Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Dolphin communication, the babelfish, and bad AI
Decipher SciFi
English - December 24, 2018 17:00 - 40 minutes - 32.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 34 ratingsNatural Sciences Science TV & Film Film Reviews Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Adaptations
Appreciating the book(s). Bigtime. Adapting Douglas Adams. Remembering the text adventure video game exists.
Dolphins
Dolphin intelligence. It’s not about how smart they are, it’s about how they’re smart. Mammalian sameness as an avenue into better understanding life in the sea. Dolphin communication. Dolphin “language” and the possibility of translation. The Dolphin C.H.A.T. interface.
Betelgeuse
Big star! Red supergiant, 9th brightest in our sky. “Brightness” outside the visible spectrum. Dying stars gnoshing on their planets before going off.
Life form dominance
Metal boxes, taking over the planet and slowly digesting the soft squishy things inside them. Street Fighter-style car-breaking. How to judge the “top” species of a world.
Babel fish
Universal translators. A visit from Nick Farmer from the past, when we asked him about universal translators in our Q&A #2.
Space is big
Mind-bogglingly big! The bigness of space and the difficulty in finding a sense of scale from a human perspective.
Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
-Douglas Adams
AI
Doors deriving sexual pleasure from providing their service. Polar opposite extreme AI demeanors. Deep Thought and AI constraints.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy The Game: BBC Radio 4
DRONE Solar System Model by Mark Rober: YouTube
VFX Artist Reveals the True Scale of the Universe by Corridor Digital: YouTube