Decipher SciFi

View Top 200 Chart

Back to Rankings Page

Natural Sciences
**Decipher SciFi**

Decipher SciFi explores the how and why in science fiction with conversations about technology, humanity, and the future. This is not a review show, nor will you see much criticism or snark. It is a rationally optimistic look, through film, at where society and technology are and where they are headed. Also, butts.

Latest Episodes:

Escape From New York: ultralight aircraft, escape pods, and fusion reactors Jun 26, 2018

Show notes

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!

Universal Soldier: face-kicking cyborg technologies and micro drone insects Jun 19, 2018

Show notes

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!

Enemy Mine : space dogfights, alien wildlifem and interstellar slavery economics Jun 12, 2018

Show notes

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 Arthur: YouTube

Support the show!

Tron : 70s computing, object digitization, and death-frisbees Jun 05, 2018

Show notes

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 scan books. Brain uploading. Human Connectome Project.

mcp:~ $ cat /dev/jeff_bridges > /dev/null

Mainframes and the Unix Revolution by Computerphile: YouTube

Support the show!

Superman (1978) : Episode 144 May 29, 2018

Show notes

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, and Superman rubbing his eyes right against things for ultrasound. Kryptonite! And the Kryptonite shrimp challenge.

Evil plans

Clever villainy. Megaton yields.

CC0 Time travel

Superman already did the one real kind. Spinning the earth back and forth like a record.

Does Light Experience Time?: YouTube

Support the show!

Annihilation : Episode 143 May 22, 2018

Show notes

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 Deadliest Being on Planet Earth – The Bacteriophage by Kurzgesagt: YouTube

Support the show!

Avengers Infinity War: space mapping, Dyson spheres, and the purple coin purse May 15, 2018

Show notes

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 sphere variants. Statites.

Vision based on movement

But it isn’t! It’s contrast-based! Toad vision feature detection. Jurassic Park confusion.

Iron Man

Nanotech. Programming nanobots to eat brains - or gloves!

Megastructures 1.1: Dyson Spheres by Isaac Arthur: YouTube

Support the show!

Zathura: planetary ring lifecycles, science words, and light pollution May 08, 2018

Show notes

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 meat too! Cold blooded vs warm-blooded intelligence. Metabolic rates and bloodedness. Dinosaurs may have been mesotherms!

You are as meat as a cow!

-Colbert

Space food

Tubes and bricks. Bad roomates and sardine tubes. Kimchi rocket ships in spaaaaaace. Eating your sandwich in the bathroom, just in case your microbiome can’t handle the onslaught.

Shooting stars

IRL shooting stars. Rogue stars. Meteor shower disappointments.

If Earth had Rings by Artifexian: YouTube

Support the show!

Lost in Space: supercooling, space imaging, and sexy robots w/ Adrian Falcone May 01, 2018

Show notes

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 of natural selection.

"Video" from the comet 67p: Twitter
Lost in Space (1998 film): gifted children, future vlogging, and colonizing space: Decipher SciFi
Which Are The Real Pictures of Space? What’s a Photo and What’s An Illustration? by Fraser Cain: YouTube

Support the show!

Westworld: extreme theme parks, first computer virus, and sensory processing Apr 24, 2018

Show notes

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. Computer vision in 1973! Face tracking. Human attention to human attention.

Robotics!

The difficulty in developing human-like robots. Our subconscious alertness to any oddness in our human-to–human interactions. The people-watching your brain does when you’re not watching.

Computer viruses

Coinage. Von Nuemann’s “self-replicating automata.”

The Lighthill Debate on Artificial Intelligence [1973]: YouTube
Westworld (the series): iTunes Amazon

Support the show!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected