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Comics writer Si Spurrier (Hellblazer, The Flash) joins Byron to discuss his highly anticipated new projects, the Ignition Press techo-folk horror series Minotaur and his new DSTLRY experimental portal fantasy project A Mischief of Magpies, two fantastic books dropping on the same day in July! We discuss the wide ranging roots of Minotaur including the basic premise from writer Arthur C. Clarke's classic assertion that advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to the possible ramifications of the singularity getting loose, do a deep dive into its main protagonist photographer Gloria Monday, delve into the collaborative process with series artist Mike Dowling, and how Si avoids nihilism in dark storytelling.
Alberto Aparici recurrió esta semana a su ya clásica "biblioteca" para hablar de optimismo científico a través del libro Horizontes de la civilización, del astrofísico Héctor Socas. Tras un recorrido por autores fundamentales como Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov y Arthur C. Clarke, la sección reflexionó sobre cómo recuperar la esperanza en una época dominada por las distopías y el miedo al futuro. Socas explicó que su libro aborda cuestiones como el impacto de la inteligencia artificial, la exploración espacial, la posibilidad de colonizar otros mundos y los desafíos de una sociedad cada vez más tecnológica, defendiendo la necesidad de mantener una visión optimista para afrontar los grandes retos científicos y sociales del siglo XXI.
Alberto Aparici recurrió esta semana a su ya clásica "biblioteca" para hablar de optimismo científico a través del libro Horizontes de la civilización, del astrofísico Héctor Socas. Tras un recorrido por autores fundamentales como Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov y Arthur C. Clarke, la sección reflexionó sobre cómo recuperar la esperanza en una época dominada por las distopías y el miedo al futuro. Socas explicó que su libro aborda cuestiones como el impacto de la inteligencia artificial, la exploración espacial, la posibilidad de colonizar otros mundos y los desafíos de una sociedad cada vez más tecnológica, defendiendo la necesidad de mantener una visión optimista para afrontar los grandes retos científicos y sociales del siglo XXI.Conviértete en un supporter de este podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/mas-noticias--4412383/support.ESCUCHAR RADIO
15 minutos a cada 15 dias.No episódio de hoje, Edmara Galvão fala sobre a vencedora do International Booker Prize, sobre a programação da Feira do Livro, sobre as novas categorias de premiação da Academia Brasileira de Letras e de uma editora dedicada à publicação de quadrinhos indígenas.O episódio também traz uma Resenha Relâmpago da ouvinte Camila Nakamura sobre "A história de sua vida e outros contos", de Ted Chiang.Também teremos um longo bloco sobre todos os recebidos por aqui e que se acumularam. Tenham fé!---Links citadosEditora de quadrinhos nasce para valorizar narrativas autorais indígenasMariana Filgueiras: as Quirinas do Brasil - Livro Gratuito---RecebidosNo Baile do Juízo Final, de Susy FreitasCláudia Vera Feliz Natal, de Mariana Salomão CarraraTerra de empusas: uma história de horror no sanatório, de Olga Tokarczuk (tradução de Luiz Henrique Budant)Vocês brilham no escuro, de Liliana Colanzi (tradução de Bruno Cobalchini Mattos)O verão em que mamãe teve olhos verdes, de Tatiana Tibuleac (tradução de Fernando Klabin)O obsceno pássaro da noite, de José Donoso (tradução de Heloisa Jahn)Quirinas: a trabalhadora doméstica como protagonista na literatura brasileira contemporânea, de Mariana FilgueirasO dia das trífides, de John Wyndham (tradução de Bráulio Tavares)Contos completos, de Arthur C. Clarke (tradução de Aline Storto Pereira)O cálice contaminado, de Flavia de Lavor (tradução de Flavia de Lavor)A incrível viagem de Valentina, de Guilherme Kroll e Veridiana ScarpelliAté que a morte se disfarce: o silêncio sempre esconde mais do que revela, de Danilo Quartiero FilhoPássaro de fogo: o talismã de Yelnya, de Marcel BennetO cuidado dos sonhos: Histórias de folias e sombras, de Guilherme BoldrinContra a transparência: um ensaio, de Hamilton dos SantosEntre fogo e sangue, de Christopher Buehlman (tradução de Cássia Sgarabotto)Como os animais nos curam, de Jay Griffiths (tradução de Daniel Turela)Poesia 1902-1917, de Fernando Pessoa (compilação por Manuela Parreira da Silva, Ana Maria Freitas e Madalena Dine)O elemento, de Fido Nesti
The future of war has been evolving before our eyes in Ukraine, yet the west still plans to fight the last war. In this special episode, guest host Noah Smith (@noahpinion) and Brandon Anderson sit down with Yaroslav Azhnyuk (@YaroslavAzhnyuk), a serial tech founder who went from building PetCube to founding The Fourth Law, one of the world's most advanced AI-guided drone companies. Over two hours we cover the technology, tactics, and geopolitics of drone warfare, and why the modern battlefield has already left the West behind:* Yaroslav's personal history and the Ukraine war [00:01:04 – 00:14:01]* The modern drone tech stack: why FPV drones are the new god of war, the future of the rifleman, fiber optic vs. AI, five levels of autonomy, and the eight dimensions of the autonomous battlefield [00:14:01 – 01:05:13]* The geopolitics and economics of drones: China's manufacturing advantage, the drone race, Western defense readiness, countermeasures, and why the gap is widening [01:05:13 – 01:58:57]For those looking for Noah Smith's commentary, it really gets going around the 00:51:31 mark.Yaroslav Azhnyuk / The Fourth Law:* X: https://x.com/YaroslavAzhnyuk* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yaroslavazhnyuk/* The Fourth Law: https://thefourthlaw.aiNoah Smith:* Substack: Noah Smith * X: https://x.com/noahpinionTimestamps00:00:00 Cold Open: China's 4 Billion Drones and the Cameras-to-Explosives Pipeline00:01:04 Introduction: Brandon, Noah Smith, and Yaroslav Azhnyuk00:05:41 From Tech Entrepreneur to Defense: PetCube, Brave One, and the D3 Fund00:10:42 The Ethics of Building Weapons: Dual-Use Technology and the Wolf at the Door00:14:01 The Tech Stack: Cameras, Autonomy Modules, Interceptors, and a Semiconductor Fab00:18:47 Fiber Optic vs. AI: The Radio Horizon Problem and $32/km Cable00:25:32 FPV Drones: The New God of War — 70–80% of Frontline Casualties00:28:28 The Five Levels of Drone Autonomy: From Terminal Guidance to Full Autonomy00:41:37 The Eight Dimensions of the Autonomous Battlefield00:45:32 AI Safety and the Morality of Autonomous Weapons00:51:31 The End of the Rifleman? Noah's 2013 Prediction vs. Battlefield Reality01:05:13 China's Manufacturing Advantage and Western Vulnerabilities01:24:21 Policy Advice for Western Defense: Defense Valley and the Widening Gap01:32:54 The Drone Race: Who's Ahead, Category by Category01:41:57 Countermeasures: Shotguns, Jammers, Lasers, and Fishnets01:58:19 The Wedding and Final Takeaway: Be Prepared for WarTranscriptCold Open: China, FPV Drones, and the New Warning SignYaroslav [00:00:00]: Think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced 4 million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world. China can produce 4 billion of these FPV drones.Noah [00:00:10]: Would you say that right now China is now the supreme conventional military power on Earth, given its ability to manufacture and deploy drones in the quantity and quality that you just described?Yaroslav [00:00:20]: I don't think we have all the information to claim that but we cannot count it out, and that alone should be a big warning sign. As I say, at some point in my life I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story. And when you think about what your nation, what your patriots are going through, you realize that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back, and then the choice becomes very clear.Introduction: Yaroslav Azhnyuk, Petcube, and the Last Flight into KyivBrandon [00:01:04]: Welcome to Latent Space. I'm Brandon. I normally do science podcasts, but today we're going to do something a little bit different. I'm joined by Noah Smith of Noahpinion on Substack and Twitter. And he has lots of interesting things to say about drones. And as a guest, we have Yaroslav Azhnyuk, founder of The Fourth Law and several other, drone-related startups. To get started, it is February 23rd, 2022. You are running a pet startup. You're connecting pets with their owners. Let's go in just a little bit of background. How did you get started in tech, and what were you working on before the Ukrainian war started?Yaroslav [00:01:50]: Good to be here. Thank you. On February 23rd, late in the evening, 11:00 PM Kyiv time, my wife and I landed in Kyiv. Actually, then she was a fiance. We came from Lviv, where we were looking at a church, where our wedding should have taken place. And we got into this cab ride from the airport to our home, and the driver was like, “You crazy. Like, everyone's leaving Kyiv. Why do you come?” We're like, “What? Nothing's going to happen. Dude, chill.” And then obviously, eight minutes later, or eight hours later, the bombs fell in the city. It was quite surreal. We probably landed on the last flight that landed in Kyiv, or one of those last flights. My background, I'm a tech guy. Studied applied mathematics in Kyiv Polytechnics, born and raised in Kyiv. My parents are old PhDs from academia, and grandparents too. Like, everything, from linguistics to nuclear physics. And I'm an entrepreneur, so I've built a bunch of companies. Petcube is the one you were referencing. So I lived in San Francisco 2014 to 2020, building Petcube, which is one of the leading, pet device companies in the world, selling lots of pet cameras. And then, yeah, as I say, at some point in my life I went from making cameras that fling treats to pets to cameras that fling explosives to the occupiers. So that's the short story.February 24th: Leaving Kyiv as the Invasion BeginsNoah [00:03:28]: February 24th, I guess a few hours after you, go to check out your wedding chapel, what do you do?Yaroslav [00:03:37]: We had a plan for this situation. So my parents and family live in Kyiv, and we're like, “Okay, this has actually started. The worst has, come true.” And so we basically packed our belongings and got in the car and spent 17 hours driving west. And that was pretty sure most people in our audience watched at least one apocalyptic movie in their life, so that was exactly like that. Like, felt exactly like that. Missiles are falling. Like, there was smoke in Kyiv. Like, my dad and I went, like, to central part of the cities. It's probably, likeYaroslav [00:04:20]: 800 meters from presidential office, to pick some stuff up at his workplace. Because he's, like, the head of an academic institution, so he had to get some of the things with him. And super surreal. Like, the streets are empty. Like, the gas stations are out of gas. Like, we found some gas station. We didn't have, like, spare canisters with us, so we're like, We figured out, like, the car was diesel, so like, we figured out, if it's diesel, you can actually store it in plastic, canisters, and we bought some window wash for the cars. We poured it out of the canisters, and we poured the diesel into that. Yeah, so it was like that. And then, like, helping friends get out, like my friend and his dog. Like, we found Like, my brother was also, like, riding in a separate car. We found a place for my friend who didn't have a car. It was like, yeah, it was like, totally surreal. And we didn't know