Decipher Scifi : The Show About How And Why

Dystopia New York city post WW3. Crime in the US in the early 80s. Airplane failure recovery The good old days when Presidents could be bald. Plane escape mechanisms. Parachutes vs ejection seats vs ejection pods. Jet injectors Vaccinations by high-pressure jet. Finding out these are real-life. Polio vs Hepatitis. Gliders Large wingspan, light body. The Twin Towers. Clever practical FX for wireframe nighttime navigation display. Comparing budgets with Tron. Fusion Time projections. Cold fusion and hot fusion. Taking the shortest route and simply building a Dyson sphere. Waste production and failure modes. The Thing: antarctic explorers, extreme doctoring, and figuring out aliens w/ Cae & Ryan: Decipher SciFi Support the show!

Cyborgification Remote-controlled cockroaches. Engineering cyborg cats with tape and servos. Search and rescue rats. What counts as a cyborg? Insects with eyebrows. Non-cyborgification Whirring servos and motors. Wearable technology and where to draw the line on cyborgs. The cyborg olympics. Determining the limits of human performance. Thermoregulation Mammalian heat regulation. Humans are the best distance runners AND car-pushers. Pain Pain response and learning. Pain and athletic performance. A PSA about injecting things int your heart - you don’t want a hole there. The best places in your body to randomly put holes. Cyborg naiveté But what is a penis anyway? Memory inhibition. Competitive eating. Binging and stomach elasticity. Competitive eating training. Supersoldier Programs Was it a success? Drugs make you a superhero. Universal Soldier alternate ending: YouTube Support the show!

Old-school space dogfighting Stealth and the economics of close-distance space combat. Ship designs for different combat settings. Space vs atmosphere travel. Underwater? Alien planets Hostile, but really lucky to have breathable air and drinkable water. Storms. Periodic heavy meteor showers. Comet tails vs close planetary bodies for meteor shower material. Alien wildlife Space horseshoe crabs. Sarlac antlions. Half-Life 2 interpretations. Antlion larvae. Drac The aliens as portrayed by Louis Gossett Jr. Alien physiology. Evolutionary body-heat dissipation adaptations. The spectrum of binocularity in Earth-life. Space-faring civilization Time scales for change on the technological curve. Alien reproduction Hermaphroditism? Asexuality? Parthenogenesis? This pregnancy is a weird situation. One man and an alien baby. Interstellar enslavement economics Transporting slaves to remote mining colonies. Where are the robots? Possible Dune connections. Space Warfare by Isaac Art

Production Early 80s VFX. So much rotoscoping. The dawn of computer generated graphics. Disney and art assets. Computational limitations creating art styles. Late-70s computing Hard drives! Huge ones.Huge mainframes. Pre-internet networks. Anthropomorphised computing Sentient computer antagonists. Legal protections for artificial life. Chess as the soon-to-be-obliterated pinnacle of artificial intelligence. AI Takeovers Master Control program.Skynets. Conflicting interests between man and machine. AI villainy is different from human villainy. Good AI to compete with the bad ones. Maybe the only way to stop a bad A.I. with a nuclear arsenal is a good A.I. with a nuclear arsenal Death-frisbees Chakram! Old-school sharpened frisbee weapons of south Asia. Accidental godliness Accidentally creating cargo cults. Self-aware life in servitude. Responsibilities when creating intelligences. Digitization Digitizing three-dimensional objects. Destructive and non-destructive methods. How we sc

Krypton Where did the Superman “S” as family symbol come from? Kryptonian Planetary OSHA. Retroreflective materials. Planet-‘sploding backstories. Shifting orbits. Tidal forces. Planetary superstructures. Space baby Intergalactic space travel. Time dilation. Launching an intergalactic spaceship from your living room.Time dilation and relative experience of time. Hyper-intellectual aliens. Space baby temper tantrums. Space is big, but then the space between the less empty empty spaces are even… more empty. And there’s a lot of it. -Lee Colbert There’s only one thing that can go the speed of light and that’s… light -Christopher Peterson Heroes and villains by era Zod vs Luthor. Henchman. Old-school bad guys with actual bona-fide lairs. Christopher Reeve was so perfect as Superman. Henry Caville’s magically-perfect chestbeard. Super powers The history of Superman’s powers of flight. Hulk jumps! Kryptonian evolution. Superman’s resistance to cancer from x-rays. Alternative vision modes,

