Decipher SciFi

Over-the-top satire. Starship Troopers. Blood and guts in the late 80s/early 90s. Co-ed locker rooms and mocking commercial advertising interludes.

The “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative. Firing weapons from space, orbital platforms, and simulated gravity. Depictions of artificial gravity in media at the time.

Availability of cyborg components and social stratification. Different kinds of artificial hearts.

The economics of the brainwashed cyborg vs pure AI robot. Body transplants vs brain transplants.

Opto-neural processing enhancement. Reading visual memories from brain activity.

The resolution of the eye. Simple computer-vision and inadequacy of 1980s VHS tapes.

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)

“Stop, citizen, or I will rub my poop-hands on you.” Animal noises and postural intimidation tactics. Safety alarms.

Comparison with Arthur C Clarke’s three laws.

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 any technology: can it run Doom? Doom running on a Macbook Pro Touch Bar.

“3D holograms.” As a narrative/historical record playback device. As seen in: Prometheus. Difficulties versus augmented reality.

Measuring “life” as a life meter. Micromorts and actuarial considerations. Safety gear in health packs.

Tapping into unlimited energy; who could resist?

Turing tests. Regrets. “Absolute zero” cooling systems and marketing speak. Backups analagous to DNA cloning.

Body transplants vs brain transplants. Where does the self reside? Cyborg geniuses. Life goals.

RIP AND TEAR

A fun guy lol ?

Fungus zombies! Similarities to The Last of Us. Surprise that we’re not completely tired of zombies. Pandemic vs epidemic.

Mycelium, hyphae, fruiting bodies. Spores! “All mushrooms are edible. Some only once.”

Fungi playing Surgeon Simulator with human bodies.

Hunting by smell. Covering scents. Smelling slow and fast. The power of Axe Body spray. The power of chemical warfare. How “smells” work.

Ophiocordyceps unilateralis! The real fungus on which the zombie fungus is based. The rundown of its lifecycle. Biting the leaf. Chemical instructions controlling behaviour.

The difference in arthtropod and human circulatory and nervous systems. How to best spread fungal infections between humans.

Parasites forcing their hosts to act in their interests. Mushroom towers. The rise of homo boletus. Coming around on anthropocentrism.

Do you want a cat?

Aircraft shielding. Impressing upon humanity the futility of resistance.

Alien diplomatic moneyball.

Flawless colloquial earth languages. Cultural context. How to manipulate apes. Benevolent alien dictatorship.

Approaching utopia removing incentives for innovation. Alien limits on research. “The stars were not meant for man.”

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. :/

Directed evolution at a scale of tens to thousands of years.

This part is too spoilery for this page

Not too much to ask, really. We could have had a worse run.

The idea that the biosphere self-regulates to support life. Does it hold up?

Sim cards. Better ways to select the humans that will survive. Minimum populations.

Sword legs! Cleaving humans not just through but vertically.

Butts! And their utility for distance running. Hugh Herr and awesome climbing feet.

Versus virtual reality. Physical positioning and orientation fudging in virtual and augmented reality shared spaces. Rainbows End. HoloLens.

It’s so good! Also: long shots, real or otherwise.

SIM card splodeyheads. Transcranial direct current stimulation. To cull, or not to cull.

Why not dump all of our nuclear waste there? Shedding orbital velocity. Eros the magic space potato.

Our lack of understanding irl of whether humans can conceive and gestate and grow in low or microgravity. Centrifugal artificial gravity.

Pulling Gs. Human limits.

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:

Fragility of interconnected systems at small scale. Radiation. Living inside a big rock.

Venus sucks. Mostly. On the surface, at least. Soviet Venus missions. Turning Venus into a spaceship.

Harvesting and limiting solar exposure in different parts of the solar system. Relative solar intensity.

Energy usage and biclops lasereyes.

The old wive’s tale of dental fillings picking up terrestrial radio signals. Satellite military communications frequencies.

Quantum and DNA computing. Synesthesia. Recognizing that we are all synesthetes within the bounds of “normal” human brain operations.

Extra- super- ultra-dimensionality. Flatland again.

“Beings of light” and why this might be the most reasonable example of the trope. The world on the other side.

This is Miles’ favorite. Chris doesn’t generally love Miyazaki but really really loves Totoro.

Processing human-caused catastrophe. We previously explored this in our Godzilla episode with Miles. Miyazaki was inspired by Minamata disease.

irl Nausicaa glider!

The ways in which humanity is worse than poison. Thriving of wildlife in our absence. Predators.

Colloquial definitions versus recognition that we are part of nature and not really separate from it.

Nuclear power safety and the negative effects of fossil fuels. Recognizing the relative safeness and harm. Being responsible with our technology.

Of knowledge and technology over epochal time. Infrastructure and production. The scientific method as essential technology.

A story of love for Prometheus with recognition of its faults. Surprisingly high tomato ratings. So much stuff to think about?

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.

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.

Yoked as hell. Albinos with allopecia.

List of cultures visited. Radiocarbon dating (carbon-14). Uranium dating. Informational density.

Constellations and hemispheres and directions to solar systems.

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.

Parasites. Superparasites, Tearing the umbilical cord. Placenta.

Because we really enjoyed this movie.

A human, a green humanoid, an enhanced raccoon, Drax, and a hypermobile hyperintelligent tree.

Cybernetic skeletons. Animal intelligence. Cognitive enhancement and different types of intelligence.

Kinda like a grey hulk. Putting our lack of comics expertise on display.

How plants work. Nitrogen from the air making 50% of tree biomass. Plant regeneration and communication.

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.

Chris Pratt’s cassette tapes. Batteries. Audio cassette technology. Wearing oxides and tape-stretching.