of course, and you didn't know this will last for so long. You didn't know whether Ukraine will be able to defend Kyiv. And it was like, yeah, very little information and very little insight into future.From Pet Cameras to Defense Tech: Building for Ukraine and the Free WorldNoah [00:05:42]: What are your thoughts with regards to how do you, defend, Ukraine? So you eventually start building drones Like, what is the process to get from there from where you were building, devices that connect owners with pets to building drones, and what other things did you do to help the war effort in the process?Yaroslav [00:06:07]: It's definitely non-trivial, right? Like, I didn't go, to I didn't get any, like, military education when I was a student. Like, normally, in Ukraine, you would, you would go to like, this military school even if you're getting higher education in any other, sphere. I decided to skip that which is like, an unusual way to go. And I never thought that I will be somehow engaged in a war effort. Like, what is war? Of course, wars are over. It's the end of history. So one thing you got to understand about, like, many Ukrainians and like, I guess, it's also true about most of the people I met here in the US, that your who you are in terms of your nationality is a big part of your identity. So when that gets under attack, it's something deeper than just the country you live in gets under attack, right? And I Day one, I figured I'm going to I'm going to fight back with everything I can, right? But I didn't think on day one that I'm actually going to do, weapons. And a bunch of things. We were reaching out to a number of American, congresspeople and senators, and basically advocating for support of Ukraine, for voting for lend lease, which has happened in May 2022, but didn't actually work as expected. We helped start, Brave One, which is now a very important defense innovation cluster, sort of like a DIU here in the US. We helped start, a fund called D3. It's like, it was started or co-started by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. So a bunch of these odd things, but then eventually I was like, “Okay,”by 2023 it was obvious this thing, A is going to last a lot more time, and B, that the whole world is shifting and that there's going to be a new arms race, that the warfare is redefined by drones as platforms. And for the first time in history, you have a platform that is software defined, that can increase your battlefield capabilities, in a in a step change just overnight. So it's like if you were able to push a software update and get all of your Roman legionnaires a new helmet? That has never been possible before. It's the first time in the history of war this is possible. So all of that and many other things like, supply chain fragilization, and the impact that AI is going to have on all of this all these things have become evident to me in 2023, and it's like, “Okay, I should do what I do best, or what I know how to do best, start a tech company, and sort of leverage the global techno capitalist machine, to provide, defensibility to Ukraine and the free world.” So that's literally the mission of the company, increase defensibility of Ukraine and the free world. And then there was some sort of soul-searching and like, asking yourself. It's like, “Okay, am I Actually, I know nothing about weapons. Am I actually, like, ready to make, things that other people use to kill other bad people?”Yaroslav [00:09:36]: When you think about what your nation, what your Compatriots are going through And think about all the terror of places like Bucha, the occupied cities in the east and south, the abducted children, the raped women, all the economic damage that's being done, and the intention to destroy a whole nation, to genocide the people of Ukraine, you realize that's the only morally right thing to do is to fight back, and it is immoral not to fight back. And then the choice becomes very clear. And look, we're just passing the ammunition. We're not doing the actual job. The actual fighters and defenders and heroes are people in the armed forces. We're just support.The Moral Question: Weapons, Responsibility, and Fighting BackNoah [00:10:33]: I have so many questions. Actually, I know you seem to have a question. Do you want to ask anything?Yaroslav [00:10:38]: No, I'm just listening. Go ahead.Noah [00:10:40]: I do want to talk about, some of let's say, the moral issues, like you just said. You endYaroslav [00:10:50]: I think there are no issues there.Yaroslav [00:10:52]: What would an example of a moral question be in this case?Noah [00:10:55]: No, I mean Okay. As you just said, you are creating the tools, but others are using them.Noah [00:11:05]: I was maybe thinking of having this conversation later, but one of the questions is like, is it actually you are going to be building them for your homeland, which you are building it for your homeland, which is I think, very a strong morally defensible position, but this technology is not going to stay with you, right?Noah [00:11:26]: This you will probably be selling these to other people Yeah. So the future is really where the moral issues may come into playYaroslav [00:11:38]: The this question becomes, easier and more complete if we ask this not about a particular technology or particular weapon, if we think that this question actually applies to any kind of technology Right? So -Knife or fire. You can use knife to do surgery and save people's lives, or you can use it as a weapon to take people's lives.Noah [00:12:06]: Cut tomatoes, too.Yaroslav [00:12:08]: Cut tomatoes too.Noah [00:12:09]: Yes, knife.Yaroslav [00:12:09]: That's helpful.Noah [00:12:10]: In Japan, sword and knife, they, call the same word.Yaroslav [00:12:14]: It's like, it's with any technology. Large language models, right? Look at how powerful they are and yet they're available to anyone in North Korea or in Russia.Yaroslav [00:12:29]: That's one side of the argument. The other side is As a maker, what is your responsibility for how the tools you're creating, will be used? There's definitely some responsibility, right? Then How should the decision process look like? Should you, like, try to calculate all the possible scenarios before starting to work on something? Or do you create something that is needed now to save people's lives, and then think about, addressing the unwanted edge cases later? In ideal world where there's like, or okay, it's not ideal world. In a mythical world where there is some one governing party and it gets to decide everything, and there is no other country, that can, decide on their own, you could say, “Well, we need to calculate for all the consequences, and only then, maybe build this building, by replacing this park because, maybe we need this park in the city,”right? So that kind of situation. But when you're in a situation where you're in a forest, in front of a wolf, you first going to deal with the wolf that wants to eat you, and then you're going to go consult Greenpeace. So that's kind of situation that Ukraine is in.The Fourth Law, Odd Systems, and Ukraine's Drone StackNoah [00:13:59]: Enough. Because this is a tech podcast, I did want to spend some time talking about, sort of the tech in that you've developed and what you've been working on. So can you explain, I guess, first of all, like, the problem that you were trying to solve from a technical standpoint? And I think, and then maybe, like, go into some of the solutions and some of the design process that led you from designing, little laser-guided, guiding lasers with a with an iPhone versus Having drones.Yaroslav [00:14:34]: Like, it so happened, that my partners and I, we sort of So I started one company called The Fourth Law, and its goal was and is to Make, massively scalable on-drone autonomy. And then In parallel with that together with my, Petcube co-founders, partners, and friends, we started another company called Odd Systems Which, was focused on making thermal cameras. Cameras, thermal cameras are seeing thermal radiation and are used to see at night. And we're now sort of those companies are getting closer and closer together and we're probably going to merge them. And this group of companies is currently the leading, team in on-drone AI and thermal imaging on the Ukrainian battlefield, and Likely one of the leading, if not the leading in the world. So We have these, like, three sort of business units, which are cameras, drone autonomy, and drones. So the cameras and drone autonomy sell daytime and nighttime cameras and different types of drone autonomous modules to other drone manufacturers, over 200 drone manufacturers in Ukraine. And then the UAV, business unit sells the drones themselves to the armed forces of Ukraine, Ukrainian government. And there are different types of drones. Those are sort of front strike, as we call them, so those are sort of FPV strike drones and the bombers, and then interceptors. And there are different kinds of interceptors. We do Shahed interceptors and we do ISR interceptors. We don't do the deep strike-FPV Drones, Interceptors, and Battery-Powered WarfareNoah [00:16:32]: What's an ISR interceptor?Yaroslav [00:16:33]: ISR is stands for intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and those are basically drones which are which, Russians are using to watch over positions and then communicate where, the targets are coming.Noah [00:16:48]: It's a reconnaissance.Yaroslav [00:16:48]: That's, the ISR is sort of a classical term for a for a reconnaissance drone.Noah [00:16:53]: Are all of these battery-powered drones that you just described? ‘Cause I know that the sort of deep strike drones still have, like Some sort ofYaroslav [00:17:01]: Internal combustion engine?Noah [00:17:02]: Internal combustion engine. Are all the things you're talking about battery-powered?Yaroslav [00:17:06]: What we're working on is all battery-powered, right? We don't do the deep strikes, right? And then in terms of autonomy-Noah [00:17:12]: You can catch a Shahed with a battery-powered thing. It's not Fast to catch.Yaroslav [00:17:17]: No, absolutely. Look, Shahed interceptor, like ours, it's called Zero, it goes up to 326 kilometers per hour.Noah [00:17:26]: For reference, how fast is a Shahed?Yaroslav [00:17:28]: Eight, like, in internal phase it could be 280, but in cruise phase it's, like, 220-ish.Yaroslav [00:17:36]: Yeah. And sorry, I'm not like you can convert that into miles if you're interested.Noah [00:17:41]: No, that's fine.Noah [00:17:41]: Multiply by two thirds or point six or something.Yaroslav [00:17:44]: That's easy. Yeah, I was saying that for autonomy modules, right, we, -We make systems, autonomous systems for frontline, for interceptors and some for deep strikes as well, and then different levels of autonomy. So from terminal guidance, which is like lasts 500 meters, give or take, to autonomous bombing, to autonomous target detection, to autonomous navigation and all of that across day and night, different terrains, different time of the year, different platforms like quadcopters and fixed wing, and maybe some other platforms. So it's quite a wide variety of products. We also have like our own simulation. We have our own training school for the war fighters. And we're about to start construction of two, semiconductor plants to make, sensors for thermal cameras. So that's super exciting for me as a computer science guy is Doing semiconductors. Super cool.Noah [00:18:49]: Like in terms of kind of core drone technologies, you basically are one is an FPV replacement