Decipher SciFi

Amazon’s practice of putting out a pile of different pilots and letting the cream rise via actual user data.

Environmental collapse. Precipitous economic drop, at least locally. Population collapse maybe?

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.

The role of a man of God on a space station where resources are scarce and engineers are in high demand.

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.

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.

Hydroponics. Aeroponics. Lower energy and water requirements, fine control of variables. Haley Joel is our Mark Watney botanist.

Ala Armageddon? Mundane explanations, Occam’s Razor, and magnets. Or supernatural. We’ll see!

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. :)

What could be going on on this world and what we expect to actually happen. Solaris!

Just a warning: we really think you should watch this before listening to the episode. It’s so good!

Taking advantage of human intuition. Taking advantage of our sensory aparatus. Inoculating against credulity and being fooled.

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.

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.

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”

The wonderment of the period. Misconceptions about the rivalry between Tesla and Edison.

The difference between simple and easy. Going over the top to solve a problem with technology where it isn’t necessary.

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.

Roots in Neuromancer etc. The rising Asian power of the period (Japan) and the mixing of western and eastern aesthetics.

And robot materials. Robot doctors. Metamaterials. Biorobots and cyborgs. Metal vs biomech. Blending in. Squishiness.

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.

Harry potter and Predator. First Predator vision, now predator invisisuit! Bending different frequencies of light around objects cloaked with metamaterials.

Memory “glitch” medication. Implanting learning. Wiping memories and adapting brains to new bodies.

The potential foreignness of artificial intelligence. The human brain as a meaning-making machine. Melding with the machines.

And dualism and the great questions raised in the original film.

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.

Zombies vs vampires and the origin of this story in the pre-zombie era. The book inspired Night of the Living Dead!

Viruses as workhorses to deliver medical payloads. Mutations, good and bad. Telomeres. Cancer, and the difficulties of biological immortality.

The post-apocalypse can be rough; it’s difficult for social creatures. Talking to dogs and mannequins. Videos by

What we observe presumably as the effects of their disease:

The twist being that Will Smith is the real monster! Depending on which ending you see.

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.

Crew of six. Highly trained to do space stuff and… study aliens? Crazy crane-arms.

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!

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?

In the movie Jake Gyllenhaal claims 473 days in space. That’s a lot! NASA Twin study.

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

Literal firewalls. Temperatures of incinerators. Could we burn it up by tossing it down into the atmosphere (hot!).

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.

Michael Bay blows things up. Layers of subtlety.

Just how very very large and unavoidably catastrophic the impactor in this movie is. Size vs Deep Impact. Size vs the dinosaur impactor.

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.

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.

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.

Lots of past impactors. Micrometeorites. Modern impacts like Chelyabinsk or Tunguska. Russia is basically a meteor magnet.

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. 😎

Nonsensical simulated gravity. Slingshot maneuvers. Steeling energy from moons and planets.

My guest appearance talking about this film on the podcast Voices From L5.

The movie mostly follows three incredible women in particular.

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.

Existential threats. Intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear submarines obviating much of the interest in basing nuclear weapons in space. Dangerous beeps and boops.

Yuri Gagarin was the first man in space. Alan Shepard. National and global heroes.

Flight testing is really unsafe. Redstone rockets.

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. :(

Human computers. Adding machines. Early programmable computers. (Justified) trust issues with these new machines. IBM 7090. Fortran.

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.

Appreciation for the people who pulled all of this stuff off, with special consideration for the women featured in the film.

What: Our first Q&A episode! Wherein we answer the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET!

Trolley problems. Types of immortality, especially “virtual” immortality. Consciousness uploading.

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.

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.

Messy. Defining what we mean by orbital. Flotsam and jetsam. Yet more references to Seveneves. Kinetic weaponry and orbital bombardment.

Not liking oneself from the outside. Antisocial magnets of the same polarity.

Ethical implications with trying to take in a creature of unknown intelligence as a pet. Bad pets: Dune sandworms,

Impactors. Protections offered by our moon, Jupiter, and other bodies in our solar system. The formation of our moon, with accretion disks and whatnot.

Doubleplus good.

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.

Chris was in town and at the last minute, we called together a Decipher SciFi meetup in NYC. Thanks for coming out, folks!

Long and short term threats to humanity. Anthropocene.  Courage and adventure and inspiration.

Frank Borman and space vomit and space diarrhea. Pre-flight and post-flight quarantine protocols.

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.

Around nine months to mars (maybe). Ion drives? Mundane solid rocket? Apparent weightlessness?

Remote Agent architecture. Robots prefabricating a Mars base before the humans arrive.

Weightlessness as an environmental “stressor.” Insemination in space. Fetal and childhood physical development.

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.

What would a native-born Martian human experience coming to Earth? Higher gravity. Heart enlargement. Blood pressure. Thin bones, low muscle mass.