Decipher SciFi

Some things are more art than science sometimes.

“Space antennas” but what kind of signal would benefit from this design? X-Rays? Why would this not be better off in orbit? The structure sure looks a lot like a space elevator. Space elevators and geostationary orbital masses.

It’s hard to steer without sufficient atmospheric density. Felix Baumgartner’s jump “from space.”

Antimatter nonsense. Our increasing fragility in the face of an unlucky coronal mass ejection. Protecting infrastructure both inside and increasingly outside our atmosphere.

Moon surface settlements vs moon gateways vs embarking to The Moon from low Earth orbit. Awesome moon buggy chases. Pirates!

Communicating with and from Mars. Interplanetary distance and comms speed. Building settlements within Martian or Lunar lava tubes.

Finding the “edge” of our star system. Difference in concentration of high energy particles.

Looking for signs of life around other stars. Taking pictures of black holes. Planet-sized telescopes. The absurd distances from Earth to other stars. Vegemite in Australia. Absent of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Project Orion. Blowing up your spaceship because it doesn’t have a nuclear bomb-ready push plate.

MJ’s VPN advice. VPN advertising on YouTube.

How to build a whole city on mud. Transplanting alder forests from on some ground to under some other ground. Hard clay is worse than bedrock. Measuring a sinking city’s rate of subsidence with space-based radar and GPS. Climate change sure isn’t helping any. What value should we place on artifacts of human civilization? Losing UNESCO world heritage sites. The MOSE project. Climate change and rising sea levels. What will the world do?

Advanced holography with drones! Photoreal real-time rendering. LED walls. Projection mapping. Lasers in your eyes.

Inward and outward-facing smart glass technologies. Wearable ubiquity. Evolution of “smart glasses” from Google Glass to Echo Frames. Magic Leap? Bone conduction and having discrete interactions with your personal assistant.

Looking back after the culmination of all these threads in Endgame. Queen Amidala’s midichlorian magical umbrella.

Thor knowing All-Tongue, emitting pheromones, and doing the bee dance. The difficutly of universal language or language understanding. Finnishish conlanging. The cultural and linguistic juxtaposition between Scandinavia and Finland.

Astrology is bunkum nonsense gobbledegook. The miniscule and generally unimportant effects when bodies in space are “in alignment.”

Our difficulties with magical realism. Asgardian “Smagic.” Apparent technology levels and technology so advanced it looks like magic. Bringing swords and shields to a lasergun fight.

Dosing for war. Uppers are very popular. The Finnish soldier who was the “first documented case of a soldier over overdosing on methamphetamines during combat.”

“Gravity grenades.” The possibility of man-made miniature black holes.

“Viking burials” but not like you thought. Tumuli/barrows/kurgans. Horned helmets.

The best genre of Star Wars media? Brandishing yourself. Old west forced sack removal.

Werner Herzog’s surprising(?) praise. “Real filmmaking” in the wake of the prequel trilogies. Wooden green-screen acting vs sweet puppets and actual human beings. Unreal Engine LED walls and volumetric projection and camera tracking.

Star Wars as our new shared cultural mythology the world over. Concern about disney’s stewardship and the private ownership of our cultural heritage. Streamboat Willie entering The Commons.

Some past famous Mandalorians, this particular Mandalorian, and martial prowess. Mandalorian history and why the Mandalorians are the only ones who figured out how to fight the space wizards for some reason?

Pooping space. Weightless waste elimination can be tricky. Floating turds.

Cryostasis. Cryopreservation. Avoiding ice crystals. Replacing blood with “antifreeze”

Taking the most depressing angle on droid consciousness and freedom (or lack thereof). And then to make it worse: DRM!

Extra-long postnatal development. Big brains and incomplete gestation. Cuteness. Animatronics.

Elasmotherium. Whooly rhinos. Hiary…. eggs? Historical rhinos. Rhino evolution. Balut.

NASA’s irl de-contamination measures. Private space industry without apparent government oversight.

Some of the oldest things in our solar system and maybe the oldest things that we can reach. Leftovers from early solar system formation. The possibility of finding the precursors of life. Delineating between comets and asteroids. Fuzzy definitions. “Extinct” comets. Scales & tails.

