise, because there isn’t (noise). Not across the near-vacuum, at least. Production of light and shrapnel. Starbursts!
Explosive decompression
Teleporting Colbert to his doom. For science! Multimodal attacks. Explosive decompression. Sausage people and asphyxiation. Freezing in space and how thew force disables all bets. Sausage people and elasticity of human tissues. Consciousness vs useful consciousness.
Skimmer ships
Hydrofoils cum “alasofoils.” Flight engineering and “dragging sticks.”
hydrofoil boat
U.S. Navy CC-0
Salt planet
“Salthoth.” “Hey, it’s salt.” How salt flats form on earth. Salt rising and drying from seasonal flooding. Salt-friendly bacteria and weird oxidation.
Green milk
Yum! Domesticating mammals for their milk. Mailing baboons. Milk’s macronutrient ratios and the micronutrients that color it with the bulk removed e.g. for cheese). How it’s kinda green irl too. Domesticating the aurochs and testing the nipples.
- Star Wars Meta: How to Star Wars, machete order, and the best Star Wars fan edit: Decipher SciFi
- Star Wars: the death star, planet science, and appreciating the original Star Wars trilogy: Decipher SciFi
- The Last Jedi - Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
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Indie scale
Scifi adventure throwback. Corporations are always evil. Ambition in scope of indie scifi.
Cloud city
Floating cities and air bases. Energy requirements. Floating cities on Venus, where balloons of an atmosphere of Earth-like density can float safely and happily in the high clouds. Hamster ball pleasure cruses. IRL “floating aircraft carriers.” Realizing that all aircraft carriers are “floating.”
Space settlement light and dark
The apparent necessity of slave labour. Western expansion analogies. Naval analogies. Australian analogies. Hoping that space settlement becomes mundane.
Backwards Dr Moreau
A comparison
Individual picture elements property of their respective owners
“Raggeds.” Reverse mode on Dr. Moreau. Echoes of evil ninja turtles and goombas. Send the gorillas to get the mongoose.
“Terraforming”
Maybe “ecoforming?” Ecological manipulation. Seeding new ecology vs tearing down existing ecology. NASA sterilization practices and caution in avoiding contamination vs throwing turtle monsters at it.
Self-destruct cleanup mode
[Rule 34](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_34(Internet_meme)? Nuclear reactors can explode, but they don’t explode _like a nuclear bomb. Chernobyl as example. Hot water and pressure reactive with metal and exploding. Metldown and the elephant foot.
Taking risks
Character elimination and happy fairy tale endings.
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Replicant discrimination
Is racism the right word? Hate and discrimination against replicants. Replicant slavery.
Synthetic farming
Whatever that means. But in the meantime, let’s eat some grubs okay? The benefits of cricket and grub farming. Necessity breeds insects.
Solar concentrators
Hey these are neat
Replicant birth
Pooped out of the goo shoot. Like real life. And then replicants replicating themselves.
Space settlement
Thank you creepy Jared Leto. Tyrell’s original mission versus the cohesive effort lead by creepy Leto.
Digital Girlfriend
Narrow v general artificial intelligence. Awesome magic projector technology.
Data storage
DNA or other biological data storage. Holographic storage.
- BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022" Anime Short: YouTube
- BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2036: Nexus Dawn" Short: YouTube
- BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2048: Nowhere to Run" Short: YouTube
- Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design: Decipher SciFi
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International Space Station
Contemporary space station size comparisons. ISS transformation over time.
Alien life
Bipedalism. Bilateral symmetry. The assumption of humanoid structure in the “world.” Duck-billed Ferengi information brokers and neurological RAID modes.
Alpha Station
“Critical mass.” Vital stats. Population, demographics. Modular growth over time. Racial job specialization.
Alpha Station location and travel
FTL(?) via “exospace.” The plan to exit the solar system. The issues re planetary orbits when you build a brand new moon around earth with tons and tons of foreign (to the solar system) mass. Languages! 5,000+ languages are spoken on the station, not even including “computer languages.”
Mül and the Pearls
Beach-dwelling N’avi (with no tails). Math and science. Intellectual ability and exaptation of base rational abilities to science and math.
Space battles
Should they happen so near planets? Travel and planned space battle. Don’t fight on a planet because you’re vulnerable to Christopher’s favorite: the Brannigan maneuver.
- The Fifth Element: space turtles, magic stones, and LeeLoo Dallas multipass: Decipher SciFi
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The “observable” universe
The part of the universe that we can, in principle, capture light from as a function of the speed of light and the expansion of the universe.
Galactic perspectives
Learning more about the breadth and contents of the universe since the 1950s. Hubble and “island universes.” Figuring out there are other galaxies and past and present ideas of just how many there are.
The modern space industry
Appreciation for where we are finally. Space travel becoming cheaper and cheaper and the legit settlement of other planets on the horizon.
When worlds actually collide
Spitzer detecting the aftermath of what seems to have been a planetary collision. Other planetary collisions in the history of our own solar system, like the one that produced our moon.
Artist's conception of a collision around the star NGC 2547-ID8
NASA/JPL-Caltech
The incoming star: Bellus
Only 12x the size of earth. Luminosity and distance. What type of star could be in this range of size and luminosity?
Herzprung-Russel Star Diagram of star surface temperature and luminosity
ESO CC-A-4.0
Uranus
Somehow we got to this topic. And now here is some history!
Effect on the solar system
Oh no! Will the planet be able to find a stable orbit in our solar system after presumably affecting the fairly stable orbits of the other planets? Star system escape velocities.
Landing on a new world
And not even having time to remark upon the clearly engineered structures on the surface before your whole planet is flung from its sun and everything freezes and you die. :cry:
- When Worlds Collide by Powerman 5000: YouTube
- 2000000000000: Uncertainty Principle the Podcast
- Hubble Deep Field by Vox: YouTube
- And another about the Hubble "Ultra" Deep Field by Deep Astronomy: YouTube
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Origins
Roland Emmerich. And from a book by Art Bell! …of all people. Not known for hard scifi.
Climate science communication
Some examples are better than others.
Arctic vs Antarctic
They are… different! How they are different and why the movie might have chosen to go with the “wrong” one for the real-life event on which the opening scene based. Larsen B Ice Shelf. Continental ice vs glacial ice.
Antarctic ice shelves
A. J. Cook and D. G. Vaughan CC-BY-3.0
Thermohaline circulation
Arctic/antarctic events and affect on the thermohaline circulation. The Younger Dryas event as an irl historical example of extreme climate shift which still took decades longer than the events of the film.
Paleoclimatology
Human records. Ice Cores! Meteoric ice. Tree rings! Water body beds! Caves!
Ice cores
Age and layers. Ash, gas, life, temperatures from oxygen isotope ratios.
Climate modeling
Colbert’s insights from The Supercomputing Conference. The big data; it is very big.
“Landicanes”
… which are the name we’ve made up for the misnomered “hurricanes” that seem to form over land in the movie. Air flow. the Coriolis effect, thermodynamics and superfreezing in the center of the storm.
attr_text:
- Inside The Giant American Freezer Filled With Polar Ice by tom Scott: YouTube
- 13 Misconceptions About Global Warming: YouTube
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Mayan calendar
They had one! And so do we. They both end on some sort of the cycle and the world never ends because of our arbitrary selection of scope. Fraser is really tired of having to argue about this sort of thing with death-cultists. The end.
Galactic alignments
Neutrino detection.
Heating Earth
Earth’s layers. Discovering new and different regions of the earth’s internal structure via seismography. Rate of temperature increase. Effect on oceans. Heat retention and radioactivity.
Ark ships
Space settlement and Christopher’s disappointment. Seveneves as the gold standard for how to relocate humanity to space in an emergency.
Perpetuation of specieseses and culture
Should we keep giraffes? Cows? Any larger fauna? Recognition of the complexity and energy-inefficiencies of the food chain. Surviving on crickets and phytoplankton.
Yellowstone
Yellowstone is no joke! Yellowstone supervolcano (more volcano conversation in our Volcano episode). Pyroclastic flow rates. Lake Toba (is larger).
Magnetosphere
The earth’s internal metal. Pole-flipping!
Tsunami
Propagation of energy via wave through fluid and how it probably shouldn’t roll the ship. Asteroid impacts, landslides, and misplaced fossils.
Anti-apocalypse rant
Fraser’s got some stuff to say on this matter, tell-you-what.
- Seveneves: impactors, guided evolution, and radiation shields w/ Daniel Mann: Decipher SciFi
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What is a volcano?
No, seriously, what is a volcano? A lot of film critics at the time whiffed on this one and at least one or two of us were in the wrong too. Volcano:
A vent or fissure on the surface of a planet (usually in a mountainous form) with a magma chamber attached to the mantle of a planet or moon, periodically erupting forth lava and volcanic gases onto the surface.
-Wiktionary
La Brea tar pits
Predator/prey capture ratios. Biological activity causing the bubbling and subsequent discovery of a bunch of different bacterai that live in there. Larger things we find fossilized there:
- Sabretooth tigers
- Mammoths
- Giant feline
- looooooooads more
Fault lines
The different fault types and which of them tend to manifest volcanoes. Spoiler alert: LA has a transform fault which is the kind that is really really really unlikely to sprout a volcano under normal conditions. Transform faults
Volcano detection
Major monitoring methods looking out for pending eruptions:
- Seisimic activity
- Gas!
- Groundswell - actual deformation of the landscape from the pressure
Pompeii/Herculaneum
Pyroclastic flow vs lava. The eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79AD. Casting the cavities that surrounded trapped bodies. Cast of a pompeii body
Volcanic dangers
Volcanic ash, which is often basically just teeny tiny glass for you to breathe in. Lava temperatures: between holy shit hot and omg holy shit hot. Lava weather systems. Gasses! Lava fountains.
Measures
Dams! Backwards or otherwise. The Decade List.
- Experiencing a volcanic shockwave: YouTube
- From the movie: a human being melting directly and immediately into mere inches of lava: YouTube
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Body horror
Body horror, biological horror, organic horror or visceral horror is horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the unnatural graphic transformation, degeneration or destruction of the physical body.
-Wikipedia
Cronenberg! And Carpenter! You may recall some similar horror themes from our episodes on Event Horizon (though that concentrated rather on the cosmic horror) and The Thing.
Mad… scientist?
More like mad “project manager,” as he describes himself. How refreshing to see something sidestep the trope of the omnicapable super-scientist and have someone NOT create world-changing supertech by themselves. The art of the kludge/bodge.
The computer
It’s basically a genie! Rules-lawyering a computer is programming a computer. The nature of this interpretive computer system and the feats of artificial intelligence that enable it to coherently fuse Brundle and fly together.
Teleporter
Materials-detection, DNA analysis, and black-box DNA recombination algorithms. That’s a hell of a design. And the voice recognition isn’t too shabby, either.
DNA detection
How do we tell between species by DNA these days? DNA barcoding! Find a good, differentiable locus and make a database of that area for a certain type of earth life. Where do we keep the database? The Barcode of Life Data System.
How genetic fusion teleportation could go wrong
Animate vs inanimate. DNA fusion or DNA damage and how and when problems could manifest. Expressing or ignoring large chunks of odd DNA. The unlikelihood of coherent expression of fly-like traits from the fused fly DNA. Junk DNA and its influence on our robustness against fly fusion.
Turning into a fly
Gross hairs. Super strength and the square cube law a la our King Kong episode. Enzymatic digestion. Insect reproductive cycles.
- Flies lifecycle: YouTube
- A Scientist Responds… to The Fly: io9
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Settling nearby space
Mars vs the moon. Inconvenient solar exposure schedules breeding technological food solutions. Substitute engineered fungi for photosynthetic plants as a food source.
Exposition
Vs “show don’t tell.” Australian flags and separation from the United Kingdom.
Space ships
Lived-in ships and how they were exemplified in Alien or Star Wars. The “traditional” design of the Lewis & Clark, basically maintaining the naval analogy in space travel. BUT! The Event Horizon is much different.
The Event Horizon
How the Event Horizon is the opposite of Joseph Campbell’s “belly of the whale.” Radula hallways and OSHA. Gothic architecture and religious imagery in interior and exterior design.
FTL
The Event Horizon and its gravity drive something-or-other. Spacetime-folding visual analogies. Using contained black holes to create wormholes. The Monty Hall problem, but with Hell instead of a prize.
The Solaris Effect
Completely foreign consciousnesses probing for something to communicate. Accidentally poking at raw human neuroses like a toothache. Other forms of consciousness, where consciousness is a form of information processing.
Hell
Is this Hell a place? Or a manifestation of our neuroses? Or a greater consciousness just rolling over on us by accident?
Lovecraft
Cosmicism. Humans facing life from deep time. Human-scale irrelevance.
- Caelum Rale: Instagram
- The public-domain works of H.P. Lovecraft: Archive.orgAmazon
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Classical vampires…?
And is this a horror movie? Better than the sparkly Twilight ones.
Blood-squirting lizards
Just because that’s awesome
Blood substitutes
Substitutes for what part or what function of blood? Making a blood sword on our Conan episode. What blood is made of. What blood does for us biologically.
It’s got plasmatic electrolytes
It’s what bodies crave
Blood transfusion
Blood types and our developing understanding during the 17th and 19th centuries. Carlos Lammerstammer’s initial work distinguishing the blood types. Pre-modern medicine and the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-who-dies method of medical research, e.g. injecting milk or ale or whiskey into the blood to see what happens.
Vampire blood flow
We’re told and see demonstrated that the vampires have no heartbeat, BUT - the other things we observe suggest that they do have blood flow, somehow. Intravenous vampire blood. Vampire blood extraction. Vampire peristalsis.
Medical vampirism
“In case of human frailty, break glass.” With a “cure” for vampirism available, the ensuring rise of using vampirism as a cure for deadly ailments. But you only get to use it once, so make it count! Connections between vampire lore and the possibility of parabiosis.
Downsides to vampirism
Blood isn’t really usually considered delicious. Ethical concerns with surviving on human blood UNTIL the “blood substitute” is developed.
- Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, Elizabethan sexuality, and Kenau's awesome accent w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
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Geographical Context
Traveling from ancient Egypt to Mespopotamia. Hiding evil things as far away as possible.
Deciphering the Mummy’s historical period
Context clues pointing to Egypt’s “New Kingdom,” circa 1500BC-1200BC. Some touches that hinted: Ahmanet’s Nefertiti-inspired crown, her blue finger-paint as direct reference to King Tutankhamun’s golden finger- and toe-jewelry.
Speaking of King Tut…
His (lack of) actual historical importance. Public knowledge due to the simple coincidence of which things are best preserved and then discovered.
Egyptomania
From ancient Rome to Victorian England to King Tut in the mid-20th. It keeps coming back! The combination of modernity and exoticism of Ancient Egypt.
The Rosetta Stone
Napoleon’s groundbreaking work in enabling the study of science and history while conquering things. The birth of Egyptology.
Egyptian book of the dead
Hollywood’s chronic misunderstanding of the nature of The Book of the Dead. It’s not evil! Egyptian beliefs re death and the afterlife.
