Decipher Scifi : The Show About How And Why

Science…?! Some things are more art than science sometimes. Structures anchored to geostationary orbit “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. Falling from space […] The post Ad Astra: nuclear spaceships, the edge of the solar system, and space monkeys appeared first on Decipher SciFi.

VPNs MJ’s VPN advice. VPN advertising on YouTube. Venice 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? VFX Advanced holography with drones! Photoreal real-time rendering. LED walls. Projection mapping. Lasers in your eyes. Smart glasses 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. This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN by Tom Scott: YouTube Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse: particle colliders, art, and magne

Background Looking back after the culmination of all these threads in Endgame. Queen Amidala’s midichlorian magical umbrella. Language 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. Alignment of worlds Astrology is bunkum nonsense gobbledegook. The miniscule and generally unimportant effects when bodies in space are “in alignment.” “Magic” 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. Battle stimulation 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.” Black holes etc “Gravity grenades.” The possibility of man-made miniature black holes. Vikings “Viking buri

Western The best genre of Star Wars media? Brandishing yourself. Old west forced sack removal. “Real filmmaking” 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. Our new mythology 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. Mandalorians 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? Poop! Pooping space. Weightless waste elimination can be tricky. Floating turds. Freezing in carbonite Cryostasis. Cryopreservation. Avoiding ice crystals. Replacing blood with “antifreeze” Robo slavery Taking the most dep

Decontamination protocols NASA’s irl de-contamination measures. Private space industry without apparent government oversight. Comets 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. Von Neumann Goo 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. Evil Jeff Bezos Thinly-written villains. Narcissism. Poorly designed humans and “saving” humanity. Sound 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.” Symbiosis Christopher’s surprise learning the distinction between the category of biological interactions

Hey so we covered the entirety of the Terminator series in the past few months and it was really fun! The Terminator: bootstrapping, machine uprising, and time traveling meatballs w/ Joe Ruppel Terminator 2: advanced puppetry, Skynet, and liquid nitrogen handling w/ Joe Ruppel Terminator 3 Rise of the Machines: hacking cars and supercomputing Skynet FLOPS w/ Joe Ruppel Terminator Salvation: body donation, realistic time travel, and the legal shmegal defense w/ Joe Ruppel Terminator Genisys: surprise anthologies & time travel spaghetti w/ Joe Ruppel Meta Hooray! Another legit good Terminator sequel! Nutso revenue requirements. Linda Hamilton and Arnold physique maintenance. Arnold appreciation as always. Opener No spoilers but wow what a way to begin. CG face replacements. Terminator battle plans. More alternate timelines. Human upgrades Grace. Imposing! “Design” considerations. Relying on human tissues. Comparing and contrasting with the Terminator Salvation’s Sam Worthingtonbot.

Eiffel 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. Aliens Which government agency should you be applying to in order to research alien stuff? Remembering the MiB is an NGO. Space tracking 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.” A Danzig tale 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

Setup Cross-galaxy teleportation macguffins. The Delta quadrant. Where are the Borg!? Species The Kazon, aka less-good, less-organized Klingons. Were Klingons racist? Or the Ferengi? Or the Kazons? Water The availability of water in star systems. Exoplanet surveys and water-rich gas giants. Voyager Yay Janeway! Comparing with the original actress. Imagining a Star Trek/Too Many Cooks crossover. Replicators and teleporters The most incredible Star Trek technology of all. Teleporter failure rates: very low, or actually 100%? Scales 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 Orville: iTunesAmazonHulu Support the show!

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 Support the show!

Titans Awaking dormant giant monsters from within the Earth. Bio-acoustic signatures. Giant balloons! Tracking elephants by sound. Pre-civilization civilizations 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 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. Creature combos Pterosaur-bird monster Rhodan. Inane pedantry. Pterasaurs vs dinosaurs! Freedom at the cutting creative edge of paleontological art. Deep Learning With The Elephants by Planet Money: NPR.org Godzilla: postwar Japan, science, and regrets w/

The curse of the Terminator Why do all these production companies go under after making these always-profitable Terminator movies? VFX Twelve months to make a fake Arnold. Time travel Time travel but, like, way more confusing. And possibly nonsensical. Five movie in and we FINALLY we see a time machine. Operation Cronos. Trying to count timelines and getting very confused because they broke everything. Skynet Skynet in the government shadows vs Silicon Valley public launch. UbiquityOS. Engineering to let the AI our of the box. The dawn of “apps” and how it was important. “Genisys does what Nintendon’t.” Skynet takeoff scenario, altered yet again. Terminators A review of the T-3000 and T-5000. Doctor Who. Bio-nanite replacement. Ship of Biorobo Theseus: is the T-3000 still the same person as it was? Kyle Reese Old Nikes! Scrappy Kyle vs jacked Kyle. David vs Goliath. Who wants to go do my mom John Connor Arnold build_time_machine.bat . Time traveling at 1x speed. Various

The taste of another episode of Decipher History! Featuring gangs fights in 19th century New York, etc. On Decipher History: Gangs of New York: history of The Five Points, immigration, and archaic criminal lingo Support the show!

Is this a sequel? A prequel? Our progress in covering the entire Terminator series. The possibility of the future war trilogy, dashed. Body donation Donating your body to science. Body donation vs organ donation. Size and BMI standards. Medical education via cadaver. “Body brokers.” Why do blast testing on bodies? Are we learning to cure “acute dynamitism?” Lethal injection How to make a body unsuitable for whole-body donation. Donating to Terminator-science. Executions as disincentive. The role of the medieval executioner. How the guillotine was an early example of the robots taking our jerbs. Execution showmanship. The Ultimate Warrior was nuts. Time travel The only sorta realistic time travel in the whole Terminator series: pausing your exiistence and turning back on in the future! The nature of self, and the “legal schmegal” defense. Terminators The most human Terminator yet? Robocop vs Wolverine? Head transplant or body transplant? Terminator production volume and just-in-time delivery. 