without fiber optics, and the other isYaroslav [00:18:59]: YouNoah [00:18:59]: Signal tracking with interceptorsYaroslav [00:19:00]: With or without fiber optics. Fiber optics Is just like, sort of a communication module.Yaroslav [00:19:05]: You can, you can use classical analog, video link and radio link. Those would be two separate radios. You can do digital, or you can do fiber optic, and then fiber optic Has its own advantages but also adds weight and decreases, the distance and decreases, how fast you can, sort of turn and With a drone. Yeah.Noah [00:19:33]: Do you need AI for fiber optic drones?Yaroslav [00:19:36]: Like you can use AI for fiber optic drones. AI replaces a human, right? Fiber optic is making your communication link more resilient. So those are slightly different goals. Like if you want, you can have, AI controlling hundreds of fiber optic drones instead of having 100 operators for each.Fiber Optics, Radio Horizons, and Terminal GuidanceNoah [00:20:03]: I guess I thought that the key reason that people moved to fiber optic drones was for like electronic, countermeasures. Or I guess to counter those.Yaroslav [00:20:13]: I think that's a correct assessment from sort of a public awareness standpoint. In practice it's somewhat more difficult Because besides electronic countermeasures, you have these issues of a radio horizon For FPV drones, which means that asYaroslav [00:20:36]: I believe Earth is round Some people disagree. But basically if you fly a drone and you have a land station over here and a drone flying over hereYaroslav [00:20:49]: If your drone is flying high, you have good direct radio visibility. If your drone goes low, and usually, Russian infantry and vehicles, they're on the ground and you want to hit them, you need to go low. Lower you go, maybe you'll get behind a hill or behind a forest, and if you're far enough, you'll just get behind the curvature of the earth. You get into what's called a radio shadow. And then That is a real bummer because for the last, be it 60 or 20 meters, you won't be able to see anything and it will be very difficult to hit the target. So to counter that what-- And then the distances that these FPV drones, act on they're, they can be quite large. So for example, here in the US there was this drone dominance program competition, and in drone dominance the furthest distance was about 10 kilometers.Noah [00:21:44]: What was drone dominance? What was that competition?Yaroslav [00:21:47]: Drone, the drone dominance is a is a program started, by the US government, to accelerate the development of drone technology here in the US.Noah [00:21:57]: Got it. And the longest range thing they were using was 10 kilometers.Yaroslav [00:22:00]: Was 10 kilometers, right. In Ukraine, like if your drone doesn't fly at least 20, 25, it just, no one's interested in it, and the usual hits are happening. It was like, okay, many hits are happening between 30 and 40 kilometers, and that's what expected from a regular 10-inch, FPV drone. So at that distance, even at altitudes of like 60 to 100 meters, you might start losing, the link. So some of the earlier AI technology that was fielded in FPV drone was this terminal guidance technology. That was the first product that we ever, launched that helped you as an operator, once you see the target from two, three, 500 meters, you lock onto the target and then, it just, drives the drone towards the target no matter what, even after you lost the visual connection. So optic fiber solves that. However, if you want to go like 20 kilometers with optic fiber, that will add an extra three kilos, of useful weight to your drone. SoNoah [00:23:12]: ‘Cause the cable that you have to unspool as you go weighs.Noah [00:23:15]: It is heavy.Yaroslav [00:23:15]: At first, like the spool is about 800 grams, so a bit less than a kilo, and then, and then think about 10, 10 kilometer optic fiber is another kilo, something like that. That takes away from your useful mass and then now you have like, you need a 15-inch drone and it can only carry maybe one or two kilos of explosives if you want to go, 20 kilometers. If you want to go to 30 or 40, like 30 is probably max. 40 is like very problem problematic on optic fiber. And then the problem with optic fiber is it's actually getting super expensive. So and why? Because of all the data centers for AI. That's literally the same optic fiber-Noah [00:24:01]: We're running out of centersYaroslav [00:24:02]: That's being used there.Yaroslav [00:24:02]: Like when Ukrainians and Russians come to Chinese factories to buy the optic fiber, they're like, “We're out. We sold it out to the Americans.”? That's the craziest thing. So optic fiber went up in price from like, $4 per, kilometer to like, $32 per kilometer in a few months in the beginning of this year. And I'veBrandon [00:24:26]: Claude Code is stopping the Russian drone effort here.Yaroslav [00:24:30]: Ukrainian as well. Yeah.Brandon [00:24:31]: Ukrainian. But I read somewhere that the Russians had grown more dependent on fiber optic drones relative to the Ukrainians, and that's one reason why the Ukrainians have sort of regained the initiative in drones recently.Brandon [00:24:42]: How accurate's that?Yaroslav [00:24:43]: The Russians were the first ones to scale that. I think by as of now, Ukraine has caught up. I think, like, as of maybe three months ago, Ukraine is mostly caught up on fiber optic. Yeah.Brandon [00:24:57]: What percent of damage would you say is in terms of FPV drone damage would you say is now fiber optic versus, like autonomous?FPVs as the New God of War: Tanks, Artillery, and Cost per KillYaroslav [00:25:07]: For our, for our audience, I actually, I cannot answer that question. Like, it's like I know the answer, but I would not disclose that. But for our audience, I think another interesting fact is out of all the casualties on the front line Between 70 and 80% are done by FPV drones.Brandon [00:25:30]: FPV drones are the new weapon of universal weapon of warfare.Yaroslav [00:25:34]: It'sBrandon [00:25:35]: Land warfare, anywayYaroslav [00:25:35]: They used to say that artillery is a god of war because artillery used to cause, like 80% of casualties, and now On that ranking-Brandon [00:25:46]: FPVYaroslav [00:25:47]: FPV drones rule.Brandon [00:25:48]: FPV drones are the god of war.Yaroslav [00:25:51]: Sort of. Dethroned artillery. But it's not to say that artillery is not useful, is not needed. Like, all of these systems are needed. Maybe except cavalry, although Russians still use it. I know, have you seen the videos of Russians using mules and horses?Brandon [00:26:09]: What is the usefulness-Yaroslav [00:26:10]: It'Brandon [00:26:10]: Of a tank in the in the modern-Yaroslav [00:26:11]: That's where we need Greenpeace to say a word, but they're silent. Yeah.Brandon [00:26:15]: What's the use of a tank on the modern battlefield?Yaroslav [00:26:21]: It's diminishing.Brandon [00:26:22]: Diminishing.Yaroslav [00:26:22]: However, I think there might be technologies which will, revive the tank. Look, tank still provides you armor, and armor is important. Like, you still need to armor and firepower, right? Like, you can be an armor personal carrier that provides you, armor. The challenge that currently exists is armor is not very well protected against incoming drones. However, there are ways to do to protect it. We were previously talking about this before the podcast. The CEO of Rheinmetall, recently sort of ridiculed, Ukrainian drone industry, saying that like, there is nothing interesting there, no real innovation, no to stand Compared to like, Rheinmetall or Boeing, and it's all made by housewives. There was like, obviously a ton of memes about this people ridiculing the CEO of Rheinmetall. And one of the best quotes, I heard on this topic is from my friend, Alexey Babenko, who's, the head of and founder of VIARI Drone, which is one of the largest manufacturers of FPV drones. They're our partner. They're using our autonomy. So he said that the drones we manufacture in one day will be more than enough to destroy all the tanks Rheinmetall manufactures in a year.Yaroslav [00:27:52]: Then, yeah, cost-wise, of course, a drone is like, $500 and a Rheinmetall tank is what, probably 5 million-ish or maybe more.Brandon [00:28:00]: Don't mess with those housewives.Yaroslav [00:28:03]: Drone wives.Brandon [00:28:04]: Drone wives.Yaroslav [00:28:06]: That's it.Noah [00:28:06]: There's a classic saying that everyone always fights the last war.Noah [00:28:12]: Yet do How did So from your standpoint, how did we get to the point where tanks became irrelevant in at least for now In a matter of just a few years?Yaroslav [00:28:24]: Look, I think it's the same way, how do we get to the point that calculators become irrelevant?Yaroslav [00:28:31]: Now we have iPhones. Like, why would you need a calculator? Technology progresses and its influence grows non-linearly. It's all exponential. So I can tell you that full autonomy, when you put it on a drone Look, so if you, if you think about a tank and a like, it's not a direct comparison, but even, like, a drone and a artillery shell or like, sort of cost per kill, an artillery shell for 155 caliber, which is a standard NATO caliber Currently market price is about $4,000 per piece. So compare that to say, $400 per drone. That's 10 times more expensive. Account for the amortization of the artillery gun and for how vulnerable it is and what is the sort of tactical, capabilities it gives you as compared to a drone. You'll figure out that an FPV drone is maybe three orders of magnitude, more versatile, more useful, more capable than artillery and many of than a classic artillery. Many of Because there are different types of artillery. Not just, like, one 155. You have mortars, you have all that. But give or take, roughly three orders of magnitude maybe. Again, it doesn't have that firepower. It's not one-to-one comparison still.Yaroslav [00:29:53]: Now, take that FPV drone. When you put full autonomy on that FPV drone, which can be not very expensive, like systems that we're, producing are like, in hundreds of dollars of pure bombFull Autonomy: From Human Pilots to Smartphone-Directed Drone MissionsNoah [00:30:06]: Just interrupt. You said full autonomy Just a second ago you were saying that the autonomy here is guidance, right? It's not decision-making.Yaroslav [00:30:14]: No, I was I was saying that's the f-First and sort of easiest pieces of autonomy that was fielded by us. But if you, if you add full autonomy to a droneBrandon [00:30:24]: He, I think he's asking what does it can you, for the listeners, can you explain What the term full autonomy means?Yaroslav [00:30:29]: Basically, I think a good way to think about an FPV drone is like an iPhone of warfare. It's, like, very inexpensive, very mass producible, very versatile. You don't need a bunch of other things when you have a iPhone in your pocket. You don't have, need an MP3 player, you don't need a calculator, don't need other things. All right? So FPV drone is an iPhone. Or like, okay, Apple please don't sue me, is a smartphone. And then, when you add autonomy to it sort of becomes like Uber or ride sharing. Okay? So what it means is instead of actually being a trained pilot who has this complex remote controller device which requires a couple months of training to actually pilot the drone, and then having to pilot it for 30 minutes, flying towards the target, et cetera, et cetera, now you basically, you have your smartphone, you have a drone, you pick your smartphone, you