Misunderstanding the ancient Egyptian gods
Chaotic neutral Seth and how he is totally not the god of death. Preservation of order against chaos in Egyptian mythology. Enumerating the actual gods of death and how they’re not necessarily bad guys. The problem with mummies.
- The History of Egypt Podcast: The History of Egypt Podcast
- The Japanese Art of Self-Preservation: Damn Interesting
- Diablo Postmortem : YouTube
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Stasis
Stasis for interstellar space travel. “Freezing” people into a low-activity biological state. IRL medical developments.
Microimpactors in space
Space junk in near-earth orbit. That time a paint chipped cracked a window on the ISS (don’t worry, the ISS is fine). Comet tails and variously-sized chunks of ice as impactors.
Landing on M6-117 (and other planets)
Atmospheric density vs interstellar velocities. The benefits of landing on a planet with atmosphere vs a planet without. It’s hard without! Realizing having an atmosphere to slow down in can be a blessing if the ship can handle the temperatures due to atmospheric compression under/around the vessel.
Trinary Star systems
Trinary systems and the chance for stable planetary orbits. Proxima Centauri. Globular star clusters as alternative for “all light all the time.”
Bioraptors (the monsters)
Predators on the “cicada cycle.” How the ecology of this world appears or does not appear to support this cycle. Slowly-heating stars and the shifting “goldilocks” zone.
Riddick
Eyeshine! Light amplification or translation from outside of our cone of EM reception. Night vision. Replacing eyeballs with robust cameras. Ghost in the Shell and X-ray vision.
Glow-worms
Evolving bioluminescence as a food-collection mechanism vs keeping away the flying death-machines.
- Fraser Cain's different stuff: Astronomy CastUniverse TodayYouTube
- Farewell Cassini: The Grand Finale and the Final Images of Saturn by Fraser Cain: YouTube
- What If Saturn Paid Us a Very Close Visit? by Phil Plait: Bad Astronomy
- The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu: iTunesAmazon
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Necromongers
Where do I sign up? Scary space death cults. Necromonger gothic architecture and interior design. Frowny-faces.
Face on your face
Avoiding ambush predators via application of faces. Strong jaws. Designing against ambush predators. FACES EVWERYWHERE.
Why Google’s Deep Dream A.I. Hallucinates In Dog Faces
(Atmospheric) penetration
Atmospheric entry bombs. Landing invasion ships, overpressure, and displays of power. Also the blue ball planet-killing explosion thing.
Interstellar travel
Ion drive acceleration and speed and average distances between stars. The unlikeliness of non-FTL travel between star systems during the span of human lifetimes.
Private prison
The economics of the private prisons in this universe and how it’s cost-effective to basically put a prison facility on Mercury.
Crematoria
Hot planets close to their sun. Lack of atmosphere and lack of green-house effect causing extremely quick extreme temperature changes. This planet was pretty much Mercury. The impossibility of breathable atmosphere in these circumstances. The speed of the sunset and solar terminators.
Crematorian dog-things
Robustness of skin. Comparison to other color-changing creatures. Luminescence vs passive color-change.
- The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay/Assault on Dark Athena: Amazon
- The Chronicles of Riddick by Folding Ideas: YouTube
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Confetti breath
Colorful monster breath. Aurora borealis or australis and how the solar wind interacts with our atmosphere at the poles. How “confetti breath” is a better name than “Taserface” and how Taserface looks like Mr Lordi:
Skin
Drax’s misunderstanding about “thickness,” and our approval of his intuition that the inside might be easier to pierce. Pick a meatus. And… it can be gold! How not to die from using bodypaint.
The Sovereign
The gold people with the gold parts. Grills? Genetic design of a whole civilization and levels of caution for personal safety graphed against length of life.
Drones
For once in space-scale scifi: drones! The levels of cost and complexity when designing craft to safely transport squishy humanoids. Galaga!
Space jumps/wormholes
Hexagons! And what they reveal about interstellar travel in this universe. Space straws.
Brain Planet
Escape velocity and atmosphere and centering your vulnerable mass. The life lost when a creature that lives for eternity is vanquished. Inability to take on perspectives.
Empath…y?
Empath vs telepath and imagining how this ability could communicate “emotions” but not “thoughts.” FMRI. Lizard brain. Fight or flight. Side-channel data leakage and influencing the system via things like Trans-cranial direct current stimulation.
Yondu
A Yondu-appreciation party and exploring the control of the arrow via the fin. Controlling the arrow not by his whistle but by direct bionic neuro-feedback.
- The Complex Feels of Guardians of the Galaxy v.2 by Lindsay Ellis: YouTube
- Does water freeze or boil in space?: Starts With a Bang
- The Trelenburg Gate by Andy P: Batch 25 Comics
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H.G. Wells
The book, his prescience, and his coinage of the term “time machine.” His scientific literacy and the ideas in the physics and mathematics of his time. Other times he was on the show.
Moving through time
Dimensions and physics and moving through the invisible dimension of time.
Humanity and war
Time traveling between wars. The inevitability of global conflict in the late 19th century. The inevitability of nuclear apocalypse in 1960. The inevitability of humanity overreaching in manipulation of the natural world in 2002. Really large explosions, nuclear and otherwise. Krakatoa vs Tsar Bomba. The year without a summer.
Geological scales
Time traveling across geological time scales. Tracking in relative space and over miles across the planet’s surface. “Time and space machine.” Staccato time travel.
Eloi and Morlocks
Human evolution and selective pressures. Humans as cattle. Inefficiency in turning sunlight into steak. Maintaining 19th-century English over millennia.
Time travel paradoxes
Single-timeline self-consistency. Time travel victory strategies.
Books
What books would you bring with you to repair future society?
Weenas
- The Time Machine by H.G. Wells: iTunesAmazon
- The Time Machine (2002): iTunesAmazon
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The particular value of pilot episodes
We did this once before and had a really good time. Covering pilot episodes specifically and exclusively to get at a high-concentration of scifi ideas and worldbuilding. And now we’re at it again with The 100!
Free-floating constructed space settlements
And their value versus planetary settlements or settlements otherwise on existing bodies in the solar system. Time to develop space settlements and what a dozen individual, national settlements suggest about the state of industry in space before the apocalypse in the show. Inflatables in space settlement.
Space resources
Both before and after earth enters nuclear winter. Water, air, hydrocarbons and where to find them.
Rules and enforcement under extreme circumstances
Freedom vs keeping everyone from dying. Reproduction policies. Simulations for generation ships - maintaining sufficient genetic diversity through selection and control of reproduction.
Aging equipment in spaaaaaaace
We hit on this once before in our Seveneves episode. Using landing vessels that have been sitting in orbit for a century. Don’t keep your equipment next to your bananas.
Nuclear apocalypse
The 7:10 rule. Human civilization vs survival of the human animal. Nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. Types of radiation and radiation cookie puzzles.
Post-Nuclear Earth
Ancient Roman artillery (ps we said “scorpio” but meant “ballista,” whoops). Bioluminescence in a forest.
- How Damaging is Radiation? by Veritasium: YouTube
- Cruel Bombs by Vsauce: YouTube
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How to watch Blade Runner
About the different releases and how very bad voiceovers can be. But tl;dr: watch the “Final Cut” for sure always.
Creators’ Intent
Philip K Dick’s vision in the novel Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep vs Ridley Scott’s in the film. Dick’s use of scifi as a tool to explore humanity.
Cyberpunk
High tech, low life. Blade Runner and William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Many other examples in our episode history. Social stratification and the wealth gap. Cyborgy bits and noodle bars. Environmental destruction. Flying cars?
VFX
And cinematography. What a beautiful movie! Practical effects and things that age well from the 80s.
Replicants
Detection. Genetic design. Testing for replicants with bullets like testing a witch with drowning.
Robotic Anthropomorphicization
Why design your androids to be so human? Designing anthropomorphized androids to operate with human tools in a human environment.
Robot Revelations
A new theory for how replicants work. Terminological issues. Maybe they shouldn’t be called “androids?”
AI Issues
The control problem and cellular kill switches.
The Voight-Kampff Machine
The Voight-Kampff machine as analogy to the lie detector, i.e. the BS intimidation machine for coaxing people/androids into admitting things. Or shooting the interviewer. Turtle vs tortoise vs terrapin.
Brain design and selection
“Android” brain production analogy with CPU production methods.
Memory, Mortality
Memories providing the context that makes up our selves. Looking for nipples.
Deckard’s humanity
Is Deckard a replicant? It depends on whether you’re talking about the book and then also which cut of the film.In the book, no. In the theatrical release, probably not. In The Final Cut, yes.
- Bad Voiceover Montage from the Theatrical Release of Blade Runner: YouTube
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Crew Selection
Human pairing in space crews. Sex selection for different purposes, and in particular settlement. The Voices from L5 episode on Gender in Space. If humans still need to gestate the old-fashioned way, you’re gonna need a lot of human wombs.
Colonizing
The numbers game of space settlement. The possibility of gestating the next human generation on the target planet from frozen embryo: i.e. population bomb.
Neutrinos
Weakly interacting. How to detect a “neutrino burst” in space and not be vaporized by a supernova. Tools to grant perspective on the topic. Neutrino detectors large and small. “World’s Smallest neutrino detector.”
A model of the Japanese neutrino detector
日:Jnn
Swole Jesus
More details from Ridley Scott about the connection between Jesus and the engineers. The suggestion made in Prometheus made more explicit. Swole Korean Jesus. Swole white Jesus.
Alien Evolution
Parasitoid developments. Design vs natural selection. Indiscriminate resource consumption.
How to break out of a chest
These guys made some assumptions and ran with them. Mouth-mouth saw-saws and their use in chestbursting.
- What is a Neutrino? by Minute Physics: YouTube
- Quantum SHAPE-SHIFTING: Neutrino Oscillations by Minute Physics: YouTube
- Alien: Covenant | Prologue: Last Supper by 20th Century FOX: YouTube
- Alien: Covenant | Prologue: The Crossing | 20th Century FOX: YouTube
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Reality TV
The Real World, reality TV, etc… and then The Truman Show. Thank the writers strikes and the economics of production sans writers.
Seeing things from space
Calculating the size of the Truman show dome from the satellite images in the film. Seeing man-made things from space. How the Great Wall is not visible from space but the pyramids are. And where does “space” begin, anyway? Looking from the ISS.
The Dome!
Weather systems inside man-made structures. The dome is plenty large enough to have its own weather systems. Hugeness and economic realities. Other scifi domed-city discussions.
Product Placement/Advertising
And our own plans for how to sell out. Thoughts on “Gorilla” marketing. Unrelated: send advertising inquiries to contact@deciphermedia.tv (｡◝‿◜｡)
The Truman show Delusion
Colbert’s mustache woes. Delusions of grandeur over time. This guy’s really interesting personal story of his experience with “the Truman Show Delusion.”
Reality Testing
How would you know if it were you? Occam’s razor. Glitches in the matrix. Plato’s Cave.
- How Much of the Earth Can You See at Once? by Vsauce: YouTube
- The Truman Delusion/Being Famous byh Johnny Benjamin: YouTube
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Dinosaur extinction event
Dinosaurs spotted in the Cretaceous period. The K-Pg (Cretaceous-Paleogene) aka K-T (Cretaceous-Tertiary) extinction event (the one with the comet). Hypothetical competition with the vulcanism explanation. Morgan Freeman, Brian Cranston, and Christopher’s favorite move, the “Zap Brannigan”
Get off my lawn
Damn teenagers being irresponsible, endangering others and themselves and whatnot. But then they get superpowers so I guess it’s cool.
Life seeding and crystals and whatnot
Origin of life on earth: crystals. Pro tip: it’s really hard searching online for science things about crystals because all the results are woo woo nonsense. The Prometheus problem. The sameness of all life (that we see). Bipedalism seems to be a generally useful adaptation, I guess. Yay us.
Alien Language
Christine Shreyer created the Eltarian conlang for the movie. Here is an interview where she discusses her work on both Man of Steel and Power Rangers. Erlang is a programming language, in case you get confused. Sources of ancientness that she used in the construction. Language change over time and how to avoid it.
Gold
10,000 nukes. Calculating the gold tonnage needed to create a Goldar. Recovering splattered riches. Places to find Goldar-sized gold deposits.
Megazord
Combat strategy. Our best Zord ever idea: MANTIS SHRIMP.
Controlling a Mega Zord
It’s basically Octo Dad, Or QWOP.
- Is Rita Repulsa’s Staff More Destructive than Her Monsters? by Because Science w/ Kyle Hill: YouTube
- POWER/RANGERS UNAUTHORIZED [BOOTLEG UNIVERSE] by Adi Shankar: YouTube
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Many Worlds
The interpretations of quantum physics that gives Rick & Morty the “multiverse.” Probabilities and determinism.
Shrödinger’s Cat
Shringer’s thought experient, initially a criticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics cum go-to example.
Universes
Organizing and labeling universes. The “central finite curve.”
AI Foibles
Rules-lawyering with a genie, again. Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg. Kevin Kelly’s take. Keeping them in the box.
Universes in Universes
Energy efficiency in multiverse batteries. Creating universes. the Kardashev scale.
- Community also by Darn Harmon: iTunesAmazon
- Rick and Morty - Finding Meaning in Life by Will Shoder: YouTube
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Hiding islands
Perpetual storms. Jupiter’s storm and other non-Kongish Jupiter appreciation.
Spy Satellites
Early spy satellites. Stability-spins and film-return techniques.
Geological Imaging
“Seismic charges” i.e. bombs to irritate aggressive megafauna. Earthquakes, real or otherwise, and using them to understand the inside of the earth. The “hollow earth theory” is dumb garbage.
Kong
King Kong size inconsistencies over time and even within films. Godzilla comparisons.
Combat-ready herbivores
Gorillas! When herbivores have sharp fangs. The economics of displays of aggression instead of fighting.
Giant Creatures Evolution
Pygmification of island species irl. Limitations on resources. Keystone species in ecosystems.
The dangers of the tropics
Venomous creatures and their prevalence in warmer climes. Why Do Venomous Animals Live In Warm Climates?
Medieval weaponry…
And how this relates to King Kong..? Was the flail a ‘real’ weapon?
- Why Do Venomous Animals Live In Warm Climates? by Veritasium: YouTube
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Mega Cities
Big. Tall. How they can be good, and how this one is bad.
Breaking the oxygen cycle
The environmental calamity in the movie that broke the earth is not detailed, but we try to consider how long humanity has if it doesn’t fix it somehow.
Recycled Food
Reclaimed food waste? OR… reclaiming synthetic food from human waste. Unjustified psychological aversions.
Ground Effect in aerodynamics
“In fixed-wing aircraft, ground effect is the increased lift (force) and decreased aerodynamic drag that an aircraft’s wings generate when they are close to a fixed surface. When landing, ground effect can give the pilot the feeling that the aircraft is ‘floating’.” -Wikipedia
Warbots
Awesome bang-for-buck robot design. Chris adds “Warbot head model” to his list of things he needs even more than air.
The Janus Project
The practical impossibility of incubating neurologically-adult humans. Babies in sacks and the benefits thereof.