Alex Garland ❤️. Ex Machina. Abominable mutants Shark-gators. Flower-deer. Man-bear-mole-pig. Dr Manhattan-style animal transformations. Big blue tree phalluses. Horizontal gene transfer Micro vs macro. Continuous mutation Plants. The shimmer Exponential understanding. Deciphering the puzzle of Earth life. Clams with human faces. Desctructive/transformative information processing. They’re Made Out of Meat Micro-life in the shimmer Boa constrictors in your gut. Tapeworm run amok. Gut bacterial colonies and fungus. Cordyceps zombie fungus a la The Girl With All the Gifts. The Shimmerrer Interfacing with alien life. Different levels of understanding. Von Neumann machines. The ending Deciphering the ending without putting the major spoilage here in this page. The Girl With All the Gifts: parasitic fungi, speed of smell, and the end of humanity: Decipher SciFi Ex Machina: ai software, wetware, and the turing test: Decipher SciFi The Deadlie

Thanos Josh Brolan was so good! And the character itself too! Coin purse chin. The story of how a light flick to the coin purse could have saved the world. Economic modeling Thanos breaks out the Excel spreadsheets. Productively employing the bottom trillionty billion around the galaxy. Ultimate utilitarianism. The upper atmosphere Atmospheric pressure. Hypoxia. Space mapping and orienteering Visualizing three-dimensional routes as two-dimensional on Earth-maps. Visualizing four-dimensional routes as three three physical dimensions plus time. Star forges Forging in the heart of a neutron star vs heart-of-a-neutron-star-adjacent. Breaking assumptions. Neutron stars. Facts and figures and analogies. Converting teaspoons of neutron star matter into 5-Dollar Footlongs. Thor jelly vs Thor Jam and their relative whelmingness. Dyson Spheres Disovering that Dyson’s original conception (1960) of the Dyson “sphere” actually better fits the modern description of a Dyson “swarm.” Different Dyson sph

Science words Jumanji in space. Card-by-card science words. Light pollution The night sky “never looked that close before.” The majority of Americans being unfamiliar with a real view of the night sky. Light pollution. Dark sky preserves. The LA blackout and the milky way. Light pollution and the effect on wildlife. And the effects on us. Sky glow. Light pollution! Royal Astronomical Society CC-BY Planetary rings 100% ring rate on gas giants in our solar system. Ring size and albido. The lifecycle of a ring system. The “Roche Limit.” Ring formation beginnings. Rocks vs ice in ring systems. Super-large ring system discoveries. The Roche limit Theresa Knott CC-BY-SA-3.0 Cryonic sleep Cryonic sleep and galactic travel. Teenager sleep schedules. Gravity Wells Weightlessness in orbit. Orbit is falling. Meeting aliens As per Hawking: you might not want to! Zorgons Don’t forget: people are

Space travel and orienteering Space maps. Star brightnesses and reference points. The ESA Gaia Project. Landing in glaciers. Glacier life cycles. Fjords! Callback to Seveneves. Space imaging Dude, we have video from a comet! How various inputs are composited into attractive imagery. Public data and the opportunities for citizen science and science communication. Spectroscopy and impactor makeup-detection. Detecting invisible glass clouds by how they scatter light. Red shift and blue shift. “Superfreezing” Superfeeezing, supersaturation, etc. Booby-trapped microwaved water. Nucleation points. Slushy bear. Day/night cycles and weather around extreme freezing/thawing. The “crew” Dad’s triage skills. Recognizing magnesium. Is it bigger than a breadbox? Robots! General Grievous gets the thigh ground. Fueling your nether regions with gasoline. Power-saving mode in the murder module. “Fire seeds” Giant redwood reproduction strategies. Living through wildfires. “Cleverness” in the unguided process

Disney Westworld is some Disneyworld-level theme park logistics. Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge. Westworld ticket prices. The Wild West The mythos. Cowboys shootin’ and rootin- tootin’. The time period. The expansion of settlement exceeding governmental reach and the perception of lawlessness. TV vs Movie Deep questions about consciousness and self and where they really really aren’t. AI in the 70s Depictions of artificial general intelligence in the period and how awesome 2001: A Space Odyssey was/is. The “AI Winter.” The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence. Heuristics. Teaching our machines to learn. Neural net black boxes. Machines created by other machines. Smart AI/dumb AI Collections of very convincing modules, sans consciousness, vs AGI. In what way can a computer system “understand” language? Sensory processing How long it takes humans and machines to adapt to moving in their environments. The speed of artificial neural networks in learning and human evolution of millennia. Comp

