Decipher SciFi

Analogy with developments in head transplantation. Consciousness uploading. Preservation of identity. Conflict of human immortality with religion.

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.

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. ?

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.

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.

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.

Nathan Anderson

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.

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.

The one with the robot thing. Comparison with the new SpotMini.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Our second Q&A episode, wherein we ask our friends to help us answer the the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!

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.

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.

Answerer: Daniel James Barker

Physics! Black holes. Neutron stars. Gravity. Collapse.

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.

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.

Closest star systems to Earth. Sudden outbursts of James Cameron appreciation. Alpha Centauri {A,B}, Proxima Centauri. Sub-light space travel.

Continuation of consciousness. Perceptions of meatsackness.

Adaptive definitions of moons and planets. Learning about moons aside from our own. Disney World’s Pandora.

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.

Megafauna and megaflora and lower gravity. Hexapodality.

Na’vi anatomy. Avatar differences, e.g. 5 fingers, eyebrows. Boobs? Dr. Manhattan.

Neural networks. Brain-machine interface vs brain-everything interface. Na’vi adaptability to remote neural control. Data-transfer

Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors! Floating “mountains.”

Naval analogies and a callback to a similar discussion in our Valerian episode. Magnetic (fused) torpedoes!

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 shouldn’t make noise, because there isn’t (noise). Not across the near-vacuum, at least. Production of light and shrapnel. Starbursts!

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.

Hydrofoils cum “alasofoils.” Flight engineering and “dragging sticks.”

“Salthoth.” “Hey, it’s salt.”  How salt flats form on earth. Salt rising and drying from seasonal flooding. Salt-friendly bacteria and weird oxidation.

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.

Scifi adventure throwback. Corporations are always evil. Ambition in scope of indie scifi.

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.”

The apparent necessity of slave labour. Western expansion analogies. Naval analogies. Australian analogies. Hoping that space settlement becomes mundane.

“Raggeds.” Reverse mode on Dr. Moreau. Echoes of evil ninja turtles and goombas. Send the gorillas to get the mongoose.

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.

[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.

Character elimination and happy fairy tale endings.

Is racism the right word? Hate and discrimination against replicants. Replicant slavery.

Whatever that means. But in the meantime, let’s eat some grubs okay? The benefits of cricket and grub farming. Necessity breeds insects.

Hey these are neat

Pooped out of the goo shoot. Like real life. And then replicants replicating themselves.

Thank you creepy Jared Leto. Tyrell’s original mission versus the cohesive effort lead by creepy Leto.

Narrow v general artificial intelligence. Awesome magic projector technology.

DNA or other biological data storage. Holographic storage.

Contemporary space station size comparisons. ISS transformation over time.

Bipedalism. Bilateral symmetry. The assumption of humanoid structure in the “world.” Duck-billed Ferengi information brokers and neurological RAID modes.

“Critical mass.” Vital stats. Population, demographics. Modular growth over time. Racial job specialization.

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.”

Beach-dwelling N’avi (with no tails). Math and science. Intellectual ability and exaptation of base rational abilities to science and math.

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.