LAWWWWWWW
- You Betrayed the Law: YouTube
- Dredd (2012): iTunesAmazon
- Demolition Man: cryogenic criminal justice and three seashells: Decipher SciFi
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Verhoven’s genius
Over-the-top satire. Starship Troopers. Blood and guts in the late 80s/early 90s. Co-ed locker rooms and mocking commercial advertising interludes.
Space Defense
The “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. Firing weapons from space, orbital platforms, and simulated gravity. Depictions of artificial gravity in media at the time.
Cyborgification
Availability of cyborg components and social stratification. Different kinds of artificial hearts.
Robocop
The economics of the brainwashed cyborg vs pure AI robot. Body transplants vs brain transplants.
Brain-machine interfaces
Opto-neural processing enhancement. Reading visual memories from brain activity.
Machine learning and eyeballs
The resolution of the eye. Simple computer-vision and inadequacy of 1980s VHS tapes.
Robot vs Robot
Cyborg body design type choices. Bipeds descending stairs. Dean Kamen’s stair-climbing gyroscopic wheelchair. (correction: I talked about “tri-wheeled” tread-based wheelchair on the show. The iBot actually had two sets of wheels and I was thinking of other wheelchair designs)
ED-209
“Stop, citizen, or I will rub my poop-hands on you.” Animal noises and postural intimidation tactics. Safety alarms.
Primary directives
Comparison with Arthur C Clarke’s three laws.
# Robocop Asimov
1. Serve the public trust. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. Protect the innocent A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. Uphold the law A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
- Our Robocop Remake: Our Robocop Remake
- That scene from Our Robocop Remake with all the dicks: YouTube
- What is the Resolution of the Eye? by Vsauce: YouTube
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Doom
Doom was a really awesome important thing in 1993. History lessons because Dan is too young to understand but we are old. Nostalgia, for better or for worse. Modularity and the development of game modding. How to play a modern game without playing it.
The true test of technology
The true test of any technology: can it run Doom? Doom running on a Macbook Pro Touch Bar.
Volumetric Projections
“3D holograms.” As a narrative/historical record playback device. As seen in: Prometheus. Difficulties versus augmented reality.
Health
Measuring “life” as a life meter. Micromorts and actuarial considerations. Safety gear in health packs.
Hell Universe
Tapping into unlimited energy; who could resist?
Vega the supercomputer
Turing tests. Regrets. “Absolute zero” cooling systems and marketing speak. Backups analagous to DNA cloning.
Samuel Hayden
Body transplants vs brain transplants. Where does the self reside? Cyborg geniuses. Life goals.
RIP AND TEAR
- Doom (The original game): GoGSteamAndroid
- Doom 2016 Soundtrack: YouTube
- Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture by David Kushner: iTunesAmazon
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Dad jokes
A fun guy lol ?
New sorts of zombies
Fungus zombies! Similarities to The Last of Us. Surprise that we’re not completely tired of zombies. Pandemic vs epidemic.
Fungus
Mycelium, hyphae, fruiting bodies. Spores! “All mushrooms are edible. Some only once.”
Fungus Marionettes
Fungi playing Surgeon Simulator with human bodies.
Sense of smell
Hunting by smell. Covering scents. Smelling slow and fast. The power of Axe Body spray. The power of chemical warfare. How “smells” work.
IRL
Ophiocordyceps unilateralis! The real fungus on which the zombie fungus is based. The rundown of its lifecycle. Biting the leaf. Chemical instructions controlling behaviour.
Cordyceps moving to humans
The difference in arthtropod and human circulatory and nervous systems. How to best spread fungal infections between humans.
The end of homo sapiens
Parasites forcing their hosts to act in their interests. Mushroom towers. The rise of homo boletus. Coming around on anthropocentrism.
Goodbyes
Do you want a cat?
- The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey: iTunesAmazon
- Why Do We Have Two Nostrils? by VSauce: YouTube
- The Last of Us: Amazon
- Zombie Parasites from Nat Geo Live: YouTube
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Arrival/First Contact
Aircraft shielding. Impressing upon humanity the futility of resistance.
Selecting Diplomats
Alien diplomatic moneyball.
They Know Us
Flawless colloquial earth languages. Cultural context. How to manipulate apes. Benevolent alien dictatorship.
Curbing Scientific Inquiry
Approaching utopia removing incentives for innovation. Alien limits on research. “The stars were not meant for man.”
The Great Filter
Maybe these aliens in the show are the great filter. Filling in some slots of the Drake Equation. Maybe we’re just terrible for the universe and they know it. :/
Butt Numbers
Directed evolution at a scale of tens to thousands of years.
Alien Appearance
This part is too spoilery for this page
Remember Us
Not too much to ask, really. We could have had a worse run.
- Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke: iTunesAmazon
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Gaia Hypothesis
The idea that the biosphere self-regulates to support life. Does it hold up?
Civilization Reboot
Sim cards. Better ways to select the humans that will survive. Minimum populations.
Oddjob with swordlegs
Sword legs! Cleaving humans not just through but vertically.
Prosthetic feet/legs
Butts! And their utility for distance running. Hugh Herr and awesome climbing feet.
Augmented Reality
Versus virtual reality. Physical positioning and orientation fudging in virtual and augmented reality shared spaces. Rainbows End. HoloLens.
Church Scene
It’s so good! Also: long shots, real or otherwise.
The Culling
SIM card splodeyheads. Transcranial direct current stimulation. To cull, or not to cull.
- Kingsman: not so secret effects: FXGuide
- Arrival Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
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Falling into the sun
Why not dump all of our nuclear waste there? Shedding orbital velocity. Eros the magic space potato.
Martian Gravity
Our lack of understanding irl of whether humans can conceive and gestate and grow in low or microgravity. Centrifugal artificial gravity.
Epstein Drive
Pulling Gs. Human limits.
Exciting times
Finally we’re in a place that we’re taking space settlement for granted. Developments in space travel like the Falcon Heavy et al. Recently, Stratolaunch:
Settlement issues
Fragility of interconnected systems at small scale. Radiation. Living inside a big rock.
Venus
Venus sucks. Mostly. On the surface, at least. Soviet Venus missions. Turning Venus into a spaceship.
Solar Energy
Harvesting and limiting solar exposure in different parts of the solar system. Relative solar intensity.
- Fraser's things: Universe TodayAstronomy CastFraser Cain @ YouTube
- The Expanse: Nick Farmer on conlanging and the intersection of language and scifi: Decipher SciFi
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Superpowers?
Energy usage and biclops lasereyes.
Radio reception
The old wive’s tale of dental fillings picking up terrestrial radio signals. Satellite military communications frequencies.
Alternative Computing
Quantum and DNA computing. Synesthesia. Recognizing that we are all synesthetes within the bounds of “normal” human brain operations.
Dimensions
Extra- super- ultra-dimensionality. Flatland again.
Superdimensional Beings
“Beings of light” and why this might be the most reasonable example of the trope. The world on the other side.
- Carl Sagan on Dimensions: YouTube
- Arrival Part 1: superdimensionality and alien physics w/ Jolene & Adrian: Decipher SciFi
- : Decipher SciFi
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Miyazaki recognition
This is Miles’ favorite. Chris doesn’t generally love Miyazaki but really really loves Totoro.
Environmentalism in Media
Processing human-caused catastrophe. We previously explored this in our Godzilla episode with Miles. Miyazaki was inspired by Minamata disease.
Aircraft
irl Nausicaa glider!
Rewilding
The ways in which humanity is worse than poison. Thriving of wildlife in our absence. Predators.
What is nature
Colloquial definitions versus recognition that we are part of nature and not really separate from it.
Technology Anxiety
Nuclear power safety and the negative effects of fossil fuels. Recognizing the relative safeness and harm. Being responsible with our technology.
Preservation
Of knowledge and technology over epochal time. Infrastructure and production. The scientific method as essential technology.
- Espers - From Nothing, Something Comes by Miles Greb: Kickstarter
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Love and hate
A story of love for Prometheus with recognition of its faults. Surprisingly high tomato ratings. So much stuff to think about?
Seeding Earth
Natural selection, evolution, and engineers seeding life on Earth. This would require seeding all life on earth, to explain our shared genetic heritage with everything else that lives here.
Objective-based evolution
In this movie, I guess Lamarck Was Right. Continued Egineer presence over the course of the history of life on earth, guiding things toward their goals in order to make us like them.
The Engineers
Yoked as hell. Albinos with allopecia.
Cave Paintings
List of cultures visited. Radiocarbon dating (carbon-14). Uranium dating. Informational density.
Star Maps
Constellations and hemispheres and directions to solar systems.
Alien System
FTL. Moons and ringed planets. How not to safely approach and explore a new planet/moon. “Eh, seems fine” as a modus operandi for your space exploration mission.
Alien Pregnancy
Parasites. Superparasites, Tearing the umbilical cord. Placenta.
- Messages for the Future by VSauce: YouTube
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A bit of review
Because we really enjoyed this movie.
The team
A human, a green humanoid, an enhanced raccoon, Drax, and a hypermobile hyperintelligent tree.
Rocket Raccoon
Cybernetic skeletons. Animal intelligence. Cognitive enhancement and different types of intelligence.
Drax
Kinda like a grey hulk. Putting our lack of comics expertise on display.
Groot
How plants work. Nitrogen from the air making 50% of tree biomass. Plant regeneration and communication.
Language considerations! Yay!
Possible layers of complexity under “I am Groot.” The different ways that could or could not represent language. The complexity of metaphors and similar linguistic mechanisms, and how Drax’s people could lack understanding. Thermians. Tamarians.
Old Terran technology
Chris Pratt’s cassette tapes. Batteries. Audio cassette technology. Wearing oxides and tape-stretching.
- Why Do Marvel's Movies Look Kind of Ugly? by Patrick Willems: YouTube
- Guardians of the Galaxy 2: iTunesAmazon
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Amazon Pilot Model
Amazon’s practice of putting out a pile of different pilots and letting the cream rise via actual user data.
London 2032
Environmental collapse. Precipitous economic drop, at least locally. Population collapse maybe?
Space is big
The Oasis settlement is on “the edge of the galaxy.” That’s really far! Nearest edge to Earth still thousands of lightyears. So, magic FTL. Stasis and muscle-wasting. FTL comms may be couriered by the ships.
Preacher man
The role of a man of God on a space station where resources are scarce and engineers are in high demand.
The Oasis Settlement
Not as advertised! We’re still in the early stages of building Elysium here; it’s still being settled. Gravity and weather systems and water. Tectonic activity and proximity to other bodies. Breathable atmospheres and how they get there.
One-way trips
Expense and complexity of designing for return trips in space travel. The nature of the magic FTL seems to still need normal rocket launches to get up there. Processing passenger vessels for materials.
*Ponics
Hydroponics. Aeroponics. Lower energy and water requirements, fine control of variables. Haley Joel is our Mark Watney botanist.
Space Dementia
Ala Armageddon? Mundane explanations, Occam’s Razor, and magnets. Or supernatural. We’ll see!
Magnets. How do they work?
Please see the Veritasium and Minute Physics videos above. This has little (nothing) to do with Oasis, really, but it’s a cool thing we wanted to share. :)
Predictions
What could be going on on this world and what we expect to actually happen. Solaris!
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This movie is so good!
Just a warning: we really think you should watch this before listening to the episode. It’s so good!
Magic as skeptical training
Taking advantage of human intuition. Taking advantage of our sensory aparatus. Inoculating against credulity and being fooled.
Penn & Teller
Excellent showmen who have been at it forever and who are just great. They are “honest liars” and a lot of their media is great training in cognitive biases.
Saving people from drowning
Attempts to derive scientific guidelines for chest compressions and mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to save drowning victims might go back further than you’d expect.
Tesla
David Bowie as the perfect dandy to play the rather dandy-ish Tesla.
Modern railguns might be in a similar vein to Tesla’s “Death Ray”
Taming electricity
The wonderment of the period. Misconceptions about the rivalry between Tesla and Edison.
Dedication and obsession and sacrifice
The difference between simple and easy. Going over the top to solve a problem with technology where it isn’t necessary.
- The Prestige - Hiding in Plain Sight by nerdwriter: YouTube
- The Trouble with Teleporters by CGP Grey: YouTube
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Future City
Where is this movie taking place? Was it made explicit? We’re thinking neo-Tokyo but what’s really interesting is the lengths they went to in order to make New Zealand look like a retro-futuristic Asian city.
Cyberpunk
Roots in Neuromancer etc. The rising Asian power of the period (Japan) and the mixing of western and eastern aesthetics.
Robots!
And robot materials. Robot doctors. Metamaterials. Biorobots and cyborgs. Metal vs biomech. Blending in. Squishiness.
Robot eyes
Networked AR lens implants. Batou had a whole suite of EM filters! Thermal, night vision, and x-ray. X-ray! Otherwise known as “cancer mode.” How x-rays work and the danger he must posing to everyone around him.
Invisibility Cloaks
Harry potter and Predator. First Predator vision, now predator invisisuit! Bending different frequencies of light around objects cloaked with metamaterials.
Memory and Self
Memory “glitch” medication. Implanting learning. Wiping memories and adapting brains to new bodies.
Man vs Machine
The potential foreignness of artificial intelligence. The human brain as a meaning-making machine. Melding with the machines.
Nature of Self
And dualism and the great questions raised in the original film.
- Ghost in the Shell (the real one!): iTunesAmazon
- Ghost in the Shell: scifi anime, computer evolution, and cybernetics: Decipher SciFi
- Measure of a Man - Star Trek TNG: iTunesAmazon
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A book and so many adaptations
I Am Legend (the book) (1954), The Last Man on Earth (1964), The Omega Man (1971), I Am Legend (2007), I Am Omega (2007). This one (if you consider the alternative, better ending) might be the closest to getting the point of the book.
Zompires
Zombies vs vampires and the origin of this story in the pre-zombie era. The book inspired Night of the Living Dead!
Using viruses to our advantage
Viruses as workhorses to deliver medical payloads. Mutations, good and bad. Telomeres. Cancer, and the difficulties of biological immortality.
Loneliness
The post-apocalypse can be rough; it’s difficult for social creatures. Talking to dogs and mannequins. Videos by
Zompire biology
What we observe presumably as the effects of their disease:
- Superquick respiration
- UV burns them to death
- Hairless
- Translucent skin
- Unhinged jaws
- Aggression
- Averbal
- Strong bones and muscle
Zompires vs Undead
The twist being that Will Smith is the real monster! Depending on which ending you see.
Endings
The “alternative” was so much better. Who is the real monster? The meaning behind the phrase “I Am Legend” and how it is mostly lost in the films.
- The Survivors by Nick Farmer: Amazon
- The Expanse: iTunesAmazon
- Mind Field Episode 1 - Isolation: YouTube
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The International Space Station
Crew of six. Highly trained to do space stuff and… study aliens? Crazy crane-arms.
Is this the future?
Near-future? Referencing the challenger explosion. A survey of the evidence and the answer: basically this must be taking place now. World population: 8 billion!
Origins of alien life
Looked rather similar to life on our own planet. Common origins. Panspermia. Or is life typical in the universe, and life as we understand it is a somewhat typical example?
Time in space
In the movie Jake Gyllenhaal claims 473 days in space. That’s a lot! NASA Twin study.
This alien
Wow what a bastard this alien is. “Just trying to survive.” Pluripotency and cell specialization. A brain made of muscles. “A giant piece of murder muscle.” A jet plane made of biceps. One cell
Kill it with fire!
Literal firewalls. Temperatures of incinerators. Could we burn it up by tossing it down into the atmosphere (hot!).
Kill it with space!
Give that alien some space. Aliens love space.
Plan B: Screw it! Push it and they and everything into space! But is the math in the ballpark of reasonable? Escape velocities from earth’s surface vs the ISS.
- Alien: iTunesAmazon
- What if... orbital speed?: What If
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💥explosion noises💥
Michael Bay blows things up. Layers of subtlety.
BIG AS TEXAS
Just how very very large and unavoidably catastrophic the impactor in this movie is. Size vs Deep Impact. Size vs the dinosaur impactor.
Visibility of this asteroid in the sky
Angular size of this asteroid. Calculations from size, speed and distance suggested in the film (14 arcseconds). Using Ceres as a baseline for figuring out how bright this asteroid would be in our sky.
Tracking potential impactors
We do this irl! It helps when they’re on our solar plane. Comets can come in all sideways, which can make thing difficult. But we do okay tracking a lot of those too. Apophis.
Asteroid belts etc
Common misconceptions about the density of objects in the belt. It’s really diffuse in general! You won’t need to fly your shuttle like a jet in not-asmosphere.
Things hit earth
Lots of past impactors. Micrometeorites. Modern impacts like Chelyabinsk or Tunguska. Russia is basically a meteor magnet.
Astronauts
Drilling and art vs science. Astronaut training and why it’s not that big a deal and you can pretty much skip most of it and hop on an asteroid. 😎
Misc Physics
Nonsensical simulated gravity. Slingshot maneuvers. Steeling energy from moons and planets.
- Deep Impact: citizen scientists, extinction events, and avoidance: Decipher SciFi
- Phil Plait's Review of Armageddon: Bad Astronomer
- Uncertainty Principle the Podcast: Uncertainty Principle
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On voices
My guest appearance talking about this film on the podcast Voices From L5.
The women!
The movie mostly follows three incredible women in particular.
NACA/NASA
This got left out of the movie, but the history of NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics), then NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration), is an important part of the story.
Space Race
Existential threats. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines obviating much of the interest in basing nuclear weapons in space. Dangerous beeps and boops.
Humans in Space
Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Alan Shepard. National and global heroes.
Space stuff is dangerous
Flight testing is really unsafe. Redstone rockets.
Space Competition
National competition in the day, feels to us more healthy and global-cooperative these days. For now. Until it gets cheaper and there are resources to fight over. :(
Computers, human and otherwise
Human computers. Adding machines. Early programmable computers. (Justified) trust issues with these new machines. IBM 7090. Fortran.
John Glenn
Joe’s favorite superhero. A totally amazing list of accomplishments even before the Mercury program. And then the only person to ride in both the Mercury and Shuttle programs.
Hats off
Appreciation for the people who pulled all of this stuff off, with special consideration for the women featured in the film.
- Hidden Figures (the book) by Margot Lee Shetterly: iTunesAmazon
- From the Earth to the Moon: Amazon
- Apollo 13: iTunesAmazon
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Q&A #1
What: Our first Q&A episode! Wherein we answer the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!
“What would you do for immortality?” (Question from CF Villion on Twitter)
Trolley problems. Types of immortality, especially “virtual” immortality. Consciousness uploading.
“#SciFi #Space: what would happen if a #BlackHole showed up in our #SolarSystem?” (Question from Maxime Duprez on Twitter)
Rogue black holes. Passing through the Kuiper belt. Or passing through the asteroid belt. The myriad ways in which this would totally mess up our solar system and probably kill us all.
“In SciFi movies we are Earthlings but what about galaxy VS galaxy stuff. What would we be called? Cuz I’m not down with being called Milkies” (Question from Michael on Twitter)
Earth-centric point-of-view. Milkies? Maybe the aliens can call us “milksopp.” Don’t forget there could be many many other intelligent species amongst the hundreds of billions of stars in our galaxy, though.
“What would an orbital battle be like?” (Question from John Freeman on Twitter)
Messy. Defining what we mean by orbital. Flotsam and jetsam. Yet more references to Seveneves. Kinetic weaponry and orbital bombardment.
Zap Brannigan style
“What would you do if you met yourself? Would be disappointed or in awe?” (Question by Nick Temple on Twitter)
Not liking oneself from the outside. Antisocial magnets of the same polarity.
“If you could have any creature as a pet from SciFi, what would it be?” (Question by Cameron on Twitter)
Ethical implications with trying to take in a creature of unknown intelligence as a pet. Bad pets: Dune sandworms,
“Why Hasn’t Some Disaster Destroyed The Earth?” (Question by MysticInvestigations on Twitter)
Impactors. Protections offered by our moon, Jupiter, and other bodies in our solar system. The formation of our moon, with accretion disks and whatnot.
“Which Newspeak word do you like most? Why?” (Question by David Rozansky)
Doubleplus good.
“Watching Arrival. Why do artsy scifi movies have abstract expressionist art aliens? I mean sure, avoid lil green men, but featureless?” (Question by vgr on Twitter)
We worked a lot out about the aliens from arrival in our two episodes. Alien morphology. More anthropocentrism. Invisible (to us) differentiating markings. Here’s a whole blog dedicated to seeing through the eyes of other creatures in their own areas of the spectrum: Photography of the Invisible World.
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How we wound up covering this teen romance
Chris was in town and at the last minute, we called together a Decipher SciFi meetup in NYC. Thanks for coming out, folks!
Settling Mars
Long and short term threats to humanity. Anthropocene. Courage and adventure and inspiration.
Astronaut Quarantine
Frank Borman and space vomit and space diarrhea. Pre-flight and post-flight quarantine protocols.
Mars mission design
Rocket to orbit, dock with the larger ship/station, then on to Mars. Not entirely dissimilar to irl concepts. Finding energy on other bodies in space with lesser gravity wells. Public and private space industry partnership.
Timelines and propulsion
Around nine months to mars (maybe). Ion drives? Mundane solid rocket? Apparent weightlessness?
Robots
Remote Agent architecture. Robots prefabricating a Mars base before the humans arrive.
Weightlessness
Weightlessness as an environmental “stressor.” Insemination in space. Fetal and childhood physical development.
Video Chat
Light speed communication speed limitations. Using AI to simulate realtime conversation. Translucent screens! ? A terrible design for the user, but a good design for storytelling in film. Also of some utility to teachers, who can then see what students are looking at. Parallax.
The hardship of existing on earth
What would a native-born Martian human experience coming to Earth? Higher gravity. Heart enlargement. Blood pressure. Thin bones, low muscle mass.
- Make it So by Chris Noessel: iTunesAmazon
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Mismatching of Person and Myth
Flawed characters in history. Remembering to recognize that the characters we imagine may not be as close as we think to the real thing.
Napoleon
A short dead dude, but also irl an imposing figure. And not actually short! Of totally average height - the shortness thing was actually an ex post facto error in conversion from the units of measurement of his time and place.
Socrates
Socrates -> Plato -> Aristotle. The Hemlock treatment vs living in the future. Socratic ignorance: “the only true wisdom is knowing that you know nothing.” Bill and Ted’s rolled high on wisdom, low on intelligence. :)
Beethoven
Gradual deafness. Bill & Ted picked him up in 1810, four years before he was reported to have gone completely deaf. So he may have had some limited ability to hear. Piano on the floor, stylus in the mouth, and other coping mechanisms. Beethoven’s metronome. OR MAYBE, he was actually just a crazy old smelly deaf guy and that’s why mall security had to come drag him away.
King Henry VII
They visit his castle in 15th century England and meet two totally bodacious babes. Or something. Attention to linguistic detail in the film: everybody speaks the correct languages! More or less. 15th century English. Chaucerean and Shakespearean pronunciation.
The Princess Situation
Can they read? Write? Reading and writing as two separate skills. Credit cards. Introducing medieval princesses to fiat currency and a debt-based economy.
Genghis Khan
Dan Carlin said all of it better than we ever could: Wrath of the Khans.
Time Travel
Causal loops. Bootstrap and grandfather paradoxes. Dr Who on the bootstrap paradox. “Time circuits.”
- War Co Expandable Game: WarCoTheGame
- Wrath of the Khans by Dan Carlin: Hardcore History
- Doctor Who Explains the Bootstrap Paradox: YouTube
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Alien Reconnaissance
Distress calls. Radio broadcasts and other ways to watch the best.speech.ever.
Alien Arrival
Wormholes. Telefragging. In-system ship speeds and an incredible ability to slow down.
Human Reverse Engineering
Twenty years of reverse engineering alien tech has yielded great fruit. Propulsion! Anti-gravity.
Getting Stuff in Space
It’s hard! Gravity wells. Magic fusion antigravity obviates the main utility of Lagrange points.
Inertial Dampening
Fluid sack inertial dampening.Breathable oxygenated fluids. Vectors!
Data in a Coma
Muscular atrophy. Twenty years without moving. Communicating with locked-in patients.
City Destroyers
Gratiuitous city destruction. Tactics and strategy. Are the aliens just jerks?
They flew into my butthole! My only weakness, how did you know?!
Harvester Ships
Why do cities lift off of the ground?
Earth is just a ball of rock.
And metal. The creamy center is actually not creamy but rather solid iron. It’s like a Kinder Egg and a Cadbury Cream Egg had a baby. The sorts of doom we’d face by having our core disrupted/extracted. Magnetosphere and the molten core. The crust ranges from 3-25 miles thick, fwiw.
Drilling the Core
Massive energy to not only drill but keep the hole into the earth open. A hole in the bottom of the sea.
‘Baitin
Jeff Goldblum is the master baiter. Alien queen fight. Insectoid queen morphology. Sexual dimorphism. Putting stuff up their butts for victory. Original idea, original idea, original idea:
Final Answer
- Why Earth Is A Prison and How To Escape It by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube
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Names and Names and Names
The light novel (All You Need is Kill) -> the movie (Edge of Tomorrow) -> the marketing (Live. Die. Repeat.)
Tom Cruise in a Video Game
Save points. Back in my day. Old-school save system where you have to go back to the beginning every time.
Biological Von Neumann Probes
The possibility of the cosmos awash in aggressive noodly alien murder machines. What are the odds they’d wind up at our doorstep?
Mimic Morphology
Spaghetti Monster tumbleweeds! Bioluminescence. Alienness. Hybrid creatures. Hierarchy.
Starcraft
Zerg rush! Starcraft was almost Warhammer.
Exoskeletons!
Reminds us of Elysium! Exosuit interfaces. Neural interface versus gestural. Safety mechanisms.
Time Loop Superpowers
What are thresholds of alpha blood exposure to contract timeloopism? Best method: bathing? in the butt? in the mouth? All of the above? Will the effect ever “run out?” Blood-bathing, Sookie Stackhouse style.
Time Loops!
Control of time loops. Like a garage door opener? TV remote? Is it time travel? Many-worlds interpretation. Branching timelines! Terminator meatballs.
Who Wants to Live Forever, Sorta?
Chris does. Whatever it takes!
- One-Minute Time Machine: YouTube
- Groundhog Day: iTunesAmazon
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Cold War
The 50s, the 60s, and the 80s and the climate at the time of the film. Star Wars (but not that Star Wars).
Weapons to End War
Gatling and the Gatling Gun, Alfred Nobel and dynamite, Tesla and his particle beams, and…. nuclear weapons?
Early-80s Computing Hardware
Text-To-Speech. Voder at the 1939 World’s Fair. Matthew Broderick’s computer. WarGames computer graphics and rendering radar screens.
Machine Learning
Teaching computers to teach themselves. The point where this movie steps into scifi territory.
Dinosaurs
Dinosaur extinction hypotheses at the time of the film. Falken is a psychopath.
- Hardcore History 59 - The Destroyer of Worlds: Hardcore History
- Silicon Cowboys: iTunesAmazon
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Episodes 4-6
San Junipero, Men Against Fire, Hated in the Nation
San Junipero
Happy endings. Consciousness uploading. Children of the 80s, idealistic recollections and the English lens. Continuity of self. Crippling fear of death.
Men Against Fire
How we get people to do things for us and how technology can make that even more terrible. Hacking visual input. Creepy Watson sex dreams.
Hated in the Nation
Covered in beeeeeees. Drone swarms. Social media hate.
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“Decipher SciFi is People”
We did an interview! Since it’s not the normal format, we’re releasing this as a bonus halfway between normal episodes.
We talk here with Cailin Munroe from The Expanse all about a bunch of stuff: the role of the producer, on-set work, diaper butts, ship designs, physics FX, device and environment UI, space hair, dogs barking, matte paintings, 3D animated sets, the next form of the blue goo ☠️
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Alien attacks
Alien attacks and death tolls. Independence Day and flying planes up the butt.
Water in spaaaaaaace
Liquid water and the Goldilocks Zone. Frozen water all over the galaxy. Water vapor too!
Dying Planets
Schiaparelli, Percival Lowell and the Martian “canals.”
Insectoid Aliens
Anatomy surprisingly like that of our tiny earth-based insects. Tool use? Telepathy? Queens controlling drones, but directly, apparently.
Alien Communication
Distance and lightspeed considerations in trying to communicate with aliens who may pose an existential threat to humanity.
Deciphering Speeds and Distances
28 days. Distances to other stars.
Space Combat Command
Action per minute. Starcraft and command delegation.
Doomsday Weapons
Very very expensive weapons and the meaning of a dollar.
- Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card: iTunesAmazon
- Starship Stroopers on Decipher SciFi: Decipher SciFi
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Episodes 1-3
Nosedive, Playtest, and Shut Up and Dance
Nosedive
Slow motion train wreck. Meow-meow beans. Chinese social credit system. Real life is this episode. Nuance and charity in judging other people.
Playtest
Backpacking fantasy. Christopher’s beard jealousy. Working while traveling via the internet. Hideo Kojima. Near-death experiences, dream experiences, and neurological speed. Death spike hallucinations. American Psycho Hideo Kojima.
Shut Up and Dance
Integrity. Liam’s butt. The worst of the worst. Anonymous.
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Ship design
Segmented helix. Simulated/artificial gravity. Fusion reactors and constant acceleration. 0.5c after 30 years.
Arcturus
A red dwarf, 37 lightyears away from earth. Could the ship have made is to that point with the time and speed given? (no) This is the meat right here. Meaningless slingshots. Red Dwarves. Physics!
Stasis
Generation ships vs stasis pods. Stasis as a resource-saving measure. IRL research in “stasis” and muscle-mass conservation. Acceptable levels of brain deterioration. “Minor” brain damage.
Anti-collision measures
Kinda like magic. Atomizing rocks in space at 0.5c.
Gravity and the ceasing thereof
How simulated gravity works on a giant spinning torus (or, in this case, a segmented helix). How it ceases, and the physics necessary in order to create the effect seen in the film. Swimming out of floating water.
- Seveneves: iTunesAmazon
- "How did the Avalon (seemingly) get to Arcturus so quickly if they are only traveling at .5 of lightspeed?": Scifi & Fantasy Stack Exchange
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Labyrinth production
The Dark Crystal -> Labyrinth -> Mirrormask : a spiritual trilogy. Jim Henson. Beverly Crusher’s choreography.