Species Wow there some really good movies in 1995! Geiger alien designs. Not “Alien,” but “alien.” This time, with nipples. Ptosis Forrest Whitaker. Chris’s history of eyelid laziness variability. Being either a dolphin or a flamingo. Eye farts? The Arecibo Message The limited utility of sending messages to aliens 25,000 light years away. The Arecibo Message sent in 1974 toward the M13 globular cluster. A cluster containiner millions of stars. 1679 bits: not a lot of bits! A colorized visualization of the 'Arecibo Message' sent in 1974 Arne Nordmann CC-BY-3.0 Bio-executable Von Neumann machines Von Neumann trolls. Self-assembling bootstrapping biological systems. What if DNA is very common across life in the universe? Containment How to combine biological containment and prisoner containment. Lots of “fire” buttons. Biocontainment protocols. Integrating what we’ve learned from prison-escape movies. Considering the Magneto-vault. Cocoons

Meta James Cameron blank checks and record-breaking budgets and payouts. Arnold Getting re-jacked to your original shape at 56 years old. Screening your movie at Saddam’s palace. Terminators The broadness of the term “nanotechnology.” Upgrading your liquid-metal nanotechss32 robots. Data Collection Placing this movie in the data collection timeline: after the dawn of big data digital government spying, but before smartphones when we willingly began to give up all the data. But there’s a Terminator movie for that too! Hacking cars Direct linkages in car systems. Driving by-wire. Hacking automobile computer systems. Wired hacking and modern wireless car hacks. Technology progression Finally, a Terminator in the age of the ubiquitous cell phone! Still not smartphones yet, but it’s a start! Hydrogen fuel cell failure modes and the danger of tiny hydrogen bombs. MRI dangers. Skynet AI escape scenarios. Supercomputing at “60 teraFLOPS” and wth is a “teraFLOPS” anyway? Computing power  meas

A small taste of our new episode of Decipher History to remind you to subscribe to the new show. This week featuring our new friend Isaac Meyer from The History of Japan Podcast! Support the show!

Weirdly prescient and quietly influential AI portrayal in film. Recognizing 2001: A Space Odyssey. Command and control. Unintended consequences. Personal movie connections and impact decades before Bostrom’s Superintelligence. Game of Thrones??? 70s scifi cynicism. Benevolent AI dictator The Cold War and looming climate catastrophe. What are Colossus’ goals? What goals does it think it has? AI Portrayal Period conceptions of computing as centralized and institutional. Computing in the era of the first moon landing. The “big board.” Computer scientists a la Mad Men. Colossus as a Golem story. How to take over the world with no subterfuge or tact. Gendering AI. Realism Portrayal of telecommunications literally before the invention of networking. Packet switching was first implemented after the novel was written and only just before the film! Computer communication syntax. Computing language. Computer interfaces and code checking. Getting weird The books get weird. And weirder! How sometimes bo

People Love and appreciation for the humans involved. James Cameron is amazing. Arnold, always our favorite. Linda Hamilton playing one of the most iconic characters in film. Robert Patrick doing the robot. James Cameron doing everything himself. VFX VFX and CG and the high shot counts for the time. The expense of CG and the appropriate use thereof. Budgets. Incredible animatronix! The value of high-quality practical FX from the 90s and how they hold up. Ict hot stuntaz Motorcycle jumping. Harley’s Fat Boy. Jumping into helicopters. Technology The Terminator series as a window into our concerns over technology in different decades. Computing miniaturization. Quantum stuff. Read-only Terminator modes, IRQ switching, and ro cassettes. Terminators Terminator models and designs. Possible Billy Idol T-1000, or Kyle Reese-bots. T-1000 shiny grey goo nanite flow robot. Liquid Nitrogen Pork chop sandwiches! Inert gas asphyxiation. Steam barriers, sugar work, and dipping your hand into hot lead.

Colliders Particle collider scales. Increasing energies. Finding the Higgs Boson. Different ways of smashing things. Straight colliders, ring colliders, and rings so large they kinda seem straight at a certain scale. Adrian’s new area of expertise. “Natural experiments” in particle physics. Imagining future colliders and subsequent discoveries. Confirmation of supersymmetry. Probing the edges of the standard model. Collider danger Stragelets and black holes and other things that won’t happen. Anatoli Burgorski taking a load in the eye. Magnetic monopoles and winning “Magnetic Monopoly.” Art! OMG the art. Chromatic aberration. Offset printing errors. Smearing vs motion blur. Animating on “twos” or “threes” and the use of fluidity as a storytelling tool. Spider-ones Favorite Spiderman movie? Exhalation by Ted Chiang: iTunesAmazon Support the show!

People James Cameron’s first film! And Arnold is amazing! The possibility of casting O.J. Simpson as the T-100. Harlan Ellison lawsuit. Robots The thawing of the AI winter of the 70s. Robots finally showing up in our lives and in the workplace. Terminator bootstrapping. Robotics and machine learning. Skynet The possibility of AI becoming “self-aware” or “conscious” and whether we even know what those things really mean. Big data feeding skynet. Terminators Jacked-up and oiled beefcake “infiltration” models. Franco Columbu. Robotic Ahhhhhnold blending in. The “rule of cool.” Feeding and maintaining a terminator’s “living tissue.” Persistence of information The persistence of human knowledge after the nuclear apocalypse. The fragility of magnetic storage media. Storing your data under a mountain. The weakness of encryption over time. Time travel How to not sound crazy when telling people in the past that you’re from the future. Meatball time travel. Using the “living tissue” time travel ru