Does It Fly?
Roddenberry Leisure
Accessible wherever you get your podcasts
Think about you’re hanging out at a bar along with your very enthusiastic buddies, about two beers in, and somebody brings up Star Trek. OK, however the transporter! How would that truly work? What concerning the TARDIS of Physician Who — does that factor even make sense? It made for thus many good tales, although, proper?
That’s the premise — and tone — of the entertaining podcast Does It Fly?, hosted by astrophysicist and “mad scientist” (his phrases) Hakeem Oluseyi and actress, author and “popular culture skilled” Tamara Krinsky. Launched roughly as soon as every week since April, every episode facilities on a science or expertise idea from a well-liked sci-fi present or film. The hosts spend most of 45 minutes pondering how properly every idea works — does it “fly”? — not simply technologically, but additionally as an engine for storytelling.
Pondering the real-world feasibility of any given sci-fi tech is hardly a brand new idea; fandoms have enthusiastically wrangled over this sort of thing for decades (SN: 9/22/15).
Does It Fly? acknowledges its place on this historical past on the outset. Oluseyi and Krinsky are, respectively, a self-proclaimed nerd and geek, and so they emphasize that they’re coming at these ideas from a spot of affection and pleasure. Typically somewhat an excessive amount of. Listening to the hosts’ banter can really feel like lurking in a fandom discussion board chat, and it’s typically tempting to fast-forward previous that banter to get to the great things.
And Does It Fly? has some really fascinating moments. Oluseyi’s astrophysics bona fides shine when he describes, for instance, the quandaries of real-world Star Trek transporter expertise, or ponders the feasibility of constructing Star Wars’ lightsabers through the use of magnetic fields to include plasma right into a lethal but moveable blade type. (Do lightsabers fly? Oluseyi says nah, not any time quickly and possibly by no means.)
Take the transporters, “one of the iconic conceits in all of science fiction,” Krinsky says. The Star Trek gadget can ship objects throughout nice distances by changing them into vitality after which reconstituting them within the supply location. In actuality, the closest factor we have now to such a expertise is quantum teleportation, wherein quantum states of particles, however not the particles themselves, may be transmitted from one location to a different. This isn’t that, Oluseyi says.
The obvious problem, maybe, with making a transporter work as we speak is how you can first break down an object into its fundamental items — and what are these, anyway? Molecules and atoms? Electrons and quarks? Even in the event you might, you’d want an immense quantity of storage for all that knowledge — far past what present expertise permits. And even when we clear up the storage drawback centuries from now, Oluseyi provides, there’s one more drawback: how you can correctly report after which re-create all of the dynamic knowledge, like reminiscences, that make up an individual at any given second.
The podcast’s fascinating twist on sci-fi science — one which this author significantly appreciated — is the dialogue of how an imagined expertise does or doesn’t serve the general storytelling. For instance, from a storytelling standpoint, the transporter is central to lots of Star Trek’s most memorable episodes, Krinsky says. The gadget “transports” characters shortly into the motion and drives plotlines round all the pieces from cloning to “transporter psychosis.” The various spin-offs of the unique Star Trek have additionally allowed the transporter’s engineering to evolve, exhibiting, for example, the technological breakthrough of transporting natural and never simply inorganic supplies for the primary time.
Backside line: Scientifically, the transporter doesn’t fly. However storywise, Krinsky says, “I might say hell, sure!”
The hosts’ cheerful and sometimes unstructured dialog works properly after they’re bouncing ideas round concerning the physics of time journey, or the tornado-analyzing silver-ball sensors of the 1996 film Twister, or the neuroexpertise in Netflix’s 3 Body Problem (SN: 7/19/24; SN: 4/23/24).
However not each fan favourite present or film is amenable to this podcast’s format. An episode dedicated to demonic possession à la Beetlejuice feels uneven and unmoored, largely as a result of there isn’t a lot science mentioned — or actually to talk about — on the topic.
Listeners actually received’t at all times agree with the hosts’ assessments. However perhaps that’s a part of the purpose. Every episode conveys the sensation of leaping into the center of an ongoing dialogue, one that’s totally anticipated to proceed after the hosts log out.
That was my expertise throughout a current automotive journey. I listened to the TARDIS episode with my sister, an enormous Physician Who fan. We each loved the mind-bending concept that the present’s beloved, time-traveling blue telephone sales space mimics a black gap in some ways: It manipulates time; it’s bigger on the within than the surface; and there’s even a hypothetical sort of black gap, known as a wormhole, thought to behave as a portal by means of house. “Every little thing black holes do, the TARDIS does,” Oluseyi says, giving the not-a-phone-booth kind of a scientific thumbs-up.
However then Krinsky means that the TARDIS is flawed from a storytelling standpoint as a result of the present typically flouts its personal guidelines about how the TARDIS works, breaking a golden rule of sci-fi. My sister disagreed. These logic leaps had been totally justified, she mentioned.
Let’s simply say, I realized lots about Physician Who throughout that automotive experience. And because the miles flew by, a very good time was had by all.
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