Fantasy Rules and Dream Worlds
Our difficulty with fantasy again, and further difficulty specific to dreamland stories. Nothing makes sense, cause and effect cannot be counted on, and essentially nothing is on the line. Yet Labyrinth is still delightful (because nostalgia!).
Relating to adolescents
Identifying with adults now more, since we are adults.
Dreams
Dreaming. Animal models. Rats and humans and dreaming during non-REM sleep.
The Greek Myth of the Labyrinth
Minotaur, reverse-minotaur. Plus, a succinct and accurate retelling of the story.
#science
Maze-solving and cognition
Humans are okay. Rats are okay. Dogs, not so much. “Ecocentric cognitive mapping.” FMRI and navigation in virtual reality.
The bog of eternal stench
Irreparable putrescence. Not something that is on you, but something that infuses your very flesh to continue to be stinky. Or, magic.
- The Dark Crystal: iTunesAmazon
- Brian Fraud's Art Books: Amazon
- The Goblins of Labyrinth by Brian Froud: Amazon
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Conan the Bookbarian
Robert E. Howard and pulp fantasy. His life and death.
Arnold is amazing
Arnold Schwarzenegger appreciation hour. Training. Work ethic. Hustle. The American dream. Grizzled old beardy Conan the Conqueror. Arnold’s blooper with the wolves:
Conan’s world and mythology
“Antedeluvian” history. Chroniclers keeping record of the exploits of historical figures. Genghis Khan.
Swordmaking
Iron, steel, forge technology. How not to make or use a sword.
Steppe peoples
Horsemastery. Wind vs slave power. More Genghis Khan.
Doom
Cannibal cults. Human cookery.
The riddle of steel
Steel, flesh, swords made from the blood of one’s enemies. Our Warrior Dash video.
- Conan the Barbarian the Musical: YouTube
- Science Fiction Film Podcast - Conan the Barbarian: LSGMedia
- Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story: iTunesAmazon
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Scifi and Fantasy
Our different aptitudes for processing fantasy. Fantasy tropes, internal consistency, Patrick Rothfuss.
Wizard and muggle technologies
Telegraphs, internets, owls and agentive magical paper airplanes. Other things too!
The power of names
“True name” magic in Harry Potter. IRL examples. Ancient Egypt, Medieval Europe, Jewish mysticism, Aronofsky’s Pi. Rothfuss again.
Classism and wizard racism
Wizard Hitler!
Wizard warfare
Magic bullet machine gun enchanted buckler wizards. Enchanted riot shields with a wand-hole in them. Other innovations.
Characters
The fascististic headmistress, Ballatrix, Luna, and other characters we wanted to note.
- Harry Potter: iTunesAmazon
- Imaginary Worlds Podcast: Apple PodcastsRSS
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Chris' favorite Decipher SciFi selfie ❤️
Production
Issues before, issues during, issues in the final cut. So many issues! How the movie lost much of the depth of the book.
Scifi vs Fantasy
Sciencey veneer over a big pile of fantasy. Maybe steampunk?
Dark Matter
Recognizing that dark matter makes no sense as an explanation for dust. Considering the public conception of dark matter way back when the book was written. Discovery and modern evidence. Bullet cluster. Baryonic matter. Dark energy or the cosmological constant.
The Mind-Body Problem
Familiars and daemons and souls. Dualism. Consciousness uploading. Metaknowledge.
Polar Bears
Polar bear evolution. Shrinking habitat. Hollow hairs and skin color and other adaptations. Blubber and keeping cool.
Parallel Universes
Svalbard! Aurora. The many-worlds interpretation.
- His Dark Materials By Philip Pullman: iTunesAmazon
- Does Dark Matter Break Physics? by PBS Spacetime: YouTube
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Alien Seed Colony
Human aliens in Norway c 709 A.D. The “Prometheus Problem.”
Viking Language
Old norse and 12th century Icelandic. The Icelandic sagas.
Ocular Data Input
Brain implants, language learning, and nosebleeds.
Whaling
Whales are big!
Warrior Culture
Berserkers and their magic mushrooms. Specific training methodologies between vikings, space marines, and dragon-fighting.
The Monster
The movie turns into Predator. Elephant-lion-crocodiles. Apex predator population scales.
Bioluminescence
Frequency of bioluminescence. Adaptation. Wavelengths. Is bioluminescence expensive?
- Viking Age Podcast: Apple PodcastsRSS
- Beowulf the movie: iTunesAmazon
- Beowulf translated by Seamus Heeney: Amazon
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Nick Farmer
He’s a linguist! And a conlanger, technically.
His website: Nick Farmer Linguist
His Twitter: @nfarmerlinguist
Sapir-Whorf
AKA linguistic relativity, and why it is a very very wrong thing. A warm and fuzzy idea that turns out, after facing science, not to reflect reality well. Nick really really wants to set the record straight on this matter.
Spoken Alien Language
Considering the possibilities. Different modalities. Language need not be sound-based! ASL. Frequencies of sound.
Written Language
Heptapod B! Bending over backwards to figure out a way for alien languages to break the linearity of time.
Alien Writing System
The complexity of deciphering alien writing systems. Extradimensionality. Stephen Wolfram wrote the software to create the logograms. Human language analogies. Mapping ideas and words and concepts is REALLY complicated.
- Everything by Ted Chiang: Amazon
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Futurists
Eliot shares how Kevin Kelly, Stuart Brand, et al advised the filmmakers on how the future ought to look. The movie’s prescience makes a lot more sense now.
Privacy Intrusion
Intrusion creep. Giving up your privacy knowingly. Testing users.
Thought Crimes
Is it a thought crime? Or just determinism?
Big Data/Precogs
Artificial intelligence. Machine learning. Policing, advertising. Oakland and other cities.
Utopia/Dystopia
The rather rosy picture painted by Minority Report and its realism. How it seems more reasonable now than it may have at the time.
Gestural Interface
Feedback cycle between our fiction and real life.
Dismantling The System
Could such a system be dismantled! It’s hard to just part with a murder rate of zero. Eliminating murder vs civil liberties.
- Cumulus by Eliot Peper: Amazon
- Make it So by Chris Noessel: iTunesAmazon
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Alien Ship Technology
Ship materials construction. Anti-gravity technologies. Tesseracts. Shadows looking into other dimensions.
Alien Math and Physics
Jef Raskin's alien math
Superdimensionality. Imagining alien understanding of maths and physics. Different perspectives forcing different approaches. The physics of alien arrivals.
Linguistic Relativity
The strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not backed by good evidence. Superdimensional alien languages. Gaining new perspective into the reality of the universe.
Preparation
Military secret-keeping. General Whitaker’s Morpheus operandi: “I cannot tell you what the matrix is. I have to show you.”
- Everything by Ted Chiang: Amazon
- Ted Chiang on Decipher SciFi: Decipher SciFi
- Darmok: iTunesAmazon
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Lament
Our love for Star Trek and how this does or does not fit.
Drone Swarm
Drone swarm tactics. Realizing they’re robots.
Explosive Decompression
It is all manners of unpleasant.
Universal Translator
Christopher’s revelation. IRL real-time translation software. Skype Translator.
Security Systems
And bad design.
Teleporters
Breaking phsyics. Weaponization.
- The Trouble with Teleporters by CGP Grey: YouTube
- Deep Space Nine: iTunesAmazon
- The United Federation of 'Hold my beer, I got this': Imgur
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what
Vivisection
Definitions. Victorian science and protest movements. John Hunter and the John Byrne Irish Giant. Behaviourist views of animal feelings.
Humans as an animal
Coming to terms with our place in nature in Wells’ time. Natural selection vs selection by Moreau.
Individual plasticity and heredity
More vivisection. Human body modification and evolution.
Religious analogy
The “father” and the “laws.”
Should we do x?
Chris plays the amoral scientist monster every time we ask this question.
Carnivore vs herbivore
Moral of the story: Moreau really should have bred a race of herbivores. Would have side-stepped a lot of issues.
Transhumanism
Strategies in evolving humanity and combining with our replacement life form.
- Frankenstein: science fiction horror, reanimation, and victorian context w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
- The Limits of Individual Plasticity by H.G. Wells: Google Books
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Movie origins
Who Goes There? short story. Previous adaptations: The Thing From Another World (1951) · Horror Express (1972) · The Thing (2011)
Antarctic Exploration
British and Norwegian missions. Cultures and approaches.
Antarctic Research
Conditions. Connectivity. Boredom. Whiskey, cigars, and shoe leather.
Antarctic Doctoring
You need a certain kinda Dr MacGyver badass for this job. Spinal self-diagnosis, etc. Wilford Brimley diabeetus.
John Carpenter cinematography and soundtracks and storytelling
Cae and Ryan understand these things, and explain them to us. We mostly get it.
The Thing
So many questions. Where did it come from? How does it work? The nature of the creature. Is it intelligent?
The nature of consciousness
If you were The Thing, could you know you were The Thing? Would The Thing know it was The Thing? Self interest in all cases. Group interests in all cases.
Infection
If I can’t win, neither can you. The doctor was the only one acting rightly. Best plan: destroy the base and kill everyone, just in case. Sexual tests as alternatives to blood…
“The Things”
I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front. I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead. I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance. The names don’t matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else. The Things by Peter Watts
- The Things by Peter Watts: Clarksworld Podcast
- The Politics of Experience & The Divided Self by R.D. Laing: Amazon
- Lee Hardcastle's The Thing Claymations: Thingu @ YouTubeClaycat's The Thing @ YouTubeFrozen blood test scene @ YouTube
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Editions
Theatrical vs “The Version You’ve Never Seen.”
Demons
Devils, demons, pazuzu, deception. How do people get possessed? Different theories.
Supernaturalism
Supernatural detective work. Priest losing his faith.
“Real” Exorcism
The Catholics. The Rite of Exorcism. Bureaucracy. Serious vs loosey-goosey exorcisms.
Simple vs Easy Explanations
Occam’s razor. Science.
Latin
Tradition. Latin as the language of ancient evil. Ecclesiastical latin.
Order of Operations
Medicine -> fringe medicine -> call a priest!
Horror
The ways this movie is timelessly excellent and scary. Parenting.
Demon Battle Plan
Demons might not be the best at planning, OR we might be inconsequential nothings to them, OR creating a rift between god and his people is their job.
- The Exorcist - Killapalooza: Double Feature Podcast
- You Are Two by CGP Grey: YouTube
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Lab Safety
Security in researching highly contagious zombie viruses. Animal liberation.
Biological Infection
Viruses, parasites, R0, monkeys. Infection rates. Bloodborne illness.
Zombies
Zombie taxonomy. Do these count as zombies? A disgreement. Fainting goats.
Preparedness
CDC recommendations. Weapon choice. Get on a boat.
Hospital Escape
Cillian Murphy’s wiener. Playing God.
- Shaun of the Dead: iTunesAmazon
- Dead Island: Steam
- Brookhaven Experiment for HTC Vive:
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Keanu
We love Keanu. But that accent! Oy vey. And standing across from Gary Oldman, no less.
Vlad
Vlad history lesson. Spikes in the butt. Motivations.
Elizabethan Sexuality
Promiscuity, puritanism. Syphilis. Bloooood.
Vampire Rules
How to vampire.
Eating/drinking Blood
Maasi blood drinking. Blood preparations in various world cuisines. Blood fetishes?
Science vs Supernaturalism
In the period and place.
- Bram Stoker's Dracula by Bram Stoker: Project GutenbergiTunesAmazonLibrivox
- Dracula (1931): iTunesAmazon
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Steven Seagal
Adam West, pre-Batman. An impressive entrance and an early, unfortunate exit.
Scientific Accuracy
Surprisingly reasonable space tech and portrayal of mars! For the time.
The Martian
Commonalities. Scientific accuracy with the knowledge of the time.
Mars
Bowser fireballs. Atmosphere.
History of our Knowledge of Mars
Galileo, albido mapping, canali, Percivall Lowell, modern missions.
Planetary Exploration
How to explore a new planet
- Open mask
- Breathe deeply
- Cross your fingers
Martian Resources and Features
Water, underwater sausage plants, red vines, air, atmosphere. Ice caps, aurora, vulcanism.
Columbus on Mars
Exploration and enslaving people. Friday, Friday. Gotta get down on Friday. Culture and intelligence.
- The Martian: iTunesAmazon
- The Martian on Decipher SciFi: Decipher SciFi
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Just a normal day in the studio
Relativity time travel
Jerky Charlton Heston. 99.999995% the speed of light. Time dilation.
The Mission
Settle? Explore? Three men and one women on a colonization mission. Charlton Heston is a bad person.
Moon on the brain
Exploding moons, broken moons, moon impacts. Callbacks: Cowboy Bebop, Seveneves, Deep Impact
Language
Biology of speech. Cognitive speech development. Language evolution.
Animal Intelligence
Octopuses, corvids, elephants, various apes. Mostly chimps. Tool use, language. Moving the goalposts.
- Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: iTunesAmazon
- Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are? by Frans de Waal: iTunesAmazon
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Meta
Cowboy Bebop the series, Yoko Kanno, style points.
Space Western
Shades of Firefly.
Gate Disaster
Shades of Seveneves and Deep Impact. Meteor impacts are becoming a recurring theme!
Settling Mars
Biodomes, marscrete, martian soil, regolith, constructive impacts. Terraforming. Biodomes.
Weather Control
China! Weather control before and after the Beijing Olympics. Cold and warm cloud seeding. Chemicals. Super-frozen, uncrystallized. water.
- Cowboy Bebop the Series: Funimation
- Voices from L5: Patreon
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Citizen Astronomy
People. Computers. Computer vision. KIC 8462852.
E.L.E.
Extinction level events. Dinosaur impact. Impactor scales.
Impactor Types
Meteors, meteorites, meteors, comets, asteroids.
Avoiding Impacts
Gentle (nuclear bombs), and less gentle (gravity tug) methods of redirecting impactors.
Earth Impacts
Tunguska, dinosaur impact. The difference between a small number of large impacts and a large number of small ones.
Humanity’s Fate
Floods, atmospheric disruption, a world aflame from the heat of a million impactors.
- The Formation of the Moon: YouTube
- Asteroids in Resonance with Jupiter: YouTube
- Death from the Skies by Phil Plait: iTunesAmazon
- Solar System Collision Calculator: Astronomy Workshop
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Origins
Short story “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates. Cold War paranoia. 50s.
Aliens
Humanoid and otherwise. Sex with aliens? Alien life from Mars, Venus, or maybe even moons of Jupiter.
Period Things
Everybody smokes. Letting your kid go around town with strange men. Independent women of the 50s. More smoking.
Language
Emray Klaatu naruat macro proval brarato lukto denso implikit yavo tarri axell plakatio baringa degas.
Gort
Gort’s real concerns. Who is the real master? Open source space police operating systems.
Atomic Power
The atomic energy scene in the 50s. Great power and great responsibility.
Violence
Whoever carries the biggest stick seems to be right.
- Lotus Dimension: Lotus Dimension
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Time Travel Choices
Why 2063? World War 3. Population. Booming warp drive economy.
