Decipher SciFi

Jerome Bixby’s final, lifelong work. A bittorrent success story. The Man From Earth: The Series

A great mechanism for great conversation: a collection of domain experts exploring hypotheticals.

Biological differences. Geography. Proto human language.

Plasticity. Long term memories. Retrospective fill-ins. Meta-memory.

Regeneration. Disease. Scarring and cancer.

Living through humanity’s violent past. Adjusting to the current morality. Old fashioned ways.

Micromorts. Judging risk and how to live life when you’re immortal.

Running for President of the USA as an atheist and a transhumanist.

Kurzweil. Vernor Vinge. The post-work economy. Luddites and progress.

Uploading the human mind. Will people try to convert the first real artificial super intelligence?

Improving humanity through technology. Medicine. Life extension and immortality. The Transhumanist Wager. The power of love.

More Kip Thorne. Wormholes. Detecting gravitational anomalies.

Einstein. Train rides. Relativity. Frames of reference. Frame dragging. Time as an expendable resource.

Water planet is the stuff of Christopher’s nightmares.  Frozen clouds!

Abstraction of extra dimensions into fewer. Tesseracts. Carl Sagan’s genius powers of explanation.

Predestination paradox? Self-consistent single timelines.

Multidimensional beings and the power of love. Social utility and bonding, etc.

O’Niell cylinders. Another call-in from Liam Ginty of Voices From L5.

Kip Thorne does movie science again. Carl Sagan’s Contact. Mathew McConaughey plays two opposing roles.

Monocultures. Blight. We talk about anthropogenic climate change even though it isn’t mentioned in the film. Reduced population. Governments.

Scientific mindset. Humanity’s will to expand. Good science parenting.

TARS. 2001. Humor settings and the best robot locomotion.

Areas needing a lot of progress to lead to the world of Surrogates: robotics, materials science, network bandwidth and latency, human-machine neural interfaces, legality and ethics.

Violent crime nearly nonexistent, productivity, pseudonymity, anonymity, merito cracy. Level playing field for people with disabilties. Soldiering by proxy.

The loss of it. The resistance.  Surprisingly bad solutions.

Prop design. AI language understanding. Super strength and a matter replicator. Bad reactions to conflicting orders. Like a mechanical calculator dividing by zero!

He’s totally Zod! Philology. Engineering. Dangerous tech designs.

Cutting edge sexiness in the 50s. Innocent virgins. Blaming the victim. To the captain go the spoils. The deleted scenes that explain the animal behaviour:

Best attempts at judging Krell biology from their technology and architecture. Their “plastic educator.” Deciphering their language. Using alien Wikipedia on microfilm. Vannevar Bush’s Memex. The alien arithmetic problem.

A comparison of scuttling procedures in Alien and Forbidden Planet. Speculation about Krell hearing and sight frequencies.

Short answer: yeah, sure. Featuring a voice clip from Liam Ginty, space nerd.

CSI bullet reconstructions. The trappings of science.

All kinds. The skyhook.

Prerequisite technologies. Zero day vulnerabilities and phone hacking. Distributed computing to combine the massive data. Google’s Project Tango.

Batman and his enemies in the film.

90s, Leeloo’s thermal tape, awesome hair.

Space turtles, space orcs, space squids, space humans. Archeology and ancient mythology. Chamber design.

The possible nature of the evil space-mass. Zorg’s motivations. Broken window fallacy.

Overpopulation. Governance over interstellar distances. Real-time FTL space comms. Space wizards. Space borders.

3d printing skeletons. Genetic design and genetic data storage.

Sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic. Good and bad places to smuggle 20 pounds of stone. “Space opera.” Impossible series of vocal notes. Saved by love, or something.

No refuge! Except for all the different refuge options. Harvesting the planet’s core something something oh no it’s collapsing!

On Krypton at least. Sure, he sounded a little bit like Hitler, but look what happened when they didn’t listen to him - no more Krypton! And then

They seem to put some serious resources into their criminal rehab system that barely gets used. Mundane black hole tech. Dildo butt plug space ships.

Kal first natural birth in centuries. Clearly Kryptonians were multistellar once upon a time. Wonder what happened.

Lessons in how not to handle a kid having a panic attack. Humans actually do pretty well adapting to new sensory input. Clark’s compensation and self control.

Disagreement over the exact function of Kryptonian power armor and the nature of the yellow sun/superpower relationship.

Russel Crowe hologram simulation. So the Kryptonians reached the singularity basically, but don’t seem to be impressed enough.

Super strength, super neck bones, super despondent military leaders with nothing to protect.

Christopher loved his direction in this movie. “Twists.”  Appears in all his own films.

Crop circle hoaxes. Not a great method of communication.

People who think there is meaning, and people think the universe is deterministic and unconcerned with us as individuals. Benjamin Franklin’s pragmatism re religion. Our own perspective.

A list of unreasonable presumptions from the movie about alien life. Recon forces. Encryption. Spoilers.