Decipher SciFi

New York city post WW3. Crime in the US in the early 80s.

The good old days when Presidents could be bald. Plane escape mechanisms. Parachutes vs ejection seats vs ejection pods.

Vaccinations by high-pressure jet. Finding out these are real-life. Polio vs Hepatitis.

Large wingspan, light body. The Twin Towers. Clever practical FX for wireframe nighttime navigation display. Comparing budgets with Tron.

Time projections. Cold fusion and hot fusion. Taking the shortest route and simply building a Dyson sphere. Waste production and failure modes.

Remote-controlled cockroaches. Engineering cyborg cats with tape and servos. Search and rescue rats. What counts as a cyborg? Insects with eyebrows.

Whirring servos and motors. Wearable technology and where to draw the line on cyborgs. The cyborg olympics. Determining the limits of human performance.

Mammalian heat regulation. Humans are the best distance runners AND car-pushers.

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.

But what is a penis anyway? Memory inhibition. Competitive eating. Binging and stomach elasticity. Competitive eating training.

Was it a success? Drugs make you a superhero.

Stealth and the economics of close-distance space combat. Ship designs for different combat settings. Space vs atmosphere travel. Underwater?

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.

Space horseshoe crabs. Sarlac antlions. Half-Life 2 interpretations. Antlion larvae.

The aliens as portrayed by Louis Gossett Jr. Alien physiology. Evolutionary body-heat dissipation adaptations. The spectrum of binocularity in Earth-life.

Time scales for change on the technological curve.

Hermaphroditism? Asexuality? Parthenogenesis? This pregnancy is a weird situation. One man and an alien baby.

Transporting slaves to remote mining colonies. Where are the robots? Possible Dune connections.

Early 80s VFX. So much rotoscoping. The dawn of computer generated graphics. Disney and art assets. Computational limitations creating art styles.

Hard drives! Huge ones.Huge mainframes. Pre-internet networks.

Sentient computer antagonists. Legal protections for artificial life. Chess as the soon-to-be-obliterated pinnacle of artificial intelligence.

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

Chakram! Old-school sharpened frisbee weapons of south Asia.

Accidentally creating cargo cults. Self-aware life in servitude. Responsibilities when creating intelligences.

Digitizing three-dimensional objects. Destructive and non-destructive methods. How we scan books. Brain uploading. Human Connectome Project.

Where did the Superman “S” as family symbol come from? Kryptonian Planetary OSHA. Retroreflective materials. Planet-‘sploding backstories. Shifting orbits. Tidal forces. Planetary superstructures.

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

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.

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.

Clever villainy. Megaton yields.

Superman already did the one real kind. Spinning the earth back and forth like a record.

❤️. Ex Machina.

Shark-gators. Flower-deer. Man-bear-mole-pig. Dr Manhattan-style animal transformations. Big blue tree phalluses.

Micro vs macro.

Plants.

Exponential understanding. Deciphering the puzzle of Earth life. Clams with human faces. Desctructive/transformative information processing. They’re Made Out of Meat

Boa constrictors in your gut. Tapeworm run amok. Gut bacterial colonies and fungus. Cordyceps zombie fungus a la The Girl With All the Gifts.

Interfacing with alien life. Different levels of understanding. Von Neumann machines.

Deciphering the ending without putting the major spoilage here in this page.

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.

Thanos breaks out the Excel spreadsheets. Productively employing the bottom trillionty billion around the galaxy. Ultimate utilitarianism.

Atmospheric pressure. Hypoxia.

Visualizing three-dimensional routes as two-dimensional on Earth-maps. Visualizing four-dimensional routes as three three physical dimensions plus time.

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.

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.

But it isn’t! It’s contrast-based! Toad vision feature detection. Jurassic Park confusion.

Nanotech. Programming nanobots to eat brains - or gloves!

Jumanji in space. Card-by-card science words.

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.

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.

Cryonic sleep and galactic travel. Teenager sleep schedules.

Weightlessness in orbit. Orbit is falling.

As per Hawking: you might not want to!

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

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.

IRL shooting stars. Rogue stars. Meteor shower disappointments.

Space maps. Star brightnesses and reference points. The ESA Gaia Project. Landing in glaciers. Glacier life cycles. Fjords! Callback to Seveneves.

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.

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?

General Grievous gets the thigh ground. Fueling your nether regions with gasoline. Power-saving mode in the murder module.

Giant redwood reproduction strategies. Living through wildfires. “Cleverness” in the unguided process of natural selection.

Westworld is some Disneyworld-level theme park logistics. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Westworld ticket prices.

The mythos. Cowboys shootin’ and rootin- tootin’. The time period. The expansion of settlement exceeding governmental reach and the perception of lawlessness.

Deep questions about consciousness and self and where they really really aren’t.

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.

Collections of very convincing modules, sans consciousness, vs AGI. In what way can a computer system “understand” language?

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.

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.

Coinage. Von Nuemann’s “self-replicating automata.”