Borg Fighting
Defensive strategies. Best weapons for fighting the borg: bats or sneakers?
Borg Origins
“Borgigins.” Transhumanism. Definitions of evolution.
Borg Behaviour/Design
Like ants! And maybe bees a little. But mostly ants! Comm techs. Bee-dance grammar.
Warp Drive
Alcubbiere drives, distorting space-time. Antimatter is expensive!
- Star Trek: Amazon
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The movie’s history
Crowdfunding. Timur Bekmambetov. Biting Elbows music videos.
First-Person film and video games
Visual language of first person shooters. Our affection for the genre and this film by extension.
Filming and FX
“Adventure Mask” iterative design. Camera mounting and how bets to capture first person action. VFX difficulties with Go Pros.
Motion Sickness
Surprising study results with old and young players. Motion sickness vs simulation sickness.
Sharlto
A Sharlto appreciation party. Remote surrogate body control.
Horse
horse, lol.
- How Hardcore Henry's POV shots were made by Ian Failes: FXGuide
- The Stampede by Biting Elbows: YouTube
- Bad Motherfucker by Biting Elbows: YouTube
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Read the book
Our attempt to convince folks to read the book. Do it!
The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason. It was waxing, only one day short of full. The time was 05:03:12 UTC. Later it would be designated A+0.0.0, or simply Zero.
- The opening paragraph of Seveneves
Neal Stephenson
Big old nerd. Chris expresses appreciation for his deep-dives.
Meteor Strikes
Tunguska. Chelyabinsk. Measuring in five dollar footlongs and blue whales. Who knows how many fathoms?
Shielding!
Humans and computers are both susceptible to radiation.
Choosing Our Evolution
Deaf parents choosing to have deaf babies. Culture.
Technology in Space
Difficulty in producing microchips. Dan’s experience in chemicals and computing. Lost knowledge.
Gliding
Thermals and ridge lifts and whatnot. Terrifying!
- The Day The Moon Blew Up by Bill Gates: GatesNotes
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Aronofsky
Shooting for the moon. Making beautiful film.
History
Olmec, Mayans, Aztec. Murder factories.
Nebulae
Particularity. Stellar nurseries.
Life and Death
Differing viewpoints, religious and atheist.
- The Fountain graphic novel by Daren Aronofsky and Kent Williams: iTunesAmazon
- Darren Aronofsky remastered and mixed Director Commentary: David Weisbrod
- Uncertainty Principle the Podcast: Uncertainty Principle
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Sci-Fi Dystopias
1984, Brazil, Farenheit 451, etc. Why do these count as scifi?
User Interfaces as analogy
Thanks to Chris Noessel for pointing in the Facebook group the way the “badly designed” user interfaces are really incredibly well-designed, if the point is absurdism. :)
Complexity
In business, objects, life, gadgets, systems. Ducts! Creepin’.
Security Theater
Statistics, fear of skin cancer vs shark attack. Viscerality.
Euphemistic Language
Covering up reality. Making uncomfortable behaviour easier to swallow. Hiding reality.
Dreams and Reality
Cracking up. Dreams. Endings.
- War Co. Expandable Card Game: WarCo
- The Egnineering Guy: YouTube
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This is real life
Well, partially. Lcuky Dragon #5. Hydrogren bomb testing. Real life and movie deaths. Press censorship.
Giant movie monsters
Godzilla and his ilk. The Lost World. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
Oxygen destroyer
¯(ツ)/¯
Science and regret
Oppenheimer. Eyepatch guy. Suicide to save the world. Analogies.
Goodbyes
Let them fight.
- Godzilla: Half Century War by James Stokoe: Amazon
- King of the Monsters: History of Japan Podcast
- Double Blasted: Radiolab
- After the Gold Rush: After the Gold Rush
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Conlang
What are constructed languages? Who makes them?
The Expanse
Designing the language for the TV show. Designing a posteriori languages and a priori languages and difficulties of each.
Slang
A Clockwork Orange, Andrew Niccol, and other uses of slang to flesh out fictional worlds.
Pidgins, Creoles
What is a creole, and how did Nick approach designing one for The Expanse
- The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson: iTunesAmazon
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John Hughes
And the Brat Pack. Uncle Buck and Breakfast Club.
Smagic
Science so unscientific, it is magic: smagic. Callbacks to pygmalion and Frankenstein.
Sexism/Objectification
Boy howdy. Literally using a barbie to create a living sex object. Consent. Creating sex bots. The 1950s comic on which the movie was based.
Geekery
What are they? what are we? Geeks? Nerds? Both?
Growing Up
Adolescence sucks. Being a sexually frustrated teenage boy. Fantasies and ethical concerns.
- Frankenstein w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi
- Made of the Future/Weird Science: Mars Will Send no More
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Jupiter
Baby naming. Looking through a telescope with the kids and co-bff Joe. Astrology. 😒
Fermi Padadox
Jupiter Jones: Because a dream is the only way any of this make sense. Caine Wise: Compared to what? The idea that you’re the only intelligent species, on the only inhabitable planet, in a universe so full of planets that you don’t even have a number to describe how many there are.
Civilization Development
“Tersies.” Seeding planets. The “prometheus problem.” Coexistence with dinosaurs??
Harvest
Analogies to our treatment of animals. It can still be “affecting.”
Genetic Modification
Cyberpunk. CRISPR. Animal trait splicing. Channing Tatum with his mouth open.
Space Feudalism
Lots -isms and -igarchies and whatnot. An economy sort-of based on time reminds us of Andrew Niccol’s In Time.
Nihilism
What would you do if you owned whole planets?
- A Quick Note on Jupiter Ascending's Politics: This Cage is Worms
- Antibodies Part 1: CRISPR by Radiolab: Radiolab
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Brad Bird
50s and 60s techno optimism. The Iron Giant. The Incredibles.
World’s Fair
Stages of the worlds fair. Our tech and relationship to it.
Walt Disney
Futurism. Techno optimism. Shaping reality to fit his vision.
Tomorrowland
Disneyland. EPCOT. Disney’s vision for a designed city.
A sense of wonder
Childlike optimism. Positivity in the face of pessimism. Three wolf moon.
Future Visions
Visions of technology and the future from different periods.
omg car is driving how can that be
- Walt Disney - The Triumph of the American Imagination by Neal Gabler: iTunesAmazon
- A 19th Century Vision of the Year 2000: The Public Domain Review
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Joss Whedon & Firefly
Johhhhhhn Cena prank call. Fox’s predilection for cancelling the most-loved shows. Viewing orders.
Hard and soft scifi
Joss Whedon doesn’t care about the science. Star system design without FTL. A call-in from Adrian Falcone.
Sci-Fi western
From cyberpunk to westerns. Frontier living.
Culture and language
Language evolution on generation ships. Creoles. Joss’ poetic Rialogue.
Reavers
The mythology and the more reasonable backstory. Samuel Mumby calls in to express his appreciation for the former. “Who does the dishes?”
Religion
Sci-fi treatments of religion by Whedon and others.
- Firefly: iTunesAmazon
- Serenity on Science Fiction Film Podcast: LSG Media
- Bad Character by Ted Chiang: The New Yorker
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Production
Jerome Bixby’s final, lifelong work. A bittorrent success story. The Man From Earth: The Series
Why this movie is the best
A great mechanism for great conversation: a collection of domain experts exploring hypotheticals.
Human Evolution
Biological differences. Geography. Proto human language.
Memory and Learning
Plasticity. Long term memories. Retrospective fill-ins. Meta-memory.
Immortal Biology
Regeneration. Disease. Scarring and cancer.
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
Living through humanity’s violent past. Adjusting to the current morality. Old fashioned ways.
Danger and Risk
Micromorts. Judging risk and how to live life when you’re immortal.
- "Good job, BRAIN!" by Good Job Brain: GoodJobBrain.com
- Risk. by VSauce: YouTube
- :
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Zoltan!
Running for President of the USA as an atheist and a transhumanist.
The Singularity
Kurzweil. Vernor Vinge. The post-work economy. Luddites and progress.
Artificial Intelligence
Uploading the human mind. Will people try to convert the first real artificial super intelligence?
Transhumanism
Improving humanity through technology. Medicine. Life extension and immortality. The Transhumanist Wager. The power of love.
- Zoltan Istvan: ZoltanIstvan.com
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom: AmazoniTunes
- The Singulatiry is Near by Ray Kurtzweil: iTunesAmazon
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Gravity and Black Holes
More Kip Thorne. Wormholes. Detecting gravitational anomalies.
Time Dilation
Einstein. Train rides. Relativity. Frames of reference. Frame dragging. Time as an expendable resource.
Crazy Planetary Adventures
Water planet is the stuff of Christopher’s nightmares. Frozen clouds!
So Many Dimensions
Abstraction of extra dimensions into fewer. Tesseracts. Carl Sagan’s genius powers of explanation.
Time Travel Paradoxes
Predestination paradox? Self-consistent single timelines.
Love
Multidimensional beings and the power of love. Social utility and bonding, etc.
Space Settlement
O’Niell cylinders. Another call-in from Liam Ginty of Voices From L5.
- Flatland & The Fourth Dimension by Carl Sagan: YouTube
- The Science of Interstellar w/ Kip Thorne: YouTube
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Memories of Carl Sagan’s Contact
Kip Thorne does movie science again. Carl Sagan’s Contact. Mathew McConaughey plays two opposing roles.
Corn, Corn, and Corn
Monocultures. Blight. We talk about anthropogenic climate change even though it isn’t mentioned in the film. Reduced population. Governments.
Explorers and Pioneers
Scientific mindset. Humanity’s will to expand. Good science parenting.
Robots
TARS. 2001. Humor settings and the best robot locomotion.
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Areas of progress
Areas needing a lot of progress to lead to the world of Surrogates: robotics, materials science, network bandwidth and latency, human-machine neural interfaces, legality and ethics.
Effects
Violent crime nearly nonexistent, productivity, pseudonymity, anonymity, merito cracy. Level playing field for people with disabilties. Soldiering by proxy.
Human connection
The loss of it. The resistance. Surprisingly bad solutions.
- DEKA "Luke" Arm: YouTube
- Game Over by A Life Well Wasted: 99 Percent Invisible
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Robbie the Robot
Prop design. AI language understanding. Super strength and a matter replicator. Bad reactions to conflicting orders. Like a mechanical calculator dividing by zero!
Morbius
He’s totally Zod! Philology. Engineering. Dangerous tech designs.
Gender Stuff
Cutting edge sexiness in the 50s. Innocent virgins. Blaming the victim. To the captain go the spoils. The deleted scenes that explain the animal behaviour:
Decoding the Krell
Best attempts at judging Krell biology from their technology and architecture. Their “plastic educator.” Deciphering their language. Using alien Wikipedia on microfilm. Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The alien arithmetic problem.
Jef Raskin's Alien Arithmetic Problem
Jef Raskin
Self Destruct
A comparison of scuttling procedures in Alien and Forbidden Planet. Speculation about Krell hearing and sight frequencies.
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: iTunesAmazon
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Is Batman science fiction?
Short answer: yeah, sure. Featuring a voice clip from Liam Ginty, space nerd.
Batman’s detective work
CSI bullet reconstructions. The trappings of science.
Batman’s Bondian Gadgetry
All kinds. The skyhook.
Sonar Phones
Prerequisite technologies. Zero day vulnerabilities and phone hacking. Distributed computing to combine the massive data. Google’s Project Tango.
Law, Fairness, and Chaos
Batman and his enemies in the film.
- Batman Chooses His Voice by Pete Holmes: YouTube
- Batman The Animated Series: iTunesAmazon
- Heart of Ice from Batman TAS: YouTube
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The Film
90s, Leeloo’s thermal tape, awesome hair.
Alien Species
Space turtles, space orcs, space squids, space humans. Archeology and ancient mythology. Chamber design.
Malevolent Evil
The possible nature of the evil space-mass. Zorg’s motivations. Broken window fallacy.
200 Billion Citizens
Overpopulation. Governance over interstellar distances. Real-time FTL space comms. Space wizards. Space borders.
Building Leeloo
3d printing skeletons. Genetic design and genetic data storage.
The Stones
Sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Good and bad places to smuggle 20 pounds of stone. “Space opera.” Impossible series of vocal notes. Saved by love, or something.
- The Divine Language:
- Affordances and Constraints in the Fifth Element: Vimeo
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Krypton is Imploding
No refuge! Except for all the different refuge options. Harvesting the planet’s core something something oh no it’s collapsing!
Zod is the Good Guy
On Krypton at least. Sure, he sounded a little bit like Hitler, but look what happened when they didn’t listen to him - no more Krypton! And then
Kryptonian Prison Rehab
They seem to put some serious resources into their criminal rehab system that barely gets used. Mundane black hole tech. Dildo butt plug space ships.
The Codex and the Genesis Chamber
Kal first natural birth in centuries. Clearly Kryptonians were multistellar once upon a time. Wonder what happened.
Super Awakening
Lessons in how not to handle a kid having a panic attack. Humans actually do pretty well adapting to new sensory input. Clark’s compensation and self control.
Yellow Sun Superpowers
Disagreement over the exact function of Kryptonian power armor and the nature of the yellow sun/superpower relationship.
Simulated Consciousness
Russel Crowe hologram simulation. So the Kryptonians reached the singularity basically, but don’t seem to be impressed enough.
Defeating Zod
Super strength, super neck bones, super despondent military leaders with nothing to protect.
- Superman (1978): iTunesAmazon
- Fleisher 1940s Superman Cartoons: YouTube
- All-Star-Superman: iTunesAmazon
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Shyamalan
Christopher loved his direction in this movie. “Twists.” Appears in all his own films.
Crop Circles
Crop circle hoaxes. Not a great method of communication.
Two Groups of People
People who think there is meaning, and people think the universe is deterministic and unconcerned with us as individuals. Benjamin Franklin’s pragmatism re religion. Our own perspective.
The Aliens
A list of unreasonable presumptions from the movie about alien life. Recon forces. Encryption. Spoilers.
- The Signs Demon Theory by ZorroMeansFox: Reddit
- Joaquin Phoenix's Forehead Face: YouTube
- You Are Not So Smart: The Podcast
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War of the Worlds - the book, the movie
Original book. Orson Welled radio broadcast hysteria not as reported. Radiolab report on repeated adaptations. The new developments at the time of writing that informed the book.
Alien Attack
Methods, research, planning. Trying to explain the buried death-bots.
But Why
Are we food? Do they want our resources? Making the most sense of the options. Are liquified people good for fertilizer?
Germ Attack
They might have done a little more research.
- War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells: Project Gutenberg (ebook)Project Gutenberg (audiobook)
- War of the Worlds (1953 film): iTunesAmazon
- War of the Worlds Orson Welles original radio broadcast: YouTube
- Could it happen again? And again?: Radiolab
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Asimov’s Three Laws
Enumerated in spectacular fashion in the film in order to get it out of the way and never speak of it again.
Natural Language Processing
It’s really hard! Errors in humor and social expectations. Infinite conversational loops.
Robot Personification
A nurturing environment maybe contributed to Robo Williams’ sentience. Art as awakening. Acting human. Emergence.