say, “We are here. The bad guys are here. Go and get them.” And the drone goes up, flies in a given direction, localizes itself on the map, finds the dedicated area where they, the bad guys are supposed to be sees the bad guys, bombs them, return, like, watches, so does a damage assessment, returns back, sits down, and then you can pick it up and watch the video if you didn't have the radio link, right?Noah [00:31:59]: That's a bomber drone.Yaroslav [00:32:00]: That's full autonomy for a bomber drone, right?Noah [00:32:03]: You're saying that no human decision is made in this entire process?Brandon [00:32:06]: That's not, that's not what he's saying.Yaroslav [00:32:07]: A human decision was made at the beginning of the process-Noah [00:32:09]: I get it. I get itYaroslav [00:32:09]: The same way as you would fire an artillery.Yaroslav [00:32:12]: When you fire an artillery, you don't stop at like, 500 meters away from a target and ask it whether, you want to strike or not. That's exactly, a human decision is always made at some point. So when you do that's full autonomy, and such full autonomy is happening as we speak. And such full autonomy increases the capabilities of an FPV drone, which is already, like, three orders more powerful than an artillery shell. Full autonomy increases its capabilities by four orders of magnitude because now you can have 100 times as many people who can use it, because you don't need to train those people, and this is important. You can have 10 times, mission success rate, and you can have 10 times utility per drone because now instead of being one-way kamikaze, it's, it can be a bomber.Brandon [00:33:05]: Now wait, let's, you said 10 times mission success rate, which means that fully autonomous bomber drones succeed in their missions 10 times more often than human piloted bomber drones do. That's an important thing to know.Noah [00:33:17]: Maybe, to push back onBrandon [00:33:19]: They're super, they're superhuman. They're, they' 10X superhuman.Yaroslav [00:33:22]: They're not vulnerable to electronic warfare. They don't care about the radio horizon. They don't lose track during navigation. They are not susceptible to human error when, an artillery shell or other drone blows up besides you and you're like, “Hell no,”like, “I'm getting out of here.” Right? That doesn't happen to an autonomous drone. Like, all of those things. Like, we have, like, one of the brigades that's using our drones with just first level autonomy They literally said that their success rates-Brandon [00:33:53]: What's first level autonomy?Yaroslav [00:33:54]: First level autonomy is just the terminal guidance.Yaroslav [00:33:57]: By the way, we have video of that. We can watch that.Brandon [00:33:59]: Terminal guidance means a human gets it nearby and then the AI takes over.Yaroslav [00:34:03]: The human flies it all the way, like 30 kilometers towards the target, and obviously the target was probably given to that human by someone who's flying some ISR drone, some reconnaissance drone, right? So all the way to the target, and once you see the target from a distance of 500 meters, you do target lock, and from there drone flies autonomous. So just that feature alone, it has increased the guy's, his call sign is Grom, so it has increased his, mission success rate, like precision of mission, yeah, mission success rate from 20% to 71%, and it also increased his kill zone from three kilometers to 10 kilometers, which means there's certain area around the front line which is designated kill zone. Whenever enemy goes into that area, it's almost guaranteed to be to be destroyed by a drone. And then obviously the drones are not launched from like, the zero line. They're usually launched from like, minus 10 kilometer-Mission Success, Failure Modes, and the Five Levels of AutonomyBrandon [00:35:03]: What is a zero line?Yaroslav [00:35:05]: Zero line is sort of an imaginary line of control, of two conflicting forces.Brandon [00:35:14]: It's important to explain these things to a lot of the listeners who areYaroslav [00:35:17]: Thank you for askingBrandon [00:35:18]: Familiar with warfare.Noah [00:35:20]: Myself.Noah [00:35:20]: I'm one of those listeners.Brandon [00:35:20]: You said that level one autonomy, in other words just terminal guidance, just, like, human gets it to the finish line and then it goes over the finish line, increases mission success from 20 something percent to 71%, or something like that.Yaroslav [00:35:33]: Increases the kill zoneBrandon [00:35:34]: Increases the kill zoneYaroslav [00:35:34]: Three kilometers to 10 kilometers.Brandon [00:35:36]: Got it.Yaroslav [00:35:36]: On both parameters-Brandon [00:35:37]: What is full autonomy, dude? AndNoah [00:35:38]: Actually on real quick, can we define mission success and like, maybe in a way, what are the failure modes of missions?Brandon [00:35:44]: I have a guess what mission success is.Noah [00:35:46]: But I couldBrandon [00:35:47]: Get ‘em.Yaroslav [00:35:49]: No, but that's a very good question, in fact, because, even if you fly into the target, well, first the target can be damaged or destroyed. Those are two different modes. Then there can be different targets. A sole infantryman is one kind of target. A dugout where supposed there are some, enemies there is another kind of target, and a some mechanical equipment is another type of target. Radio emitting equipment, which, like, often, like, the targets that the military want to get more than anything else is the some enemy radio tower or something like that or some small radio dish that really makes life difficult in that area, in that combat area. So those are different targets, right? It can be destroyed, can be damaged.Then sometimes, the drone hits but doesn't explode. Like, that happens. And then, there are other failure modes. You didn't even reach the target because you were A jammed by electronic warfare; B, you lost the control over drone because of the radio horizon; C, you were jammed by a different type of electronic warfare that happens way before You hit the target area. It's, impacting your, video receiver. So like jamming on video or jamming on control are two different types of jamming. Then something malfunctioned on a drone, just a mechanical malfunction, maybe like a motor broke or like, whatever. So all of those are different failure modes. Yeah, or maybe you got lost, you're navigate navigating to your, to your target. That happens, too.Noah [00:37:41]: The Level one autonomy, basically you manage to point in a direction.Noah [00:37:49]: You go there, and then the last mile The drone taking over.Yaroslav [00:37:52]: We define this like, I define that but it sort of got picked up by the industry. We define five levels of autonomy. So level one is terminal guidance. It's what we just discussed. Level two is bombing. Level three is autonomous target detection and engagement decision. Level four is autonomous navigation. And level five is autonomous takeoff and landing.Noah [00:38:15]: Those are good things to knowYaroslav [00:38:16]: Those are five levels of autonomy. Now, if youNoah [00:38:19]: I have a question for you.Yaroslav [00:38:19]: Sorry. Like, let me finish withNoah [00:38:21]: SorryYaroslav [00:38:21]: Theoretical part.Noah [00:38:23]: What is Tesla running at right now?Yaroslav [00:38:25]: Tesla?Noah [00:38:25]: No, sorry.Yaroslav [00:38:26]: That's very good point. Like, it's exactly, it was inspired by the levels of self-driving autonomy.Noah [00:38:32]: Waymo's level five, right?Noah [00:38:35]: You just tell it where you want to go, it picks you up, and then you go there.Yaroslav [00:38:36]: I think, like, if you, if you look at the classic definitions of self-driving cars, Waymo is still, like, level four because it still requires even remote, but still, like, human control. It's like if Waymo gets in trouble, there is an operator who takes over and resolves this. So that would still be a level four. It doesn't map directly, but it's also five levels.Brandon [00:38:58]: Can I, can I interject a question here? In terms of an FPV drone that's like a suicide drone that'll just blow itself up killing something, how do what it hit? Like, does it, just transmit back, or do you sort of like, lose track of it and hope it hit? Like, what happens to that?Yaroslav [00:39:16]: That's a great question. SoBrandon [00:39:18]: You need another droneYaroslav [00:39:19]: Like, the current battlefield in Ukraine is saturated with different types of drones. So obviously you have all the FPV drones and last year alone, Ukraine manufactured about 4 million of these, and then Russia's maybe, like, 20% less than that. And for this year, the publicly voiced target was 7 million on Ukrainian side. So it's, like, serious numbers. We're getting in serious numbers here. And then besides those, there are different, reconnaissance drones, ISR as we call them, and there are sort of tactical level ISR where we, both Ukrainians and Russians usually use, Mavic, drone by DJI. And then there are a bunch of locally produced drones, which are sort of fixed wing drones that can stay in the air for much longer than Mavic, maybe, like, half an hour. And then, there are drones that can stay for many hours or even up to a day. And those drones have, are more expensive, have more expensive cameras, et cetera, et cetera. We hunt those drones that Russians launch. The Russians hunt our drones, and so on. But ideally, when you, are a group of soldiers operating an FPV, you'll have someone in your, company, or someone in your platoon who has an ISR asset that will do target designation for you. They'll say, “Oh, like, there's a Russian vehicle over there. Go and get him.”and you go there, you get it, and they're like, “Okay, confirmed.”Battlefield Surveillance and the Eight Dimensions of AutonomyBrandon [00:40:57]: Those guys are watching. They have their own drones in the sky.Yaroslav [00:40:59]: Target destroyed. They have, like, a carousel of drones because One Mavic cannot stay more than 30 minutes. ItBrandon [00:41:06]: They're constantly surveilling the battlefield.Yaroslav [00:41:07]: Almost every spot on the battlefield.Yaroslav [00:41:11]: It's not always the case. Sometimes you will not have a surveillance asset, so then you would launch another FPV just to confirm that there was a hit. Then if you see there was a hit and you're not sure if it completely destroyed, you maybe hit again for good measure.Brandon [00:41:26]: You double tap.Yaroslav [00:41:28]: That's how it works. But I was about to give you another sort of piece of taxonomy. So you have five levels of autonomy, right? Then you have sort of eight dimensions of autonomous battlefield. So what is eight dimensions? It's crucial to understand how autonomy evolves in a modern, battlefield environment. So dimension number one is level of autonomy. What are the capabilities that your asset has? Dimension number two is the platform you're operating on. So it can be a quadcopter, a fixed wing drone, different types of maybe, like, a long range drone or short range drone, but it can also be a missile. You can have autonomy even on an artillery shell or a ground vehicle or a sea vehicle. So all of those are different platforms. Level three would be domain. So it's ground to ground or ground to air as an intersection, or ground to sea or sea to air. They're all, like, all the nuances with different domains. Then level four, would be higher levels of autonomy, such as swarming, drone carriers, drone nests, et cetera.Brandon [00:42:39]: Now when you're saying