Decipher Scifi : The Show About How And Why

Immortality by transplant Analogy with developments in head transplantation. Consciousness uploading. Preservation of identity. Conflict of human immortality with religion. Transhumanism and Identity The meaning of race and gender in a world where anyone can be any variety of human (and more). Merging with AI and technology in general. Sleeving The boundaries of the “self” and the “mind” and the meat. Hard to draw! The influence of the greater body system over the “self” part and boners. So many boners. But not from nipple stuff, no sir. ? Zoltan: ZoltanIstvan.com Altered Carbon (the novel) by Richard K. Morgan: iTunesAmazon Support the show!

Philip K Dick Callback to some.of.our.episodes on PKD and his stories. Pulp scifi of the 50s and 60s. General appreciation for his ideas and the return of thoughtful anthologies. Autofac PKDpocalypse. Consumerism something something. Supreme dedication to a task. The Paperclip Maximizer and the possible danger of a highly-capable AI dedicated to its task. Universal Paperclips. The unconscious, apathetic skynet. Real Life PKD was all about that hash tag life. The malleability of our perception of “reality.” Am I Anna Paquin? Neurological explanations for Deja Vu. Gaslighting. Dick moves. Colbert’s joke-telling disability. Convincing your girlfriend she’s crazy or paranoid is called gaslighting, and it’s a dick move. But convincing her she’s a robot with artificial implanted human emotions is called bladerunning. It’s a Phillip K. Dick move. Nathan Anderson The Father Thing Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Stranger Things. Really really affordable spacecraft for extremophiles. Parasites cl

Episode 4 - Hang the DJ The one with the dating. Like The button, but instead of one person it’s thousands. And instead of a million dollars you get a date. And still only maybe. Calculating Black Mirror horribleness for comparison between episodes. Massive data-crunching techniques. Episode 5 - Metalhead The one with the robot thing. Comparison with the new SpotMini. Episode 6 - Black Museum The one with the museum. Weird sex stuff. Don’t touch my nipples! The Schmidt Pain Index. The value of actually doing and recording research. Black Mirror trashy romance novels. Pleasure buttons. Sensory mapping. Consciousness partitioning. Liam was on Turn with this dude from this episode! Diffuse vs localized brain injury. Communicating with locked-in patients. Split brains! You Are Two! Waiting for law to catch up with dystopian technology. Liam's appearance on "Turn: Washington's Spies" AMC STudios ARR Voices from L5: Voices From L5 Problems with Mind Upl

Episode 1 - USS Callister The one with the Star Trek. Protecting the new kinds of consciousnesses we will eventually create. Sleeping through the AI apocalypse. What our solo video game habits say about us. Posthumous digital simulations. Data sources for creating a digital simulacrum and how DNA is one of the least useful. Designing your brain-machine interface to not possibly ever lock someone in ever. Episode 2 - Arkangel The one with the helicopter parenting. Mundane parenting concerns writ large in tech. Becoming luddites and finding your breaking point. But then you die and it doesn’t matter. The danger of cloud services. Computer vision and visual input filtering. Episode 3 - Crocodile The one with the murders. Would you like a little more murder on your murder sandwich? The genius of the automatic, unmanned pizza truck. The pointlessness of human testimony. Crowdsourcing accurate memories. Memory obstruction strategies. Fraser’s things: Universe TodayAstronomy CastFraser Cain

Our second Q&A episode, wherein we ask our friends to help us answer the the MOST INTERESTING QUESTIONS FROM THE INTERNET! Question: “Could you have x-ray vision?” Answerer: Fraser Cain X-ray vision. Cybernetic eye replacements. Wavelengths of light. The visible spectrum. Ghost in the Shell. Riddick. Light amplification. Gamma rays. Cancer avoidance. Question: “What if numbers are wrong?” Answerer: Adrian Falcone Math. Numbers. Logic. Ted Chiang’s short story “Divide by Zero” was in the collection Stories of Your Life and Others. Adrian mentioned Faith Physics. Question: “What if black holes didn’t exist?” Answerer: Daniel James Barker Physics! Black holes. Neutron stars. Gravity. Collapse. Question: How long before all the gasoline spoils in the zombie apocalypse? Answerer: James Peterson The eternally-unanswered concern that zombie shows ignore always. How long after the zombie apocalypse before all the gas is spoiled? Chemical engineers vs chemists. Oxidation. Inert gas vapor displa

Alpha Centauri Closest star systems to Earth. Sudden outbursts of James Cameron appreciation. Alpha Centauri {A,B}, Proxima Centauri. Sub-light space travel. Cryo sleep Continuation of consciousness. Perceptions of meatsackness. Pandora the moon Adaptive definitions of moons and planets. Learning about moons aside from our own. Disney World’s Pandora. Bioluminescence The utility of light in dark environs. Bioluminescence evolution on Earth. Useful wavelengths of produced light in water/air. Standard human bioluminescence. Japanese gameshow science. Pandoran flora and fauna Megafauna and megaflora and lower gravity. Hexapodality. Na’vi Na’vi anatomy. Avatar differences, e.g. 5 fingers, eyebrows. Boobs? Dr. Manhattan. The Pandoran internet Neural networks. Brain-machine interface vs brain-everything interface. Na’vi adaptability to remote neural control. Data-transfer Unobtanium Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors! Floating “mountains.” The Science of A

Space combat Naval analogies and a callback to a similar discussion in our Valerian episode. Magnetic (fused) torpedoes! (FTL) Ramming speed! Ramming vs telefragging. Kamikaze fleets, or attaching telefrag Warp Drives to asteroids and the like. Energy levels with ramming operations at lightspeed. Ruining Star Wars combat by introducing telfragging. Explosions in space Explosions in space shouldn’t make noise, because there isn’t (noise). Not across the near-vacuum, at least. Production of light and shrapnel. Starbursts! Explosive decompression Teleporting Colbert to his doom. For science! Multimodal attacks. Explosive decompression. Sausage people and asphyxiation. Freezing in space and how thew force disables all bets. Sausage people and elasticity of human tissues. Consciousness vs useful consciousness. Skimmer ships Hydrofoils cum “alasofoils.” Flight engineering and “dragging sticks.” hydrofoil boat U.S. Navy CC-0 Salt planet “Saltho

Indie scale Scifi adventure throwback. Corporations are always evil. Ambition in scope of indie scifi. Cloud city Floating cities and air bases. Energy requirements. Floating cities on Venus, where balloons of an atmosphere of Earth-like density can float safely and happily in the high clouds. Hamster ball pleasure cruses. IRL “floating aircraft carriers.” Realizing that all aircraft carriers are “floating.” Space settlement light and dark The apparent necessity of slave labour. Western expansion analogies. Naval analogies. Australian analogies. Hoping that space settlement becomes mundane. Backwards Dr Moreau A comparison Individual picture elements property of their respective owners “Raggeds.” Reverse mode on Dr. Moreau. Echoes of evil ninja turtles and goombas. Send the gorillas to get the mongoose. “Terraforming” Maybe “ecoforming?” Ecological manipulation. Seeding new ecology vs tearing down existing ecology. NASA sterilization practices and caution in avoiding c

Replicant discrimination Is racism the right word? Hate and discrimination against replicants. Replicant slavery. Synthetic farming Whatever that means. But in the meantime, let’s eat some grubs okay? The benefits of cricket and grub farming. Necessity breeds insects. Solar concentrators Hey these are neat Replicant birth Pooped out of the goo shoot. Like real life. And then replicants replicating themselves. Space settlement Thank you creepy Jared Leto. Tyrell’s original mission versus the cohesive effort lead by creepy Leto. Digital Girlfriend Narrow v general artificial intelligence. Awesome magic projector technology. Data storage DNA or other biological data storage. Holographic storage. BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "Black Out 2022" Anime Short: YouTube BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2036: Nexus Dawn" Short: YouTube BLADE RUNNER 2049 - "2048: Nowhere to Run" Short: YouTube Blade Runner: "androids," the AI control problem, and brain design

International Space Station Contemporary space station size comparisons. ISS transformation over time. Alien life Bipedalism. Bilateral symmetry. The assumption of humanoid structure in the “world.” Duck-billed Ferengi information brokers and neurological RAID modes. Alpha Station “Critical mass.” Vital stats. Population, demographics. Modular growth over time. Racial job specialization. Alpha Station location and travel FTL(?) via “exospace.” The plan to exit the solar system. The issues re planetary orbits when you build a brand new moon around earth with tons and tons of foreign (to the solar system) mass. Languages! 5,000+ languages are spoken on the station, not even including “computer languages.” Mül and the Pearls Beach-dwelling N’avi (with no tails). Math and science. Intellectual ability and exaptation of base rational abilities to science and math. Space battles Should they happen so near planets? Travel and planned space battle. Don’t fight on a planet because you’re vulnerab