Robot Slave Class
Why don’t we see them?
Uncanney Valley
Turing tests. Robots, androids, biorobots. Robo Williams’ synthetic organs.
What is Life?
Actually kind of hard to define.
Immortality
“Death is an engineering problem.”
- Positronic Man by Isaac Asmiov: Amazon
- Humans: iTunesAmazon
- Robin Williams in Motion by Every Frame a Painting: YouTube
- Uncertainty Principle Podcast by Daniel James Barker: Soundcloud
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Mary Shelley and The Book
Volcanoes and the year with no summer. Women writing books. Philosophers and children of philosophers.
Trendsetting
The movie vs the book. The beginning of scifi. The ways that each broke boundaries in their own ways.
Scary
Was it scary at the time? The movie intro. Everything that’s cliché now was new once.
Playing God
Science, evil science, and playing god. The ethics of mad science.
Science Horror
How to take the cutting edge and make it a horror story. Electricity. X-rays. Quantum stuff. Nano bio tech now? Deepak Chopra is full of crap.
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: Project Gutenberg (ebook)Project Gutenberg (audibook)
- Young Frankenstein: Amazon
- The "Slip n Slide" scene from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: YouTube
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This movie is weird
David Lynch. Return of the Jedi. Different editions of the film. Alan Smithee. Internal monologues.
Dune politics
Before Game of Thrones, this was a new level of deep. Game theory and politics.
Anti-digitalism
Mentats. Eyebrows.
Spice
Like oil? Drugs?
Treatment of Homosexuality
Was Frank Herbert homophobic? Considering the man and the time in which it was written.
Gods and Cults
How the movie and the book had opposite lessons. Making it rain.
- After the Gold Rush by Miles Greb: Gold Rush Comics
- Dune + Jodorowsky's Dune by Double Feature podcast: Double Feature
- Dune by Frank Herbert: iTunesAmazon
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Video Games
As children of the 90s, we have to wax nostalgic over the Wing Commander video games. They were really, really important at the time. Ground-breaking, even. PC games pre-windows. FMV.
- 1990 Wing Commander
- 1991 Wing Commander 2
- 1994 Wing Commander 3
- 5 million bux
- 1996/7 Wing Commander 4
- 10 million bux
- 1999 Wing Commander Movie
- 30 million bux
Chris Roberts
Director of the games was also director of the film! We hypothesize based on zero knowledge of anything how it may have been difficult for this first-time feature film director. We consider whether he is the George Lucas of video games, in both the good or bad senses.
Kilrathi
Cat creatures? This may not have been clear in the film. Hairless cats.
Mister colbert, mount the forward laser pointer!
Space Combat and Naval/Air Combat
Simplifications of space combat, ignoring the vast distances and incredible speeds in their portrayals. Things that did it pretty right.
A Crew of Mavericks
At least in Top Gun, there was only one Maverick. Here we have to consider if we’d want a ship full of Mavericks as Earth’s last best hope.
Space Romance
One makes sense. One seems to come out of nowhere. Maniac is awful and dangerous. This movie’s idea of “search and rescue” seems a bit off.
Pilgrims and Navigation
Pilgrim discrimination. Pilgrim backstory. Using pilgrim brains in the Navcom. Faith vs genetics.
- LSG Media:
- The Wing Commander video game series: Good Old Games
- The Lost Fleet series by Jack Campbell: iTunesAmazon
- Battlestar Galactica (RMG): iTunesAmazon
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Movie Production Issues
Lack of studio support. Poor audience test results. VERY small number of screens. Somehow, a cult hit after release.
Why Do People Love This Movie?
Has internet cult hit status. Why? Appealing to elitism and cynicism? Fart jokes? Love it or hate it.
Christopher Has a Problem With This Movie
It feels mean, basically. Also the extrapolations it makes are unreasonable as far as I’m concerned.
Dumbing Down Society
Network covered similar ground in the 1970s.
Whose Fault is this Situation?
The yuppies for not reproducing more? The “dumb” people? The system? Corporatism, selfishness, etc?
Human Evolution
Defining terms because people use them in the wrong way too often. How humanity actually evolves. Dysgenics. Why the movie is wrong.
Bad Things
“Crab mentality.”
Self absorption. Laziness. Selfishness. Willful ignorance. Materialism.
Design for Idiots
Actually there are some interesting examples here. Simplification of UI. “Idiot-proofing.” Automation.
How Do We Avoid This Future?
Each host gives their plan to save the world. Governor Adrian implements the ~mushroom~ marshmallow test.
- The Genius of Idiocracy: Rolling Stone
- Idiocracy is a Cruel Movie and You Should Be Ashamed for Liking It: Gizmodo
- The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman: iTunesAmazon
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Ted Chiang, Guest Co-Host
Thanks to Ted for coming on and helping us figure out what’s going on in Looper. Rather than an interview, Ted is a fully-fledged guest co-host with all the power that entails. :)
Plot Outline
This gets a little convoluted, because the movie is not incredibly worried about logical consistency.
Looper Isn’t Actually About Loops
Despite appearances and the language in the film about loops and looping, we decide that either there are no paradoxical loops or the movie just doesn’t make a lot of sense in this regard. Or maybe both things. Probably both.
Diagramming Timelnes
We straighten out how many Bruces/JGLs there have been and how they all lived out their lives. It might be more than you think! Ted has to reign us in so we don’t spend the whole show making diagrams with straws. :)
no straws, but we spent some time with a whiteboard. too much time. here is a sampling
CC-BY-NC
Motherhood
Actually it turns out this movie is about motherhood (an uncommon topic for science fiction) and the importance of a mother in keeping boys from growing up “lost.” We needed a professional writer on the show to get us to shut up about time travel long enough to figure out the point of the movie. Thanks, Ted.
Free Will
Comparing and contrasting the appearance/reality of free will in this film and other examples (Twelve Monkies, Back to the Future).
Rewriting Looper
Ted tries to rewrite the movie but realizes how important all of the logically difficult plot devices are to the story and characters.
_The first half of the film, where criminal organizations are sending people back in time to be killed - that made no sense at all! And that really bugged me.
But I quite liked the second half of the film, which was about the importance of motherhood and the possibility of breaking the cycle of violence.
I wanted there to be a way to fix the first half of the film, but keep the second half.
So I, in my mind, tried to rewrite the film…_ -Ted Chiang
And keep an eye out for the upcoming movie “Arrival” based on Ted’s story “Story of Your Life” (with Jeremy Renner and Amy Adams) probably some time this year. Should be really good!
- Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: iTunesAmazon
- There is No Loop in Looper by Prof Hames Van Cleve: A Time Travel Website
- Director Rian Johnson Talks Plot Holes and Burning Questions: YouTube
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People Really Love This Franchise
Fandom. Why do people love this so much?
Why Are We Not Bananas About Star Wars?
Fantasy vs. science fiction. Humanities, sciences. Star Wars is a “fairy tale.”
Childhood Memories
People bonding with Star Wars in their youth. Watching it with the kids. There are younger people who actually dig the prequel trilogy, believe it or not.
Science in Star Wars
Canons. Robots. Spaceships. FTL. Gravity. The Force. Planets. Language.
Death Star Scales
Big, bigger, and biggest! Engineering and construction. Military and civilian populations.
Technology and The Force
“I find your lack of faith disturbing.”
- Star Wars Movies:
- Star Wars 'Filmumentaries' by Jamie Benning: Filmumentaries
- Robot Chicken Star Wars Parodies: iTunesAmazon
- Bad Lip Reading Star Wars (especially the songs!): YouTube
- Emo Kylo Ren: Twitter
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Our Star Wars meta discussion covers merchandising revolutions, VFX, viewing order (machete!), Star Wars Revisited, Star Wars Despecialized Edition, more.
VFX
George Lucas. Industrial Light and Magic. Practical effects vs. CG.
Merchandising/Marketing
Star Wars was a revolution in movie merchandising.
Official Release Editions
Original Trilogy only because the prequels are less complicated and we just kinda don’t care
- 1985 VHS, pretty much theatrical
- 1993 Definitive Collection (The Laserdisc). Grognards dig this one. For some reason.
- 1997 Special Edition - the one that ruined Star Wars according to nerds. Reportedly cost like $10 million to do this work and it just made everyone mad. Lots of CGI was overlaid atop non-CG stuff from the original. New scenes, different music. Introduced the Greedo shooting first thing, which is stupid and paints the character of Han incorrectly.
- 2004 Original Trilogy DVDs - More changes. Nerds say the color correction is garbage, sound was messed up.
- 2006 Star Wars Trilogy Limited Edition Box Set. Had the 2004 editions of each film, but ALSO the original “theatrical cuts”. Actually the same cut as the laserdisc. They are letterboxed and grainy and bad with lots of video quality issues and look like shit.
- 2011 Star Wars Complete Saga Bluray - Basically the same thing as 2004 DVDs, but on Bluray.
Viewing Order
It’s important! Here is the original (really good!) article for machete order, but if you need the tldr it’s 4,5,2,3, and 6.
The Phantom Edit
Google for it, maybe try to find a copy on Youtube. It’s around. It’s an edit of the prequel trilogy which puts them all into one feature-length movie, mostly leaving out the first film.
Fan Edits
-
Star Wars Revisited - LOTS of changes. Christopher is partial to this one. Starts with theatrical and makes it beautiful. Color correction improved. More ships and more destruction in space battles, makes it feel more epic. Also presumes a bit much and makes some questionable changes, but these can be avoided by getting the “purist” edition. So not only did they do this, but they separated into different editions depending on how sensitive you are to different issues. Holy crap, so much effort.
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Despecialized edition - THIS is the one to watch if you have no idea. Based on 2011 Bluray, with bits from various other cuts where needed. Removed all special edition changes, pretty much. Made it look great. There are special high quality theatrical prints around used as color reference. Here is a video outlining the changes in general.
-
Others - so many others! But you shouldn’t care, mostly. The other two are the important ones to know about.
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Carl Sagan
Our love for Carl. How his character and interests manifest in the characters in the film.
SETI
What it is. Why it is. Why is doesn’t get taken seriously. Their website.
Real Science
The story of Carl’s question for Kip Thorn producing actual time travel science. Black holes and wormholes.
Carl’s Model Scientist
The Jodie Foster character really emulates Carl in a lot of ways. Also partially based on SETI astronomer Jill Tarter.
Role Models/Parents
The dad in the movie. Carl Sagan’s gentle and understanding skepticism.
Aliens
How to communicate with aliens. Dimensions and moves of communication.
Atheism/Agnosticism
No one trusts atheists. Our feelings on the Jodie Foster character and our own positions on things.
- Contact - by Carl Sagan: iTunesAmazon
- Cosmos (1980): YouTube
- Cosmos (2015): iTunesAmazon
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90s
We’re from there! We love the fashion. And the music!
Hacker Taxonomy
Hackers, crackers, script kiddies, etc.
Kevin Mitnick
Huge in the new at the time. Media coverage. The model for Dade’s legal situation.
Hacking
Hacking, social engineering, dumpster diving.
Doxxing
Ruining Agent Gill. Reddit.
- Ghost in the Wires - by Kevin Mitnick: iTunesAmazon
- Freedom Downtime: iTunesAmazon
- Mr Robot: iTunesAmazon
- Security Now:
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Philip K Dick
The importance of his work. Valis experience. Drugs! PKD’s place in the pantheon of science fiction writers, among Asimov, Bradbury and others. Humanity. Dignity. Technology vs humanity.
As we come closer to the machine, the machine comes closer to us. -Daniel Abella
Daniel Abella
Movies Based on the Work of PKD About Which We Have Something to Say * Blade Runner * Total Recall * A Scanner Darkly * Minority Report * Paycheck * Next * Screamers * The Adjustment Bureau * Man in the High Castle
Philip K. Dick Film Festival
Indie sci-fi film festival. Featuring a bunch of interesting films, shorts, and documentaries. Even one video game! Here are some trailers:
Patreon
We’ve just launched our Patreon to help us improve the show! Check out the Support the Show page to see our spiel.
- The Philip K Dick Film Festival:
- Minority Report: iTunesAmazon
- A collection of free PKD audiobooks and ebooks:
- The Man in the High Castle: Amazon
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Dying Sun
Sun science. Stages and timeline of sun death.
Spaceship
Solar radiation. Reflector shields. Ion drive. Magical gravity. Oxygen garden. Sun room.
The Crew
LOVE pragmatic Chris Evans. Our favorite person. Cillian is always great. Earth room holo tech. The different captains and their madness. Jumping through space! PS: we’ve covered this before, in episode 1.
Third Act
Thoughts on the third act juxtaposed with the first two.
Tough Decisions
Why return trip? Rendezvous a good idea? Thinning the herd. Pragmatic Chris Evans again.
Bomb Scene
We looooooooooove the score around this whole thing.
Post-Credits Secret Scene
- An alleged intro to the Sunshine script by Alex Garland:
- Solaris: iTunesAmazon
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We realize that there are some very obvious omissions from our lists. In the episode we address these, so check out the episode to see how we treat your favorite thing!
We welcome you to contact us to tell us how wrong we are. Please! Especially if we left out your very obvious #1. We’d like to hear from you.
- Science Fiction Film Podcast - Top 5 Sci-Fi TV Shows:
- Black Mirror: Netflix
- Babylon 5: iTunesAmazon
- Battlestar Galactica: iTunesAmazon
- Humans: iTunesAmazon
- Futurama: iTunesAmazon
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Language
Spanish, French, Transatlantic Accent. Class identifier. Norman invasion. Linguistic bigotry.
Rich Folks
Facial branding. Fancy Pip Boys. Differences in rich and poor tech.
Magical Healing Chamber
How does it work? Neurological limitations. Altering personality.
Neural Tech
Brain storage implants. Encryption. Kill switches.
Exo Suits
REALLY cool installation montage. Order of installation operations. Current tech. Warhammer Space Marines.
Space Settlement
Voices from L5! Space planes. Torus settlements. Artificial gravity. Division of rich and poor. Space exploration
Stanford Torus
Donald Davis CC-0
- Voices From L5:
- The High Frontier - by Gerard O'Neill: Amazon
- District 9: Amazon
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50s Pulp Stories
Chewed to bits by giant turtles! The Pulpiest Pulp.
The pulp school L. Ron Hubbard came from. The book should not stand out much against this background. Except it came out in the 80s!
The Film
DUTCH TILTS. The book Hubbard most wanted made into a movie. Travolta stood behind it as a love letter to Scientology. Reportedly, interference from Scientology higher-ups destroyed the whole thing, and then they threw John Travolta under the bus.
Earth After 1000 Years
Nature would take over. Paper would waste away. People would… start to act like chimps? Chernobyl. The Koream DMZ.
The Fermi Paradox
Read about the paradox on Wikipedia. The Psychlos as the great filter. They’re Made Out of Meat on The Truth Podcast.
Judging Alien Intelligence
Psychlos underestimating humans. Tool use and language.
Alien Design
In the book, they were feline! Douchey Klingons. Breathable atmosphere. High and low gravity. Cats are jerks.
Intergalactic Civilization
Why gold? Why slaves? Corporate space exploitation.