level, you're talking about dimensions, not about-Yaroslav [00:42:42]: Sorry. YeahBrandon [00:42:43]: Autonomy levels. So dimension four.Yaroslav [00:42:43]: The dimension. Yeah, I used to say I was supposed to say dimension. I say dimension because each of them works with another, right? So you might have, like third level autonomy, fixed wing drone operating in land to air, and stuff like that right? And then operating in a swarm or operating from a nest. Right? Then you have, sort of dimension number five is environment. So is it day or night? Is it summer or winter? Is it, humid, cold, dry? What kind of target is it? Is your target hiding in a forest, or is it, behind a hill or within buildings? So all of that is environment. Then you have, dimension number six is command and control. How are you dealing with or like, tens of thousands of those assets around the battlefield? How are you coordinating that on the higher levels of command? How are you collecting data? All that.Yaroslav [00:43:44]: Dimension number seven would be infrastructure, so things like simulation, data collection tools, security, deployment mechanisms, et cetera. So all those systems have to be developed separately and integrate with all the others. And finally, dimension number eight is sort of distribution. Have you deployed 100 of these systems or 100,000 of these systems? Because those are two very different ballgames. So that now gives you a more broad overview of how autonomy propagates across the battle space.Targeting, Human Responsibility, and Rules of EngagementNoah [00:44:23]: As someone who has done machine learning and had gone out of distribution and had things, go horribly wrong, you were talking several of these, kind of axes of thinking about drone warfare seem like they could be very susceptible to some sort of distribution shift if you start making things autonomous.Yaroslav [00:44:41]: Like what?Noah [00:44:41]: I mean Well, first ofYaroslav [00:44:43]: If the I'm very interested Sort of sort of kinds of scenarios that you're thinking about.Noah [00:44:48]: Like the most obvious one is you, if I assume these are computer vision guided systems for at least the last mile, how do you ensure that oh, well, like you now have some fog roll in or something, and you, the drones just attack the wrong thing? Or maybe, it probably will not turn around and fly back and attack you, but youYaroslav [00:45:10]: Same, the same, the same question, how do you ensure that your mortar fire hits the right thing? Well, it's like mortar fire, give or take half a kilometer could be plus or minus. So maybe you fire one, and then you fire another. So drones are actually, much better in being precise in those scenarios. And I think, to your point, I think five to 10 years from now it will be immoral to use weapons without AI.Yaroslav [00:45:44]: ‘Cause weapons without AI will be more likely to cause, collateral damage or unwanted damage. Same way, it will be immoral to drive your own car manually on a public road because it's more likely to cause, unwanted damage.Noah [00:46:02]: Wow, I never considered that mightBrandon [00:46:04]: Really? That's definitely coming.Yaroslav [00:46:07]: Anyway.Brandon [00:46:07]: No, but that' I don't know, it's an obvious, an obvious thought. I agree with you.Brandon [00:46:12]: I, No, they, obviously they're not going to let you drive once most of the cars on the road are autonomous.Noah [00:46:17]: No, that one, don't I believe.Yaroslav [00:46:19]: No, I think you were you were talking about drones, right?Brandon [00:46:21]: The drones, right. Cool.Yaroslav [00:46:22]: The weapons, right?Brandon [00:46:23]: Friendly fire and collateral damage and stuff like that is all minimized with AI.Brandon [00:46:27]: Here's my question. Take all let's go to level six autonomy. Let's take all of the target selection. Let's take all the battlefield data, integrate it into one big AI, and have that big AI basically be in command of the battlefield And agentically do target selection.Yaroslav [00:46:44]: Be the general, right?Brandon [00:46:44]: It's a general. It's, you've cut humans out of the loop except maybe as dexterous robots, repairing drones and fastening things to drones or maybe something like that because you don't have those robots yet. How soon are we there? AI general.Yaroslav [00:46:58]: The most important thing to ask ourselves is who will be faster to that us or our adversaries?Brandon [00:47:07]: I assume us, but how fast will we be to that? I hope us.Yaroslav [00:47:11]: I hope so too.Brandon [00:47:12]: How fast can we Like when are we looking at that in terms of like horizons years?Yaroslav [00:47:18]: Like technically, it could be done now. The question is of course, there's, some engineering work to be done. The bigger challenge is deployment. Right? So okay, technically Like operation in Iran, right? They, the publicly, it was claimed that I think Palantir system was used for target designation, et cetera, et cetera. So it is not exactly as you say, the AI makes all the decisions, but basically AI goes through all the data you have, gives you these 1,027 different targets and says, “You-- To confirm, please press Okay.” And you look at the targets and you're like, “Yeah, sounds right. Press Okay.”so that's, I think that's where we are now already, or we were a couple weeks ago as we're recording this on April 10th. Another question is how massively deployable it is. Is it, like, every decision being made like that or is it, like, just some of the decisions made like that? And then different levels of command and control. There you have, like, the platoon, the company level, the battalion, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But the tricky thing here when we get into that territory, the tricky thing is If your enemy is getting advantage of being Thousand times faster than yourself by deploying such systems What do you do?Yaroslav [00:49:10]: You got to-Brandon [00:49:12]: The if the enemy is a thousand times faster than you at deploying those systems?Yaroslav [00:49:16]: Like, if enemy starts deploying level six autonomy, as you call And you have not started doingBrandon [00:49:22]: You're in troubleYaroslav [00:49:23]: Yes, exactly. So you have to catch up. So my point is that it is very important to think about the safety of these systems, but that thinking should not slow you down in developing them because they are critical for your existential, survival, right? And like, one person who doesn't think, doesn't get to think about the ethics of the war is a dead person. That person surely doesn't get to think about that.Brandon [00:49:52]: What would be the safety risk of such a system?Yaroslav [00:49:55]: Of course-Brandon [00:49:56]: Friendly fire?Yaroslav [00:49:56]: Just wrong decisions, right?Brandon [00:49:59]: I see.Yaroslav [00:49:59]: Maybe, these decisions-AI Command Decisions, Dead Zones, and Complex BattlefieldsBrandon [00:50:06]: Skynet AI decides it's going to useYaroslav [00:50:08]: No, these-Brandon [00:50:08]: Drone army to kill usYaroslav [00:50:09]: Decisions will not only be made about drones. They are likely to made about what the humans should do on your side as well. Then obviously some environments are more like Ukrainian-Russian war, where you haveBrandon [00:50:26]: It will have to choose to risk lives. It will have to choose to sacrifice human lives-Yaroslav [00:50:28]: Of courseBrandon [00:50:29]: On your side.Yaroslav [00:50:29]: Of course. And then some environments are just, like, dead, like, dead zones and there are no civilians there, or virtually no civilians close to the front line because, like, super dangerous. Everyone has evacuated from there. But there are other environments which are more like, okay, there's a counterterrorist operation. There's, like, a group of terrorists or a group of civilians. Or like, it's like the recent operations in Iran, I imagine that the US and Israeli forces do not want to harm civilians. They only targeted the military targets there, right? So in those situations, it's a different level of responsibility for that decision-making as well. And then there is just such a big variety of those military missions, and I'm not even, like, well-informed or well-educated in military science to tell you about all those scenarios. We would need to put some general besides me, and maybe a Ukraine general and American general would have told you very different stories about these things.Brandon [00:51:34]: Got it. Can I ask a few more questions? All right. So in 2013, I wrote one of my first, paid articles ever was about how the era of drones will change human society. I was just sitting around bored thinking about things.Yaroslav [00:51:54]: You were way ahead of your time.Brandon [00:51:55]: I said, I said, “The following will happen.”Yaroslav [00:51:57]: It's, this article is real. I've read it.Yaroslav [00:51:58]: It's actually-Brandon [00:51:59]: I said small autonomous, suicide drones, will cleanse the battlefield of human infantry. Human infantry will not be able to stand against swarms of AI-powered, suicide drones. That was I didn't even know about, like, AlexNet at the time, I think.Yaroslav [00:52:19]: You're just an avid sci-fi reader.Brandon [00:52:23]: I'm an avid sci-fi reader, but also, like, it's not Like, there will be a way to do that. It's a it's a nonlinear multidimensional search problem, and you get enough compute, you'll find some search algorithm that will get you there. And soBrandon [00:52:38]: I, yeah, I think that one sentence describes the bitter lesson right there.Brandon [00:52:41]: It's just like it's a multidimensional search space. You search it somehow. I don't know. Figure out some get a grad student-Yaroslav [00:52:47]: Sooner or laterBrandon [00:52:47]: To make a search algorithm.Brandon [00:52:48]: It's not that hard. Anyway, so but then, but I guess the point is The point is that human infantry on the battlefield will be will be gone at the end. I wrote that in 2013. Many people on social media laughed at me for that called me hysterical, said things like, “Electronic warfare will knock all the drones out of the sky.”like, “You need humans to hold ground.”that's something you still hear from a lot of people on social media today. I feel that this article that I've written has never been directionally wrong. It has gotten more and more right steadily over time, and that we're very reading the battlefield reports from Ukraine, where, human infantry are basically guy, like a few guys hiding in dugouts for months, and I'm not sure what they're doing.Yaroslav [00:53:35]: That's on Ukraine's side. On the Russian side, that's just like a zerg rush.Brandon [00:53:38]: The zerg rush, and then they just die. Then, but they have some guys in dugouts too, right? Like hiding in dugouts for months.Yaroslav [00:53:45]: They have. Yeah.Brandon [00:53:45]: Like, but that like, what are those guys doing in the dugouts? Are providing, like, frontline, like, reconnaissance? Like, what are they doing?Yaroslav [00:53:54]: If there is a guy in a dugout with some bullets and automatic weapon, the other guy cannot come and take the that dugout. That'Brandon [00:54:07]: I seeYaroslav [00:54:08]: They are they're establishing control over territory.Brandon [00:54:10]: I see. So that is so there still is a use for human infantry on the battlefield as of today.Yaroslav [00:54:15]: LikeBrandon [00:54:15]: How long will that last?Yaroslav [00:54:17]: I think it will last for a while. This is funny. There's this whole Layer of the modern