The “observable” universe The part of the universe that we can, in principle, capture light from as a function of the speed of light and the expansion of the universe. Galactic perspectives Learning more about the breadth and contents of the universe since the 1950s. Hubble and “island universes.” Figuring out there are other galaxies and past and present ideas of just how many there are. The modern space industry Appreciation for where we are finally. Space travel becoming cheaper and cheaper and the legit settlement of other planets on the horizon. When worlds actually collide Spitzer detecting the aftermath of what seems to have been a planetary collision. Other planetary collisions in the history of our own solar system, like the one that produced our moon. Artist's conception of a collision around the star NGC 2547-ID8 NASA/JPL-Caltech The incoming star: Bellus Only 12x the size of earth. Luminosity and distance. What type of star could

Origins Roland Emmerich. And from a book by Art Bell! …of all people. Not known for hard scifi. Climate science communication Some examples are better than others. Arctic vs Antarctic They are… different! How they are different and why the movie might have chosen to go with the “wrong” one for the real-life event on which the opening scene based. Larsen B Ice Shelf. Continental ice vs glacial ice. Antarctic ice shelves A. J. Cook and D. G. Vaughan CC-BY-3.0 Thermohaline circulation Arctic/antarctic events and affect on the thermohaline circulation. The Younger Dryas event as an irl historical example of extreme climate shift which still took decades longer than the events of the film. Paleoclimatology Human records. Ice Cores! Meteoric ice. Tree rings! Water body beds! Caves! Ice cores Age and layers. Ash, gas, life, temperatures from oxygen isotope ratios. Climate modeling Colbert’s insights from The Supercomputing Conference. The b

Mayan calendar They had one! And so do we. They both end on some sort of the cycle and the world never ends because of our arbitrary selection of scope. Fraser is really tired of having to argue about this sort of thing with death-cultists. The end. Galactic alignments Neutrino detection. Heating Earth Earth’s layers. Discovering new and different regions of the earth’s internal structure via seismography. Rate of temperature increase. Effect on oceans. Heat retention and radioactivity. Ark ships Space settlement and Christopher’s disappointment. Seveneves as the gold standard for how to relocate humanity to space in an emergency. Perpetuation of specieseses and culture Should we keep giraffes? Cows? Any larger fauna? Recognition of the complexity and energy-inefficiencies of the food chain. Surviving on crickets and phytoplankton. Yellowstone Yellowstone is no joke! Yellowstone supervolcano (more volcano conversation in our Volcano episode). Pyroclastic flow rates. Lake Toba (is larger)

What is a volcano? No, seriously, what is a volcano? A lot of film critics at the time whiffed on this one and at least one or two of us were in the wrong too. Volcano: A vent or fissure on the surface of a planet (usually in a mountainous form) with a magma chamber attached to the mantle of a planet or moon, periodically erupting forth lava and volcanic gases onto the surface. -Wiktionary La Brea tar pits Predator/prey capture ratios. Biological activity causing the bubbling and subsequent discovery of a bunch of different bacterai that live in there. Larger things we find fossilized there: Sabretooth tigers Mammoths Giant feline looooooooads more Fault lines The different fault types and which of them tend to manifest volcanoes. Spoiler alert: LA has a transform fault which is the kind that is really really really unlikely to sprout a volcano under normal conditions. Transform faults Volcano detection Major monitoring methods looking out for pending eruptions: Seisimic act

Body horror Body horror, biological horror, organic horror or visceral horror is horror fiction in which the horror is principally derived from the unnatural graphic transformation, degeneration or destruction of the physical body. -Wikipedia Cronenberg! And Carpenter! You may recall some similar horror themes from our episodes on Event Horizon (though that concentrated rather on the cosmic horror) and The Thing. Mad… scientist? More like mad “project manager,” as he describes himself. How refreshing to see something sidestep the trope of the omnicapable super-scientist and have someone NOT create world-changing supertech by themselves. The art of the kludge/bodge. The computer It’s basically a genie! Rules-lawyering a computer is programming a computer. The nature of this interpretive computer system and the feats of artificial intelligence that enable it to coherently fuse Brundle and fly together. Teleporter Materials-detection, DNA analysis, and black-box DNA recombination algorithms.