Will Smith He’s the best! Alien life And the forms that it takes. Arthropoids. Cephalapoids. The names we give the aliens and the names they give themselves. Aliens and stimulants Coffee! Humanity’s beverage history And in particular how wonderfully wonderful caffeine is. Dwarf Fortress and ale supplies. Depressants vs stimulants and the shape society. The “real” Men in Black Frustration with being made a joke. Human gestation and intelligence Evolution, hip size, and cranial size. Bipedalism. Early homo adaptations and social assisted delivery. Earth as universal backwater Alien advocates for the ethical treatment of dumb humanity. Memory wiping Possible unreliable narrators. Neuralizers vs “memory sticks.” This is my roofie stick. Short term and long-term memory “wiping.” A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage: iTunesAmazon Mirror - A single-page PnP micro RPG for you and your friends by Liam Ginty: DrivethruRPGItch.io Supp

Climate control CW7 climate change-fixer compound. “Artificial cooling.” Climate manipulation. The end of the world. “Snowball earth” capped by massive volcanic activity and leading into life explosions. Weather manipulation vs climate manipulation. Radioactive hurricanes and sharks with frickin lasers. Micro-life survival. The ozone layer What is that for. Chlorofleorocarbons (CFCs) and ozone depletion. Cold The frozen arm punishment. Cooling rates and atmospheric density. Christopher’s experience (or lack thereof) freezing limbs with liquid nitrogen. Food in the cryopocalypse (entomophagy) Efficiency in energy conversion in food sources. Disgust reactions in the face of starvation. Feed conversion ratio. Indiginous food sources and feeding a growing human population. Competing with dung beetles. Christopher’s adventures in preparing wax worms. Maggot cheese and knowing your limits. Overpopulation – The Human Explosion Explained by Kurzgesagt: YouTube Edible: An Ad

Pre-historic Egypt The notability of the introduction of a massive metal space-portal 10,000 years ago, when Egyptian were still just barely getting down with agriculture. Egypt and the pyramids When was the Bronze age anyway? Pyramid time scales. Familial pyramid-building competitions. The progression from small-scale burial mounds to “great” pyramids. Egypt vs meso-American pyramid research. Seasonal construction recruitment. Stone and copper tooling for stonework Stone tools. Copper tools. Early Brone tools. Limestone vs granite. Arsenical copper advantages. Pyramid-building alien hypotheses “Chariots of the Gods” and the origin of alien pyramid conspiracies. Judging fringe theorists. Ancient Egyptian language and writing The origin of the writing systems of ancient Egypt. Accounting. Daniel Jackson Inspiring budding Egyptologists and getting suddenly swole. Stargates Stargate discovery. Deep time and the chances of happening upon ready-made technology after an extinction. Permeab

JCVD Green screen etc. Time machine carrying capacity Red smear memorials. Time travel in tiny, sweaty drug subs. It all comes down to laser machine guns. Confederate gold Get rich quick slowly schemes. Smuggling from the past Cost of moving mass through time. Burying your pilfered gold for pickup vs time traveling it to the present. Inefficient black market time travel business models. Carbon dating And how you can’t carbon date gold itself. Depression Profiting Sicilian grandmas. Skyrim health potions and time travel interest-compounding. Better investment plans: Put money into savings account … profit repeat Making the future Ugly self-driving cars. Greebles. Glue some crap to some crap and bam, you’re in the future. Timecopping and paradoxes Time loops. “The same matter can’t occupy the same space at the same time.” The indistinguishability of atoms of the same isotope. Quantum word soup. “Touching” by neutron star. The grandfather paradox where you bang your grand

Brain-controlled machines Brain-machine interfaces. EEG. The advantage of the group over the individual. Humans in tandem with AI and the closing window of human cognitive superiority. Computational offloading. Wetware/hardware integration and explaining the “excessive” neural load of Jaeger drift. Drifting Localized neural “loops.” Neural load and body mass. Chasing the rabbit. Multiple input control vectors. Meatsack adaptations and proprioception. Human biofeedback and ambulation vs “Emergence of Locomotion Behaviours in Rich Environments” Square-cube business Materials and size scales and the inappropriateness of humanoid design for your giiiiiiiiiiant robots. The square cube law. Don’t forget Godzilla and King Kong! Kaiju Neural loads and signal speed. Central pattern generators and “butt brains” and how the dinosaurs didn’t have them. Blue ammonia heavy metal blood. Atmospheric pressures. Jägers Metallic construction. Irrational fear of alloys. Possible material engineering choices. Be

William Gibson Cyberpunk! Data couriers When to move the data physically by human. CYA. The impression of security. Offline attacks. quantum supremacy. RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers) and RFC 2549 (IP over Avian Carriers with Quality of Service). Storage doubling And exceeding limits. The lack of connection between physical brain material and storage of particular sorts of memory, especially temporal sequences. Data encryption and uploading “Light therapy” and affecting brain states. Fuzzy encryption keys for biometrics. Brute force attacks. Lo-teks The cyberpunk Amish. “Pants are technology!” Privacy-focused ludditism. Human brain face-detection. Limpy-Frankenstein to avoid person-tracking. Ice T memes. Snatch back your brain, zombie. And hold it! J Bone Naval "dazzle" camoflage Naval History and Heritage Command CC-0 Non-graphical computing VR silliness. Command-line life. Chri

Weeeeeeeeeird stuff Pulling a James Cameron. Sean Connery is down for anything. Weeeeeird stuff. A list of some of our favorite things Zardoz’ mustache Zardoz’s speeches both and and out of stone head Sean Connery’s everything Psychic attacks Bullets in the air One of the worse ways to celebrate. Coins off of a skyscraper. Mass and volume and drag. Bullet lethality reductions with different trajectories. Eating only meat The benefits and drawbacks. The inuit diet. Surprisingly-high carbohydrate intake when all your meat is raw. Micronutrients via organ meats. Food preservation through controlled rot. Using fats and proteins to energy. Evolutionary humanity Other varieties of humanity that coexisted with homo sapiens. The study of evolution. Fossil evidence and developments in mitochondrial DNA analysis. The multiregional hypothesis -> the out of Africa hypothesis. Human evolutionary promiscuity Neanderthals, Denisovans, and uh…. gorillas? The evolutionary relationship between g

The Cloverfield Formula Cloverfield -> 10 Cloverfield Lane -> The Cloverfield Paradox -> Overlord Find a script Add monsters … profit Artifical gravity. With a twist! Like, literally a twist. Balancing huge gyroscopes on a central stem. Spinning buckets. Bucket size Combating bone and muscle atrophy with the ARED. How the ARED works. The danger of jackedstronauts coming back from space to take over the planet. Particle colliders Anatoli Burgorski took a proton bream to the back of the face. It went surprisingly well for him! Phineas Gage of the nuclear age. Linear vs circular particle accelerators. The Cloverfield Paradox. 3D printing Impressively unimpressive food printing. Printing plastic handguns and metal lower receivers. Maybe don’t use a gun on a space station though that’s pretty dangerous. Gyroscopes Chris’ immense latissimus dorsi. Avoiding affecting sensitive space mechanisms by avoiding spewing mass into space around your station/telescope. Losing earth/

Wow this is pretty good Chris’ varied experiences of this film over time. Color grading and the Black & Chrome edition. Roads! Roads are awesome. The US highway system is awesome. Eisenhower’s road trip. Road trips are awesome, too. Deserts! Lack of roads in the outback. Accidental un-deserting. The Namib desert. The Namib dessert is 55 million years old! The Great Salt The oceans? No way. Red salt planet in The Last Jedi. Evaporating the oceans. Blood bags War Boys stealing blood from “healthy” donors. Lack of red blood cell production from blood cancer and the need for transfusion in the late stage. Blood loss limits. Adrenaline transfer. Parabiosis Science vampires! Callbacks to Daybreakers. Combining mice. Kidnapping Wim Hof for his blood. Teeth! Malnutrition, radiation poisoning, the oral bacteriome. Dental hygiece pre- vs post-agrciulture. Beneficial dental plaques. The evolution of the human lower jaw. Chroming Berserker mushroom mode. Signalling. Low framerate editing

Michael Bay The spark of life Unicron and the spark of life between worlds. War in The Dark Ages Trebuchets. Traction trebuchet vs counterweight trebuchet. Siege weapons vs anti-personnel. Army sizes in the early middle ages. King Arthur Legend vs myth vs folk tales. Staff-bearer selection methodology. Humans all look the same to Transformers. The classic definition of myth, legend, and folktale is William Bascom’s 1965 article “The Form of Folklore: Prose Narratives.” Bascom defines folktales as prose narratives told as fiction, myths as prose narratives told as true set in the remote past before human history, and legends as prose narratives told as true set in the time of human history. (Bascom does not take up fables, but they are generally considered a type of folktale with animal characters and an obvious moral lesson.) However, folklorists today tend to focus less on the matter of form and cross-cultural classification—any one of these genres can be conveyed in non-prose, non-narrati