- Battlefield Earth - by L Ron Hubbard: iTunesAmazon
- Life After People: iTunesAmazon
- Looking beyond the Cover and baggage of Battlefield Earth - by Jason Heller: AV Club
- The Fermi Paradox: Wait But Why
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Anime
We watched a lot of it in highschool. How this film transcends the norm. Timeline of anime and the cyberpunk aesthetic.
Influence
The influences that went into this movie. The huge influence this movie had on everything after.
Plot
For once we have to lay out the plot of the movie in detail, because it’s kind of complicated!
The Opening Scene
Awesome. Exploding heads. Japanese pornography laws. Encryption as armament.
Cybernetics/Cyborgs
The spectrum on jacked-in-ness in the movie. Taxonomy of androids, cyborgs, and robots.
The Soul/Ghost
Mind-body dualism. The treatment of consciousness in the film.
Evolution in Binary
Emergent AI. What is life? Evolution of digital life forms.
- Ghost in the Shell (original manga): Amazon
- Ghost in the Shell Standalone Complex: iTunesAmazon
- The Matrix: iTunesAmazon
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Why does everyone love this movie?
Underdogs, sticking it to the man, engaging with our sense of justice and living the American Dream! Or something.
Genetic Determinism
The world of Gattaca banks on this big-time, but in real it’s much more complicated. Nature AND nurture. People are more than the genes they start with.
Designer Babies
Current practices with in vitro and in vivo baby testing. Down syndrome.
The New Eugenics
Racism. “Positive” and “negative.” American eugenics programs. Medical choices are eugenic.
Genetic Discrimination
Loooooong list of inconveniences Ethan Hawke has to keep up with to not get caught. Financial arrangements. Colloquial speech in Andrew Niccol’s films.
- Genetic Determinism and Gene Therapy in Gattaca - by David A Kirby:
- In Time - Decipher SciFi episode 11:
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FX
How they produced the “zoom” sequences in the film. Color grading.
Brain Drugs
Drugs as tools. 20% brain myth. Christopher’s past caffeine issues. Drugs have side effects, like blacking out, maybe murdering folks.
Intelligence
How do we define intelligence? Social? Knowledge? Pattern recognition? Analysis? Synthesis? Crazy neuro physical adaptation.
Thought Experiments
Would you want the drug? How could this affect society? Going into politics?
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The Film’s Marketing
Really cool Youtube channel. Neil deGrasse Tyson. Spoiler policies.
The Book
Serially published on Andy Weir’s blog. Accidental best-seller.
Nailed the Science
Research. Space travel is dangerous. Radiation shielding.
IRL Travel to Mars
Mars One. Space X. ELON MUSK. Settlement.
Water on Mars
Liquid salinated water. Frozen water under surface. NASA sterilization.
Worth it?
Robots? Human inspiration.
Settling/Colonizing Mars
Growing or shipping food.
Resourcefulness of Astronauts
Pretty much have to be MacGyver. Overcoming functional fixedness.
- Digital Dads - Exploring the Final Frontier: Part 1Part 2
- The Case For Mars - by Robert Zubrin: iTunesAmazon
- Spin - by Robert Charles Wilson: iTunesAmazon
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Biological Immortality
Telomeres. Telomerease. Garbage collection. Avoiding cancer. The Immortalists.
Biopharmaceutical DRM
Bitcoin. Digital wealth transfer. Terminator genes. Bio-pharma IP law.
Economics and Time Inflation
Wealth and life evaporate with each passing second. This is on top of inflation used on purpose to thin the herd. Time in the film must be only artificially finite.
Stratified Society
Geographic and economic lockdown. Banlieue 13. Md30EDh60Us
Tech
Skin displays. Biological immortality. Payphones. Electric classic cars.
Time Security
Cillian Murphy is lawful good. Minute men. Bad system design: could use personal transfer limits. Arm wrestling.
Immortality getting boring
Hoarding of wealth. Artificial scarcity.
- Inequality for All: iTunesAmazon
- The Immortalists: iTunesAmazon
- The Economics of In Time:
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Climate Disaster
Colbert talks about it a bunch. Chris goes all Pollyanna. The Newsroom Climate episode (embedded above)
Traveling From Earth
Stargates. Gravity wells. Luck they didn’t wind up inside a sun.
Space Colonies
Space X! Mars One! Christopher gushes about Elon Musk for thirty minutes.
Gifted Children And Rubbish Fathers
Will Robinson. Ahmed Mohamed. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Ghengis Khan? Elon Musk?
Future Tech
Cryo sleep. Holographic communications. Vlogging via watch.
Video Communications and Holography
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- The Newsroom - climate change interview: YouTube
- Lost in Space (the original television series): iTunesAmazon
- Revelation Space - by Alastair Reynolds: iTunesAmazon
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The Novel
The title was taken from a Stephen King short story which pretty much otherwise has no relationship at all to the film. This actually led to a lawsuit.
Director Brett Leonard
Was praised at the time for his vision. Virtuosity.
3D Graphics at the Time of the Film
Wolfenstein 3D. Compact discs technology. Sega CD. The cost of this film in time and money. How impressed we all were at the time. Sega console monstrosity. The Sega Tower of Power.
Virtual Reality: Past
What we thought it would be at the time of the film.
Virtual Reality: Present
360° “VR” movies. Google cardboard. AR. How directed do we want our experiences with art to be?
Virtual Reality: Future
VR training. Holodeck. Pornography. Awesome-sounding VR “theme park” in Utah. cML814JD09g
Becoming the Lawnmower Man
Nootropics. The singularity. Controlling the real world via the internet.
- Community: Lawnmower Maintenance and Postnatal Care: Stream on Yahoo!Episode info on the Community Wiki
- Daemon - by Daniel Suarez: iTunesAmazon
- Freedom TM - by Daniel Suarez: iTunesAmazon
- Altered Carbon - by Richard K Morgan: iTunesAmazon
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The Novel
Philip K. Dick sort of wrote this about himself and his experiences with the Berkeley drug culture. “Everything in A Scanner Darkly I, actually saw.” This novel is probably the least scifi of Dick’s work.
Rotoscroping
Other famous examples of rotoscroping, but Linklater’s are the first to do it 100%. Interesting custom software with layering techniques. Perfect for this film with its less than firm grip on reality.
Drug Addiction
We are squares and we know roughly nothing about drugs. But it sure seems bad. Especially the drug in the movie: Substance D. LSD experiments like the following: n4Sb8jCJUTw Here is the article about these experiments.
Big Brother/Corporate Conspiracy
Small conspiracies vs grand conspiracies. Big brother. Alex Jones and Linklater. Govt agencies compelling sharing by private firms. The social effects of being watched. The war on drugs.
Fractured Indentity
Scramble suits. How much can trust our own senses? Occam’s razor. Unwitting sacrifice.
- a Scanner Darkly - by Philip K Dick: iTunesAmazon
- Citizenfour: iTunesAmazon
- Waking Life: iTunesAmazon
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Star Trek
Christopher is a big fan. Has a revelation regarding this on the show.
Star Trek Fandom
Christopher might be a trekkie. The movie is a loving tribute. Star Trek cast reactions to Galaxy Quest.
Aliens in the movie
Tend to be humanoid. Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element. Abundance, working together. Literalism in language like small human children.
Silly Star Trek Tropes
The movie uses them for great meta comedy. Transporter. Omega 13 device. Most important crew members go down to explore new worlds.
Artemis is Really Really Awesome
Here is a good example of the frivolity you could expect (skip to3:38 for gameplay):
- Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator: iTunesAndroid Play Store
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: iTunesAmazon
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author: Christopher Peterson layout: podcast_post wordpress_id: 245 categories:
- Guest Co-Host
- Joe Ruppel
- Podcast tags:
- Action
- Adventure
- army
- asteroid
- buenos aires
- Casper Van Dien
- Christopher Peterson
- Denise Richards
- Dina Meyer
- drill instructor
- intelligence
- Jake Busey
- Lee Colbert
- liberation of prisoners
- moon
- Nieil Patrick Harriss
- Paul Verhoven
- Science Fiction
- soldiers
- space battle
- space marine
- space ship
- Thriller
- total destruction The Movie is a Satire of the Book
Heinlein wrote what amounted to military propaganda. Picture Heinlein as the teacher with the missing arm.
Verhoven Dislikes Militarism and Fascism
Not a surprise for someone who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland. He thought the book was disgusting and wouldn’t finish reading it - had someone else tell him what happened.
Society at Constant War
Propaganda. Othering. Resources all in to the military-industrial complex. Militarism. Fascism.
Insectoid Aliens and Intelligence
Hive minds. Brain straws. Pheromone communication. Intelligent bugs. Higher-oxygen atmosphere.
Future Tech
Exo-suits, insterstellar travel, shooting projectiles across the galaxy. Drones? Where are the drones?
Gender Equality
Exo-suits, from the book, would close the gap for war purposes. Co-ed showers. Norway and Israeli conscripting women.
- Starship Troopers - by Robert Heinlein: iTunesAmazon
- The Commonwealth Saga - by Peter F Hamilton: iTunesAmazon
- World War II Propaganda Cartoons: Walt Disney: On the Front LinesLooney Toons Assorted Propaganda Cartoons
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The Script Started Out Much Different
What began as a science fiction version of an Agatha Christie mystery grew into a Will Smith blockbuster. And then the studio acquired the rights to Asimov.
The Three Laws
- Law Zero: Robots must not harm humanity.
- Law One: Robots cannot harm a human.
- Law Two: Robots must obey humans unless it conflicts with 1
- Law Three: Rzobots must avoid harm to themselves except where it conflicts with 2 or 3
Reasoning Around the Three Laws
Wouldn’t want any rogue states or terrorist groups getting their hands on a VIKI. VIKI reasons her way around the laws.
Tests For Intelligence
Art? Emotions? People always moving the goalposts. Domain-specific masteries.
Robot Workers
Taking our jerbs. Amazing Amazon warehouse robots. Teachers. Service industry. Creative work the most protected, for now. How to handle the fallout from the robot worker class? Guaranteed minimum income experiment in Holland.
- Google Deep Dreaming: Blog postMake your own
- I, Robot by Isaac Asimov: iTunesAmazon
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - by Nick Bostrom: iTunesAmazon
- Our Final Invention - by James Barrat: iTunesAmazon
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Lone genius inventor
The myth. Thomas Edison. Google. Boss guy taking credit. Standing on the shoulders of giants. Could the open source movement make great breakthroughs possible for small groups? Didn’t it already?
Turing Test
Commonly misunderstood. But the intelligence in this movie is way past that anyway. Testing for theory of mind might be the right track for the future.
Personification of AI
Being a cute, vulnerable girl AI goes a long way. Uncanny valley. Sexual attraction to non-human humanoid intelligences.
AI Danger
Fast/slow takeoff. AI will look back on us like pre-Sapiens fossils. It is not difficult to “escape the box.” If a person can do it, so can a superintelligence.
Machine Learning/Data Collection
Google might be the biggest and most successful AI project in the world. Phone spying. Black-box neural networks. Algorithmic complexity.
AI Ethics
Is it immoral to create an AI and not let it be free? “Do you have someone testing you who could turn you off?” Romantic interest better than morals? Does Nathan consider how he is treating the AIs? God complex. Baghavad Gita. The end of humanity. AI arms race.
[spoiler title=’Spoiler Notes’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’]Section Did Ava leave Caleb to die? Did she do it purposely? What will her next move be?[/spoiler]
- Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies - by Nick Bostrom: iTunesAmazon
- Our Final Invention - by James Barrat: iTunesAmazon
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Movies with strict limitations in cast and location
Love these! Moon is a good one, seriously only one human actor present. Other pleasing examples include Buried with Ryan Reynolds, The Man From Earth, 12 Angry Men is the greatest.
Isolation
Humans need other humans. Our own introversion. Solitary confinement is torture. Having the light at the end of the tunnel.
Gerty
Love the robot design. Practical to the extreme. He has a cupholder! The name means nothing. LOVE the smiley interface. Hal 9000 references.
Space Business
Multinational mega corporation with government ties. Bottom line is all that matters. The economics of evil and helium-3 mining. Exploitative labor practices. Helium 3 science.
[spoiler title=’Spoiler Notes’ style=’default’ collapse_link=’true’] Cloning
How would you feel to be a clone? To be an original who is cloned? A clone of you, even in adult form with implanted memories, is not “you” anymore once the copy is made. Could you work together with your clone?[/spoiler]
- Michel Siffre:
- The Island: iTunesAmazon
- 2001: A Space Odyssey: iTunesAmazon
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Wesley Snipes, irl criminal, fights Sylvester Stallone in the future while wearing hammer pants and gaudy earrings. Future sci-fi hijinx ensue.
Criminal Rehabilitation
Rehab or punishment? Synaptic suggestion for true rehabilitation? The time needed for the rehab process in the film. Cryogenic freezing. Stallone says he was awake, probably wasn’t. Better than prison. What if evil dictators had this technology?
Implantable Skills
Huge benefits. Whoah, I know kung fu. Free will. No need for college, just plug in. But who will be the lower class?
Nonviolence
Unreasonable to have a pacifistic society in a world with self-interested human actors? Silliness. Stagnation of martial skills.
Thought Policing
Anything not good for you is bad, hence illegal. Fluid transfer illegal. Can humanity move beyond sex? Maybe after the singularity. Should we even call it humanity at that point?
Future Tech
Communications technology prescience. Video calls on tablets. Self driving cars. Stallone is a curmudgeonly caveman. Cryogenics. Sewer maintenance. No internet? The three sea shells mystery, solved.
- Futurama:
- The Lost Fleet Books by Jack Campbell:
- Rambo:
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Quotes
Cale: “Everyday I wake up and it’s still the present. The same grimy, boring present. I don’t think this “future” thing of yours exists. “ How mundane the miracles of technology seem once they become ubiquitous. Wikipedia. Butt-washing machines. Korso: “That the human race is outta gas. It’s circling the drain. It’s finished! The only thing that matters is grabbing whatcha can before somebody else beats ya to it.” The desperation of desperate people in desperate times. FYGM, rational self-interest. Sci-fi’s common dichotomy between high and low life with high tech.
Director
Donald Bluth directed. also made Dragon’s Lair, Space Ace video games. And the movies An American Tale and The Land Before Time. Fox Animation Studios closed after Titan did badly in theaters.
CG/2D
Space is beautiful in CG. Christopher loves the 2d hand-drawn cell animation on top of CG environments. 2.5d, perhaps.
90s
The music of the 90s. 90s fashion. Mat Damon’s hair. Powerman 5000. Spaceship repair montage.
Alien Creatures
Cochroach chef was almost Jar Jar Binks. Straight-up murder in a cartoon surprised us. Alien kangaroo person’s hundred-jointed legs are of questionable utility. Energy beings made less than enough sense.
Low Human Population
Humanity was down to 10,000 people millennia ago, that was close. Now here they are spread out across space. Space racism.
Titan Device
Like Norwegian Seed Vault, but in space. Sort of. Adam and Eve. New Earth or Planet Bob. Joss Whedon.
- Paperman: iTunesAmazon
- Paperman and the Future of 2D Animation:
- Dragon's Lair: iTunes App StoreGoogle Play Store
- The Land Before Time:
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