Decipher SciFi

Latest Episodes:

When Worlds Collide: observable universe, 20th century astonomy, and modern space industry w/ Daniel James Barker Nov 28, 2017

Show notes

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 be in this range of size and luminosity?

Herzprung-Russel Star Diagram of star surface temperature and luminosity ESO CC-A-4.0 Uranus

Somehow we got to this topic. And now here is some history!

Effect on the solar system

Oh no! Will the planet be able to find a stable orbit in our solar system after presumably affecting the fairly stable orbits of the other planets? Star system escape velocities.

Landing on a new world

And not even having time to remark upon the clearly engineered structures on the surface before your whole planet is flung from its sun and everything freezes and you die. :cry:

When Worlds Collide by Powerman 5000: YouTube
2000000000000: Uncertainty Principle the Podcast
Hubble Deep Field by Vox: YouTube
And another about the Hubble "Ultra" Deep Field by Deep Astronomy: YouTube

Support the show!

The Day After Tomorrow: paleoclimatology, thermohaline circulation, and climate modelers Nov 21, 2017

Show notes

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 big data; it is very big.

“Landicanes”

… which are the name we’ve made up for the misnomered “hurricanes” that seem to form over land in the movie. Air flow. the Coriolis effect, thermodynamics and superfreezing in the center of the storm.

attr_text:

Inside The Giant American Freezer Filled With Polar Ice by tom Scott: YouTube
13 Misconceptions About Global Warming: YouTube

Support the show!

2012: Mayan Calendar realities, galactic alignment, and ark ships w/ Fraser Cain Nov 14, 2017

Show notes

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).

Magnetosphere

The earth’s internal metal. Pole-flipping!

Tsunami

Propagation of energy via wave through fluid and how it probably shouldn’t roll the ship. Asteroid impacts, landslides, and misplaced fossils.

Anti-apocalypse rant

Fraser’s got some stuff to say on this matter, tell-you-what.

Seveneves: impactors, guided evolution, and radiation shields w/ Daniel Mann: Decipher SciFi

Support the show!

Volcano: seismic detectors, tar pit geology, and dangers of volcanic ash w/ Joe Ruppel Nov 07, 2017

Show notes

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 activity
Gas!
Groundswell - actual deformation of the landscape from the pressure

Pompeii/Herculaneum

Pyroclastic flow vs lava. The eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 79AD. Casting the cavities that surrounded trapped bodies. Cast of a pompeii body

Volcanic dangers

Volcanic ash, which is often basically just teeny tiny glass for you to breathe in. Lava temperatures: between holy shit hot and omg holy shit hot. Lava weather systems. Gasses! Lava fountains.

Measures

Dams! Backwards or otherwise. The Decade List.

Experiencing a volcanic shockwave: YouTube
From the movie: a human being melting directly and immediately into mere inches of lava: YouTube

Support the show!

The Fly: teleporters, dna detection, and arthropod digestion Oct 31, 2017

Show notes

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. That’s a hell of a design. And the voice recognition isn’t too shabby, either.

DNA detection

How do we tell between species by DNA these days? DNA barcoding! Find a good, differentiable locus and make a database of that area for a certain type of earth life. Where do we keep the database? The Barcode of Life Data System.

How genetic fusion teleportation could go wrong

Animate vs inanimate. DNA fusion or DNA damage and how and when problems could manifest. Expressing or ignoring large chunks of odd DNA. The unlikelihood of coherent expression of fly-like traits from the fused fly DNA. Junk DNA and its influence on our robustness against fly fusion.

Turning into a fly

Gross hairs. Super strength and the square cube law a la our King Kong episode. Enzymatic digestion. Insect reproductive cycles.

Flies lifecycle: YouTube
A Scientist Responds… to The Fly: io9

Support the show!

Event Horizon: cosmic deep time,lived-in space ships, and real hell w/ Caelum Rale Oct 24, 2017

Show notes

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 communicate. Accidentally poking at raw human neuroses like a toothache. Other forms of consciousness, where consciousness is a form of information processing.

Hell

Is this Hell a place? Or a manifestation of our neuroses? Or a greater consciousness just rolling over on us by accident?

Lovecraft

Cosmicism. Humans facing life from deep time. Human-scale irrelevance.

Caelum Rale: Instagram
The public-domain works of H.P. Lovecraft: Archive.org Amazon

Support the show!

Daybreakers: medical vampirism, living without a heartbeat, and blood substitutes Oct 17, 2017

Show notes

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 frailty, break glass.” With a “cure” for vampirism available, the ensuring rise of using vampirism as a cure for deadly ailments. But you only get to use it once, so make it count! Connections between vampire lore and the possibility of parabiosis.

Downsides to vampirism

Blood isn’t really usually considered delicious. Ethical concerns with surviving on human blood UNTIL the “blood substitute” is developed.

Dracula: Vlad the Impaler, Elizabethan sexuality, and Kenau's awesome accent w/ Joe Ruppel: Decipher SciFi

Support the show!

The Mummy (2017): the New Kingdom, Egyptomania, and chaotic neutral gods w/ Dominic Perry of the History of Egypt Podcast Oct 10, 2017

Show notes

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 and the afterlife.

Misunderstanding the ancient Egyptian gods

Chaotic neutral Seth and how he is totally not the god of death. Preservation of order against chaos in Egyptian mythology. Enumerating the actual gods of death and how they’re not necessarily bad guys. The problem with mummies.

The History of Egypt Podcast: The History of Egypt Podcast
The Japanese Art of Self-Preservation: Damn Interesting
Diablo Postmortem : YouTube

Support the show!

Pitch Black: tri star systems, micrometeorites, and eyeshine w/ Fraser Cain Oct 03, 2017

Show notes

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 shifting “goldilocks” zone.

Riddick

Eyeshine! Light amplification or translation from outside of our cone of EM reception. Night vision. Replacing eyeballs with robust cameras. Ghost in the Shell and X-ray vision.

Glow-worms

Evolving bioluminescence as a food-collection mechanism vs keeping away the flying death-machines.

Fraser Cain's different stuff: Astronomy Cast Universe Today YouTube
Farewell Cassini: The Grand Finale and the Final Images of Saturn by Fraser Cain: YouTube
What If Saturn Paid Us a Very Close Visit? by Phil Plait: Bad Astronomy
The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu: iTunes Amazon

Support the show!

The Chronicles of Riddick: Crematoria, necromongers, and ambush predator defense Sep 26, 2017

Show notes

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 impossibility of breathable atmosphere in these circumstances. The speed of the sunset and solar terminators.

Crematorian dog-things

Robustness of skin. Comparison to other color-changing creatures. Luminescence vs passive color-change.

The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay/Assault on Dark Athena: Amazon
The Chronicles of Riddick by Folding Ideas: YouTube

Support the show!

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected