Decipher SciFi

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:

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 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.

For once in space-scale scifi: drones! The levels of cost and complexity when designing craft to safely transport squishy humanoids. Galaga!

Hexagons! And what they reveal about interstellar travel in this universe. Space straws.

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 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.

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 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.

Dimensions and physics and moving through the invisible dimension of time.

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.

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.

Human evolution and selective pressures. Humans as cattle. Inefficiency in turning sunlight into steak. Maintaining 19th-century English over millennia.

Single-timeline self-consistency. Time travel victory strategies.

What books would you bring with you to repair future society?

Weenas

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!

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.

Both before and after earth enters nuclear winter. Water, air, hydrocarbons and where to find them.

Freedom vs keeping everyone from dying. Reproduction policies. Simulations for generation ships - maintaining sufficient genetic diversity through selection and control of reproduction.

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.

The 7:10 rule. Human civilization vs survival of the human animal. Nuclear fallout and nuclear winter. Types of radiation and radiation cookie puzzles.

Ancient Roman artillery (ps we said “scorpio” but meant “ballista,” whoops). Bioluminescence in a forest.

About the different releases and how very bad voiceovers can be. But tl;dr: watch the “Final Cut” for sure always.

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.

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?

And cinematography. What a beautiful movie! Practical effects and things that age well from the 80s.

Detection. Genetic design. Testing for replicants with bullets like testing a witch with drowning.

Why design your androids to be so human? Designing anthropomorphized androids to operate with human tools in a human environment.

A new theory for how replicants work. Terminological issues. Maybe they shouldn’t be called “androids?”

The control problem and cellular kill switches.

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.

“Android” brain production analogy with CPU production methods.

Memories providing the context that makes up our selves. Looking for nipples.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.

Parasitoid developments. Design vs natural selection. Indiscriminate resource consumption.

These guys made some assumptions and ran with them. Mouth-mouth saw-saws and their use in chestbursting.

The Real World, reality TV, etc… and then The Truman Show. Thank the writers strikes and the economics of production sans writers.

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.

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.

And our own plans for how to sell out. Thoughts on “Gorilla” marketing.

Colbert’s mustache woes. Delusions of grandeur over time. This guy’s really interesting personal story of his experience with “the Truman Show Delusion.”

How would you know if it were you? Occam’s razor. Glitches in the matrix. Plato’s Cave.

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”

Damn teenagers being irresponsible, endangering others and themselves and whatnot. But then they get superpowers so I guess it’s cool.

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.

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.

10,000 nukes. Calculating the gold tonnage needed to create a Goldar. Recovering splattered riches. Places to find Goldar-sized gold deposits.

Combat strategy. Our best Zord ever idea: MANTIS SHRIMP.

It’s basically Octo Dad, Or QWOP.

The interpretations of quantum physics that gives Rick & Morty the “multiverse.” Probabilities and determinism.

Shringer’s thought experient, initially a criticism of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics cum go-to example.

Organizing and labeling universes. The “central finite curve.”

Rules-lawyering with a genie, again. Elon Musk vs Mark Zuckerberg. Kevin Kelly’s take. Keeping them in the box.

Energy efficiency in multiverse batteries. Creating universes. the Kardashev scale.

Perpetual storms. Jupiter’s storm and other non-Kongish Jupiter appreciation.

Early spy satellites. Stability-spins and film-return techniques.

“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.

King Kong size inconsistencies over time and even within films. Godzilla comparisons.

Gorillas! When herbivores have sharp fangs. The economics of displays of aggression instead of fighting.

Pygmification of island species irl. Limitations on resources. Keystone species in ecosystems.

Venomous creatures and their prevalence in warmer climes. Why Do Venomous Animals Live In Warm Climates?

And how this relates to King Kong..? Was the flail a ‘real’ weapon?

Big. Tall. How they can be good, and how this one is bad.

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.

Reclaimed food waste? OR… reclaiming synthetic food from human waste. Unjustified psychological aversions.

“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

Awesome bang-for-buck robot design. Chris adds “Warbot head model” to his list of things he needs even more than air.

The practical impossibility of incubating neurologically-adult humans. Babies in sacks and the benefits thereof.

LAWWWWWWW