Sending out of infected ice-balls and hoping someone notices. Like a tree! Just send your reproductive material everywhere and who cares who it lands on or gives allergies to.

Thinly-written villains. Narcissism. Poorly designed humans and “saving” humanity.

And magnets! The frequencies in which MRI machines are loudest, and the way that doesn’t line up with Venom’s sonic sensitivities. Resonance frequencies and alien “brown notes.”

Christopher’s surprise learning the distinction between the category of biological interactions that is symbiosis and its subcategories.

Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun!

Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always.

No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines.

Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot. Bio-aumentation. More than muscle! Nervous system response shortcuts.

Robot literally taking the guy’s job this time. Learning to work with the robots. Extended robot anxieties throughout the history of the Terminator franchise. Robots surveilling and monitoring our jobs and making it easy for Terminators to find us.

New Terminator! The Rev-9 taking the best bits of previous no-longer-canon sequels. Infiltrating and cracking wise.

Synet rebranded. AI built on human data and maybe no matter which platform becomes sentient it will come to similar conclusions and methods. Cyberwarfare platforms.

Becoming human. Understanding humanity. What happens to a Terminator after their mission is complete? Post-mission Terminators getting creative.

LPT: you can get pommes frites in Europe. Could Eiffel have been an agent? The history of the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel Tower’s science history. Cosmic rays. Wireless telepraphy (radio). Outliving its intended lifespan.

Which government agency should you be applying to in order to research alien stuff? Remembering the MiB is an NGO.

Increasing ability to track nearby space objects. Tracking objects in our solar system’s plane. The difficulty of tracking interstellar objects. Being a good space neighbor. Confirmed tracked interstellar objects. Failing to pronounce “ʻOumuamua.”

justin: dude

Danzig lives next door to me in l.a.

down the street

and he is the worst neighbor ever

justin: so he has this huge pile of bricks in his front yard

and the house looks like an evil pixar house

so anyway, his neighbor was like, “dude, danzig your bringing property values down with these bricks in your yard.”

and danzig was pissed

so anyway, back and forth with his neighbor and danzig

and finally one day

i see danzig outside

in his front yard

and he’s hurling bricks into this drumpster and he’s screaming, “HERE I AM MOTHERFUCKER, JUST CLEANING UP MY FUCKING BRICKS BITCH!”

Just super loud

to no one in particular

for two hours

it was amazing

like, i couldn’t even think about other things

because it was so amazing

me: oh my god

this is amazing

justin: dude

it blew my mind

because it was danzig as just a really poor homeowner

Hacking satellites! Actually totally possible and has happened. Air Force satellites at DEFCON. DDoS in space. The possibilities for catastrophy in hacking things in space. The many ways an attacker could damage or destroy our space telescopes.

Blue giants! They’re rather large, and luminous. And hot. Capturing star energy. Kardashev scales.

The tendency of our minds to backfill missing information. Using neuralizers without providing a cover story is probably actually good enough, really.

Cross-galaxy teleportation macguffins. The Delta quadrant. Where are the Borg!?

The Kazon, aka less-good, less-organized Klingons. Were Klingons racist? Or the Ferengi? Or the Kazons?

The availability of water in star systems. Exoplanet surveys and water-rich gas giants.

Yay Janeway! Comparing with the original actress. Imagining a Star Trek/Too Many Cooks crossover.

The most incredible Star Trek technology of all. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%?

Galaxy Scale. “Quandrants” actually refer to “quarters of the galaxy” which blew Christopher’s mind slightly (like this guy). And here is a map. Putting speed limits on the universe.

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring some over-the-top colonial heroism, etc

The Patriot: heroism, invisible slavery, and cutting-edge chair technology

Awaking dormant giant monsters from within the Earth. Bio-acoustic signatures. Giant balloons! Tracking elephants by sound.

The Silurian hypothesis thought experiment, especially as part of our Atlantis coverage. The increasing disappearability of the details of civilization as they raise their technological level.

Moths: way better than butterflies! Echolocation defense mechanisms. Corresponding bat appreciation in our A Quiet Place episode. Echolocation signal jamming vs. aural camouflage. Giant moths and dedication to reproduction so complete that they will never once eat as an adult and devote all of their stored energy to reproduction. How we harvest silk from moths.

Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art.