Settling nearby space Mars vs the moon. Inconvenient solar exposure schedules breeding technological food solutions. Substitute engineered fungi for photosynthetic plants as a food source. Exposition Vs “show don’t tell.” Australian flags and separation from the United Kingdom. Space ships Lived-in ships and how they were exemplified in Alien or Star Wars. The “traditional” design of the Lewis & Clark, basically maintaining the naval analogy in space travel. BUT! The Event Horizon is much different. The Event Horizon How the Event Horizon is the opposite of Joseph Campbell’s “belly of the whale.” Radula hallways and OSHA. Gothic architecture and religious imagery in interior and exterior design. FTL The Event Horizon and its gravity drive something-or-other. Spacetime-folding visual analogies. Using contained black holes to create wormholes. The Monty Hall problem, but with Hell instead of a prize. The Solaris Effect Completely foreign consciousnesses probing for something to communi

Classical vampires…? And is this a horror movie? Better than the sparkly Twilight ones. Blood-squirting lizards Just because that’s awesome Blood substitutes Substitutes for what part or what function of blood? Making a blood sword on our Conan episode. What blood is made of. What blood does for us biologically. It’s got plasmatic electrolytes It’s what bodies crave Blood transfusion Blood types and our developing understanding during the 17th and 19th centuries. Carlos Lammerstammer’s initial work distinguishing the blood types. Pre-modern medicine and the throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-see-who-dies method of medical research, e.g. injecting milk or ale or whiskey into the blood to see what happens. Vampire blood flow We’re told and see demonstrated that the vampires have no heartbeat, BUT - the other things we observe suggest that they do have blood flow, somehow. Intravenous vampire blood. Vampire blood extraction. Vampire peristalsis. Medical vampirism “In case of human frail

Geographical Context Traveling from ancient Egypt to Mespopotamia. Hiding evil things as far away as possible. Deciphering the Mummy’s historical period Context clues pointing to Egypt’s “New Kingdom,” circa 1500BC-1200BC. Some touches that hinted: Ahmanet’s Nefertiti-inspired crown, her blue finger-paint as direct reference to King Tutankhamun’s golden finger- and toe-jewelry. Speaking of King Tut… His (lack of) actual historical importance. Public knowledge due to the simple coincidence of which things are best preserved and then discovered. Egyptomania From ancient Rome to Victorian England to King Tut in the mid-20th. It keeps coming back! The combination of modernity and exoticism of Ancient Egypt. The Rosetta Stone Napoleon’s groundbreaking work in enabling the study of science and history while conquering things. The birth of Egyptology. Egyptian book of the dead Hollywood’s chronic misunderstanding of the nature of The Book of the Dead. It’s not evil! Egyptian beliefs re death an

Stasis Stasis for interstellar space travel. “Freezing” people into a low-activity biological state. IRL medical developments. Microimpactors in space Space junk in near-earth orbit. That time a paint chipped cracked a window on the ISS (don’t worry, the ISS is fine). Comet tails and variously-sized chunks of ice as impactors. Landing on M6-117 (and other planets) Atmospheric density vs interstellar velocities. The benefits of landing on a planet with atmosphere vs a planet without. It’s hard without! Realizing having an atmosphere to slow down in can be a blessing if the ship can handle the temperatures due to atmospheric compression under/around the vessel. Trinary Star systems Trinary systems and the chance for stable planetary orbits. Proxima Centauri. Globular star clusters as alternative for “all light all the time.” Bioraptors (the monsters) Predators on the “cicada cycle.” How the ecology of this world appears or does not appear to support this cycle. Slowly-heating stars and the shi

Necromongers Where do I sign up? Scary space death cults. Necromonger gothic architecture and interior design. Frowny-faces. Face on your face Avoiding ambush predators via application of faces. Strong jaws. Designing against ambush predators. FACES EVWERYWHERE. Why Google’s Deep Dream A.I. Hallucinates In Dog Faces (Atmospheric) penetration Atmospheric entry bombs. Landing invasion ships, overpressure, and displays of power. Also the blue ball planet-killing explosion thing. Interstellar travel Ion drive acceleration and speed and average distances between stars. The unlikeliness of non-FTL travel between star systems during the span of human lifetimes. Private prison The economics of the private prisons in this universe and how it’s cost-effective to basically put a prison facility on Mercury. Crematoria Hot planets close to their sun. Lack of atmosphere and lack of green-house effect causing extremely quick extreme temperature changes.  This planet was pretty much Mercury. The imposs