culture, a modern Ukraine culture built around the war-related stuff. So there is this -Punk rock band, that is called SZC, I guess in English that would be. Which stands short for like a deserter or something like that. So anyhow, this band has a song titled “2030.” It's basically about the year 2030, and the war still goes on as like the whatever, third world war or whatever. And they basically, they, sang about the AI and like cyborgs and everything, but the simple infantry is still needed, and we're still, like, getting cold in those dugouts, and we're still doing our job. That's sort of the theme of the song. And it seems like that's actually what's going to happen. There areGround Robots, Simulation, and the Limits of World ModelsBrandon [00:55:30]: Ground robots will not replace humans in the dugouts soon.Yaroslav [00:55:34]: I'm very much interested in following the whole humanoid robot theme andBrandon [00:55:39]: What about like a dog robot?Noah [00:55:41]: Or just mobile controlled platforms or something.Brandon [00:55:44]: Spider robot, yeah.Brandon [00:55:45]: Everything evolves into a crab.Brandon [00:55:46]: You build a crab robot.Yaroslav [00:55:47]: A humanoid-Noah [00:55:48]: The carcinization of warfare.Yaroslav [00:55:51]: There is a lot of utility in humanoid robots because the world is designed around humanoids. So I would not, like, 100% disqualify the possibility that sometimes 10 years in the future, humanoid robots, will be actually fighting. So that's an actual Terminator kind of scenario.Brandon [00:56:14]: Yeah, in the first Terminator movie, you look at what they've got on the battlefield, they've got flying bomber drones and humanoid robots.Yaroslav [00:56:20]: Look, the cost of large language models of running them is getting so low, you can have basically an inexpensive computer running, what was a state-of-the-art model a year and a half ago, running it locally on a device with an open source model, which also means that the Chinese can have it, the Russians can have it, the North Koreans can have it, et cetera. So that is already possible. And with when we're looking at the acceleration of the neural nets, I would've, if not the acceleration of the large language models, I would've said that I don't think that humanoid robots will be able to be useful in the battlefield earlier than in 10 years. But if you account for the exponential, it might be five years or so. The problem with all of the autonomous systems, and it's like starts with self-driving cars and even with all the AI, like modern day AI agents, to make them really, useful, you have to solve such a long tail of edge cases, that it's really difficult to make them useful. Like we were promised, self-driving cars, what, like 2007, Sebastian Thrun and Google, and even before that all the challenges, everything. And Elon of course told us it's going to be one year from 2014, and now we still don't have self-driving Teslas everywhere. We have Waymos in SF and some other places, but they're still, like, not perfect. So I think, I expect something similar from self-flying drones and fully autonomous drones, and we saw that firsthand as with each level of autonomy that we're adding, there is a very wide distance between a prototype and something that is ready to be scaled to millions of units and something that has been scaled to millions of units. But the race with like AI coding tools is just insane. So things might accelerate very fast, faster than we can imagine.Noah [00:58:46]: I think your point is that with due to this long tail behavior Level one autonomy as you've defined it, is actually very natural. Like you basically are just solving an image recognition and tracking system.Yaroslav [00:59:02]: It's actually interesting that you say it that way, and I thought about this the very same way, and we have this joke that there are like 200 companies in Ukraine which are trying to solve last mile, targeting or terminal guidance. It seems like we're like the only company that actually solved that because even that problem-Noah [00:59:22]: I'm not saying it's, I'm not saying it's trivial, but it's at least something that you imagine given our current state.Yaroslav [00:59:26]: Like us and Eric Schmidt, like Eric Schmidt's companies are pretty good.Yaroslav [00:59:29]: Like, I actually have lots of respect to what they're doing, and they're, they have been practically influential and helpful on the battlefield, and they have good engineering.Noah [00:59:38]: I wasn't, I wasn't saying it's trivial. I'm just saying this is a something naturally adaptive based upon things that we know work, well. But some of the other domains that where you do have to make decisions and you have a long tail become much harder, and you worry about edge cases more.Yaroslav [00:59:57]: Like the more, the more complex behavior you're trying to simulate, the more edge cases there are right? The more ways to do it wrong there are. And then there are different approaches. It's like if you think about, if you read academic papers about robotics, right? You sort of the robot is represented as something that has the sort of sensor input, and then you have three, levels of sort of logics or decision-making, which are perception, planning, and control, and then you have actuators as output.So pre-neural nets, you would do perception output and control all with classic logics, right? Then, with AlexNet and computer vision, you could do perception with neural nets and the rest with logic. You cannot currently do each of those separately with neural nets, each of those separately with logics, or you can just have one huge neural net that just takes lots of sensory data. It's not just pixels. Could be sound, could be accelerometer, could be everything, as input, and just outputs the controls. And some of the self-driving car companies are doing that or like, experimenting between different ways of doing that. So you can also, like, think about that and the way you implement those features, also influences how much degrees of freedom the system would have, right? Like control, you can do it classical algorithmic control with common filters and PAD filter, PAD controllers, et cetera, or you can do a neural net, that was trained in a gym with a reinforcement learning, et cetera. And those would be two different behaviors of a system.Noah [01:01:53]: I-- Maybe my point was just much more high level. It'Yaroslav [01:01:56]: Or you can If you go even like, if you go high level, you can, you can like train to like have whatever, like Feifei Li and folks who are doing like physical, sortBrandon [01:02:08]: World modelsYaroslav [01:02:08]: World models, right, physical intelligence, they're trying to make these big models and sort of understand the world and then supposedly you have such model and you can tell a drone, “Okay, like, go over that hill and like, find the bad guys and then get them,”or “Make me a video, make me a photo of the guy smiling and get back to me.” Right? That's one way. Another way you have like these subsystems, like one is navigation, another is finding the person, another is like getting to them to take a photo. And those are again, very different behaviors. And then it's not that one is necessarily better than the other, and we might have more technological ability to do one or another. But all of those systems will exist. And then again, you should always keep in mind that it's only the not only the good guys that are developing these systems, the bad guys are developing these systems as well.China's Drone Supply Chain and the West's Manufacturing GapNoah [01:03:00]: I guess where I'm going with this back to Noah's original thought with the end of the end of the soldier. And so in order to replace-Brandon [01:03:10]: Or at least the end of the rifleman.Noah [01:03:11]: Or the end of the rifleman, yeah.Yaroslav [01:03:13]: I'm not seeing that very close, and it was like I'm, as much as I'm a lover of sci-fi and all of that and a technologist, the more I try to beYaroslav [01:03:27]: Like the I try to have certain humility about these things, and like the military, domain and there was just so much human history and blood and tears, dedicated to sort of understanding this art of war and perfecting it and so on. There is so much knowledge in there that I don't feel like I even started to comprehend, a lot of that. But one thing that I really understood is that even though drones are now making eighty percent of the casualties, you go to the actual officers, you talk to the actual, like, brigade commanders, corps commanders, and they explain to you, how all of it fits together, how when you're thinking about an operation that involves a couple thousand people to get this piece of land, out of the enemy's hands, deoccu deoccupy it, how it is so complex, it involves, dozens of different types of drones and then land operations and reconnaissance operations, psychological operations and then aviations and tanks and logistics and all kinds of these different assets. So modern warfare is really very complex, and the fact that the drones are the latest, coolest thing, and then the AI is latest, coolest thing, doesn't mean that now it's that and only that right? So yeah. Whoever's looking into that I think should realize that it's not just what the press talks about, that the reality is much more difficult, much more complex.Brandon [01:05:17]: Let's talk about China and China's manufacturing capabilities. So suppose that someone, like suppose the United States went to war with China. AndYaroslav [01:05:26]: I hope not.Brandon [01:05:27]: I hope not as well. And then but suppose that drones were very essential to that war of all the types of drones that we're talking about here, and that suppose that China said, “All right, well, you need X and Y and Z, to make those drones to fight us, and we control the production of X and Y and Z, so we're just going to cut you right off, and now you have no drones.”Brandon [01:05:47]: I know that a number of countries, including Ukraine and Taiwan, have been making moves to China-proof their drone productions that China couldn't do that. Examples of things they might be able to cut off might include rare earths, fiber optic cable that you were talking about before, various other things that where even if they don't control one hundred percent of the production, they control enough of the production that would be extremely expensive to produce it without relying on Chinese sources. Or the market's fragmented enough, et cetera. What do you see as China's key bottlenecks, and how easy are those to overcome in terms of China-proofing drone production in case of a war against China?Yaroslav [01:06:30]: Let me start with a saying that -Although China does not sell directly to Ukraine and it does sell directly to Russia, a lot of Ukrainian supply chains, they start in China, right?Yaroslav [01:06:49]: We're not in a conflict with China, and we would not want to be in a conflict with China. And we'd hope that China stays a neutral power between Ukraine and Russia and the US as well. That said, the scenario that you're describing, everything is much worse.Yaroslav [01:07:11]: Think about this. Last year, Ukraine produced four million FPV drones. Ukraine is not the most industrious nation in the world.Yaroslav [01:07:19]: China can produce four billion of these FPV drones.Yaroslav [01:07:23]: China can make them not drones with propellers, but fixed-wing drones, which go not forty kilometers far, but maybe two to three hundred kilometers inland.
Devadesátá léta byla rájem pro konspirační teoretiky – svět se teprve začal propojovat skrz internet, a tak nejrůznější pozorování nevysvětlitelných jevů s sebou nesla určitou „romantickou“ auru.Co když nejsme ve vesmíru sami? Co když v jezeře Loch Ness žije prehistorický plesiosaurus? Co se doopravdy děje v Bermudském trojúhelníku? Má v tom prsty CIA, Sověti nebo snad Muž s cigaretou? Tohle byly záhady, které řešil nejen Arthur C. Clarke, Erich von Däniken, ale především Mulder a Scullyová v kultovním seriálu Akta X. Dnešní konspirační teorie jsou ve srovnání s touhle dobou spíš už jen smutné a otravné.My se v tomto podcastu přeneseme právě do té „lepší“ doby – do doby, kdy jsme s napětím sledovali v televizi znepokojivou znělku napínavého seriálu, zatímco nám po zádech běhala příjemná husí kůže. Spolehněte se, že to dnes bude nostalgické, napínavé a plné těch nejlepších záhad.Podcast Naše filmy vychází pravidelně jednou měsíčně. Prvních 15 minut je pro všechny k poslechu zdarma, zbytek podcastu je dostupný pro patrony. Chcete se se stát patronem? Čeká na vás mnohem víc bonusů! Více najdete zde https://www.patreon.com/retronationcz.
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. Robert A. Heinlein Robert A. Heinlein was the author who many people claim kicked off the Golden Age, though that can be the subject of many a barroom argument. E.E. “Doc” Smith was already an established writer by this time, and A.E. van Vogt was contemporaneous with Heinlein. But Heinlein managed to outshine everyone in very short order. He was widely known as “The Dean of Science Fiction Writers,” which testifies to his stature in the community, and along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov he was one of the Big Three of the Golden Age. He was the first person to be named a Science Fiction Grand Master in 1974. Four of his novels won Hugo Awards (Double Star, Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), and 7 more works were given Retro-Hugo awards, which are awarded for works that were written before the Hugos were established. He also had many more works nominated for both awards, as well as many other awards like Nebula Awards. In short, he was a big deal to the science fiction community at large, and to me personally. I was, for a short time, managing the web site for The Heinlein Society, and I have read every work of his that I am aware of. Heinlein Background Robert Anson Heinlein was born in 1907 in Butler, Missouri, and grew up in Kansas City, Missouri, which he described as the middle of the Bible Belt, and this background is reflected in some of his stories, particularly the later ones. His family tradition had it that the Heinlein's had fought in every American war beginning with the War of Independence, and Robert and his brothers all joined the armed forces. Robert lied about his age when he was 16 in order to enlist in the Missouri National Guard, and a few years later obtained an appointment to the Naval Academy, graduating in 1929 with the equivalent of a bachelors degree in engineering (the Naval Academy did not award degrees at the time). His engineering background is very apparent in his writings. He served on several ships, rising to the rank of Lieutenant, before being discharged in 1934 due to pulmonary tuberculosis. It seems likely that if he did not contract this illness he would have continued his career in the Navy, and with World War II coming, well, who knows what might have happened. But he did get ill, and had to find things to do. He notably got involved with Upton Sinclair's socialist organization EPIC (End Poverty in California). He ran for office unsuccessfully, running as a left-Democrat in a conservative district. And while he had a disability pension from the Navy, he turned to writing to pay off his mortgage. Heinlein's Writing Heinlein was originally known as a “hard” science fiction writer, meaning one who puts plausible and accurate science at the heart of the story. But looking at his entire career, he was equally comfortable writing fantasy, though not the faux medieval kind that many writers. In fact, he coined the term “speculative fiction” to describe the kind of stories he wrote. And if he wanted to he was quite capable of mixing the hard science and the fantasy, particularly in his later novels. And his output was very substantial. Asimov wrote more than Heinlein, but Heinlein stuck to fiction, while Asimov wrote in a variety of fields, so Heinlein's output in the general area of science fiction/fantasy is the greater. And he is known for works of all lengths from short stories to novels. A useful guide to his works is the book Robert A. Heinlein: A Reader's Companion, by James Gifford. This book covers all of his science fiction/fantasy works known as of 2000, and gives additional information about the writing and circumstances of the stories. But in 2003 an early work was discovered and published. It was a novel called For Us The Living, and while you can see the germ of Heinlein's style in this novel, it is also a very early work written in 1938 and is not one of his best. He would get a lot better than this. In any case, it was not published at the time, and is mostly of interest to Heinlein superfans or scholars. Heinlein got his real start in 1939 with a short story called Life-line, which was published in John W. Campbell's Astounding magazine. Isaac Asimov had published a few stories by this time, and his first for John W. Campbell's Astounding was in the previous month, July 1939, so as you can see this was a very fertile time in the development of the genre. Heinlein's story was about a scientist who developed a technology to predict a person's time of death. This totally threatens the insurance industry, and one of the CEO's put out hit on the scientist, which he of course already knows about having tested himself. This is not the best short story, but it was quite competent, and John W. Campbell immediately asked for more. More short stories followed. In the November 1939 issue of Astounding the story Misfit appeared. It introduces the character of Andrew Jackson “Slipstick” Libby, a young man with little education but a great ability to do mathematics in his head. And his ability turns out to be just what is needed during a construction project in space when things go wrong. And in 1940 he had 9 more stories published. And at this point he faced a problem. He was becoming so prolific that for a number of reasons he had to employ pseudonyms for some of his stories. One reason was that he couldn't have too many stories in one magazine in his name, it made the editor look bad. In any case all of the stories are now published under Heinlein's name. And of the 9 stories, 6 were either nominated for or won Retro Hugo awards, and several also won Prometheus Hall of Fame Awards, for the best libertarian or anti-authoritarian works. So you can see that his was a talent that exploded on the scene, so that you could legitimately divide the science fiction history into pre-Heinlein and post-Heinlein periods. 11 more stories of various lengths followed in 1941, and 5 in 1942. There were mostly short stories, but a few novellas and novelettes appeared. But he was really a short fiction writer at this time, and there are some extraordinary stories in this group. He was the most successful writer of speculative fiction of the time, and passed along some advice to anyone who wanted to be a successful writer. Heinlein's Rules of Writing Because he was so successful, it should come as no surprise that aspiring writers frequently wrote to him for advice, and in response he formulated his Rules of Writing. This is taken from his On The Writing of Speculative Fiction : You must write. Finish what you start. You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order. You must put your story on the market. You must keep it on the market until it has sold. He goes on to say in this article : “The above five rules really have more to do with how to write speculative fiction than anything said above them. But they are amazingly hard to follow—which is why there are so few professional writers and so many aspirants, and which is why I am not afraid to give away the racket!” This is very good advice, but as Heinlein points out his rules are indeed hard to follow. For example, Rule #1: You must write. Many people want to be a writer, but not as many really want to write, and there is a very distinct difference. Just as many people want to be a rock star, but don't want to spend years dead broke playing in dive bars to get there. But it is also fair to point out that Heinlein was a rare talent, and I doubt if simply following his rules would make anyone else a similar success. They are good rules, no doubt, but Heinlein was already very familiar with and well-read in the field before he started writing. That finishes this particular exploration of where Heinlein came from and how be began his career. And since it all started with short fiction, I next want to focus on that. beginning with his Future History. This starts our look at the works of Robert A. Heinlein, the third of the Big Three authors of the Golden Age. Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_A._Heinlein https://www.amazon.com/Robert-Heinlein-Readers-Companion/dp/0967987407 https://www.amazon.com/Us-Living-Comedy-Customs/dp/074325998X/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Writing_of_Speculative_Fiction https://www.palain.com/science-fiction/the-golden-age/robert-a-heinlein/ Provide feedback on this episode.
In the summer of 1998, Hollywood delivered two versions of the apocalypse within eight weeks of each other, and the story of how that happened is almost as dramatic as either film.Deep Impact, directed by Mimi Leder and released on 8th May, had been in development since the late 1970s, tracing its origins to producers Richard Zanuck and David Brown's desire to remake the 1951 sci-fi film When Worlds Collide. The project was ultimately merged with Steven Spielberg's adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's The Hammer of God, before Spielberg, occupied with Amistad, handed the director's chair to Leder.What emerged was a deliberately restrained disaster film, one less interested in the mechanics of impact than in the texture of grief: how ordinary people, politicians, astronauts, and estranged families face the end with or without dignity. With scientific consultants including comet co-discoverers Carolyn and Gene Shoemaker, and ILM's groundbreaking digital tsunami, the film earned genuine respect from the astronomical community and grossed a respectable $349 million worldwide on an $80 million budget.Armageddon, released on 1st July under Disney's Touchstone Pictures banner, was a different creature entirely, and was, by most accounts, a direct competitive response to Deep Impact.Michael Bay's film was shot in just sixteen weeks, with unprecedented government and military access, under enormous studio pressure. Where Deep Impact depicted skilled astronomers, Armageddon hired oil drillers and sent them to space. Where Leder's film earned praise for plausibility, Bay's is famously scientifically inaccurate in many ways. Despite this, Armageddon grossed $553 million worldwide, topped the year's global box office, eventually received a Criterion Collection release and four Oscar nominations. Deep Impact did not.Both hinge on sacrifice, on families torn apart by cosmic indifference, on the question of who gets saved and who doesn't. Both were shaped by real cosmic events, which shook the scientific community and governments into action and Hollywood into a race to dramatise the unthinkable. One film aimed for the gut; the other aimed for the conscience.That Armageddon won commercially while Deep Impact won critically, and that Mimi Leder's career faltered, while Michael Bay built a franchise empire, tells you not just about the summer of 1998, but about which kinds of spectacle Hollywood, and audiences, are willing to reward.Everything wrong with Armageddon – Everyday Science StuffSupport Verbal DioramaLoved this episode? Here's how you can help:⭐ Leave a 5-star review on your podcast app
Stefan Niklas zur Ästhetik des Planetarischen. Shownotes Stefan Niklas Stefan Niklas an der Universität Amsterdam: https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/n/i/s.niklas/s.niklas.html?cb sein Forschungsprojekt “A Planetary Aesthetics for the Future Democratic Society”: https://asca.uva.nl/research/funded-research-projects/niklas/niklas.html zu Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gayatri_Chakravorty_Spivak zu Dipesh Chakrabarty: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipesh_Chakrabarty Chakrabarty, D. (2022). Das Klima der Geschichte im planetarischen Zeitalter. Suhrkamp. https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/dipesh-chakrabarty-das-klima-der-geschichte-im-planetarischen-zeitalter-t-9783518587799 zu Herbert Marcuse: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse Marcuse, H. (1977). Die Permanenz der Kunst. Wider eine bestimmte marxistische Ästhetik: Ein Essay. Hauser Verlag https://www.marcuse.org/herbert/publications/1970s/1977-die-permanenz-der-kunst.html zu Theodor W. Adorno: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno Adorno, T. W. (1973). Ästhetische Theorie. Suhrkamp. https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/theodor-w-adorno-aesthetische-theorie-t-9783518276020 zur Frankfurter Schule: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurter_Schule Simmel, G. (2023). Soziologische Ästhetik. Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-40939-5 zu Arthur C. Clarke: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke zu Ursula K. Le Guin: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_K._Le_Guin zu Octavia E. Butler: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavia_E._Butler zu den K-Gruppen: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-Gruppe zu Ernst Bloch: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Bloch zu Michel Serres: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Serres zu Rafael Correa: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Correa zu Bruno Latour: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruno_Latour Latour, B. (2009). Das Parlament der Dinge. Für eine politische Ökologie. Suhrkamp. https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/bruno-latour-das-parlament-der-dinge-t-9783518295540 Ferdinand, M. (2021). Decolonial Ecology. Thinking from the Carribean World. Polity. https://www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?book_slug=a-decolonial-ecology-thinking-from-the-caribbean-world--9781509546220 zum Ministerium der Kultur, Dekolonialisierung und Depatriarchalisierung in Bolivien: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Cultures_(Bolivia) Schaupp, S. (2024). Stoffwechselpolitik. Arbeit, Natur und die Zukunft des Planeten. Suhrkamp. https://www.suhrkamp.de/buch/simon-schaupp-stoffwechselpolitik-t-9783518029862 Newitz, A. (2023). The Terraformers. Tor Books. https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250228017/theterraformers/ Scott, J. C. (2025). In Praise of Floods. The Untamed River and the Life it Brings. Yale University Press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300278491/in-praise-of-floods/ Robinson, K. S. (2023). Das Ministerium für die Zukunft. Heyne Verlag. https://www.penguin.de/buecher/kim-stanley-robinson-das-ministerium-fuer-die-zukunft/taschenbuch/9783453322868 zu Joseph Beuys: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Beuys zur Sozialen Plastik: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soziale_Plastik zu KPOP Demon Hunters: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/KPop_Demon_Hunters Nick Psomas an der Universität Amsterdam: https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/p/s/n.psomas/n.psomas.html Marcuse, H. (1969). An Essay on Liberation. Beacon Press. https://monoskop.org/images/2/27/Marcuse_Herbert_Essay_on_Liberation.pdf zum ökologischen Fußabdruck: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%96kologischer_Fu%C3%9Fabdruck zu Murray Bookchin: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Bookchin zur Erdsystemwissenschaft: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erdsystemwissenschaft Brunner, C. (2020). Epistemische Gewalt. Wissen und Herrschaft in der kolonialen Moderne. transcript. https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-5131-7/epistemische-gewalt/ zu Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing-Games (MMORPGs): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massively_Multiplayer_Online_Role-Playing_Game zu demokratischem Konföderalismus: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demokratischer_Konf%C3%B6deralismus zum Hambacher Forst und den Protesten gegen dessen Rodung: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hambacher_Forst zu Anna Kornbluh: http://www.annakornbluh.com/ Relevante Future Histories Folgen S3E55 | Kim Stanley Robinson on Real Utopian Futures https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e55-kim-stanley-robinson-on-real-utopian-futures/ S03E45 | Luise Meier zu kommunistischem Utopisieren https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e45-luise-meier-zu-kommunistischem-utopisieren/ S03E44 | Anna Kornbluh on Climate Counteraesthetics https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e44-anna-kornbluh-on-climate-counteraesthetics/ S03E28 | Silke van Dyk zu alternativer Gouvernementalität https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e28-silke-van-dyk-zu-alternativer-gouvernementalitaet/ S03E19 | Wendy Brown on Socialist Governmentality https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e19-wendy-brown-on-socialist-governmentality/ S03E12 | Jens Schröter und Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle zu Computerspielen als transformationskritischen Medien https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e12-jens-schroeter-und-manuel-scholz-waeckerle-zu-computerspielen-als-transformationskritischen-medien/ S03E08 | Simon Schaupp zu Stoffwechselpolitik https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e08-simon-schaupp-zu-stoffwechselpolitik/ S03E07 | Stefan Meretz und Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle zum Simulieren von Utopien (Teil 2) https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e06-stefan-meretz-und-manuel-scholz-waeckerle-zum-simulieren-von-utopien/ S03E06 | Stefan Meretz und Manuel Scholz-Wäckerle zum Simulieren von Utopien https://www.futurehistories.today/episoden-blog/s03/e06-stefan-meretz-und-manuel-scholz-waeckerle-zum-simulieren-von-utopien/ Future Histories Kontakt & Unterstützung Wenn euch Future Histories gefällt, dann erwägt doch bitte eine Unterstützung auf Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/join/FutureHistories Schreibt mir unter: office@futurehistories.today auf Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/futurehistories.bsky.social auf Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/futurehpodcast/ auf Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@FutureHistories Webseite mit allen Folgen: www.futurehistories.today English webpage: https://futurehistories-international.com Episode Keywords #StefanNiklas, #JanGroos, #Interview, #FutureHistories, #Utopie, #Science-Fiction, #Sci-Fi, #Kapitalismus, #Narrative, #ScienceFiction, #Cli-Fi, #ClimateFiction, #KlimaKonterÄsthetik, #Planet, #Sozialismus, #Planetarisch, #Ästhetik, #Simulation, #StoffwechselPolitik, #Postkolonialismus, #Posthumanismus, #Gesellschaft, #ÖkologischeTransformation, #Zukunft, #ErdSystemWissenschaften
"La estrella" (1955), un cuento de Arthur C. Clarke.
Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) by: Jerome K. Jerome Something to Do with Paying Attention by: David Foster Wallace The Leopard by: Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa Rendezvous With Rama by: Arthur C. Clarke
Ya está aquí el capítulo 287 de «Audiolibros y Relatos» y regresa El Crítico Cítrico, el spin-off más afilado del programa. En esta ocasión, Xavi y el incombustible Emilio Dollar Baby se adentran en el universo de Arthur C. Clarke para analizar uno de sus relatos más profundos y sobrecogedores: “La estrella”. Ciencia ficción, reflexión… y ese toque de crítica ácida que nunca falta, mientras exploran un viaje que pone a prueba la fe, la razón y el lugar de la humanidad en el cosmos. Como siempre, con humor, con estilo… y con alguna que otra dentellada. Con Xavi Villanueva y Emilio Dollar Baby. Síguenos en Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AudiolibrosyRelatos !Nuevo episodio! Ya puedes disfrutar de EL CRÍTICO CÍTRICO. Arthur C. Clarke en ABISMOfm.
Andre Norton is one of the pivotal figures in the history of science fiction and fantasy and remains eminently relevant for modern readers. She was a prolific writer, authoring more than 300 titles spanning a career from the 1930s to the 2000s. She was one of the earliest writers to create stories of a post-nuclear apocalyptic dystopia and works of post-humanism yet kept a thread of hope and optimism. In her lifetime, Andre Norton was recognized by her readers and her peers as a towering figure, receiving a World Fantasy Award for Lifetime Achievement and being named a Grandmaster by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association among other accolades. She was also the first writer to be invited to contribute to the Dungeons & Dragons universe. Sales of Norton's work in her lifetime rivalled George R. R. Martin, Arthur C. Clarke, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. And yet, Andre Norton has become somewhat obscure, an unsung Ohio writer who flourished during her lifetime and deserves renewed attention. Today's podcast episode will hopefully entice you to delve into her work and to help fulfill her final words: “I just don't want to be forgotten.” Don Boozer, Coordinator of the Ohio Center for the Book and Manager of the Literature Department at Cleveland Public Library, hosts this episode. He's joined by Dr. Jeff Karem, a Professor of English at Cleveland State University, to illuminate the life and work and Andre Norton. Dr. Karem received his Ph.D. from Yale University, and his research and teaching focus on exploring the contributions of diverse regional and ethnic writers and works on 20th century American Literature. To view photographs and documents relating to Norton, see this episode's accompanying blog post, “The Imaginative History of Andre Norton.” Page Count is produced by Ohio Center for the Book at Cleveland Public Library. For full show notes and an edited transcript of this episode, visit the episode page. To get in touch, email ohiocenterforthebook@cpl.org (put “podcast” in the subject line) or follow us on Instagram or Facebook.
Este es un relato contenido, casi austero. Y sin embargo, bajo esa aparente simplicidad, se esconde una reflexión muy poderosa sobre el aislamiento, la fragilidad de la experiencia humana y la indiferencia del universo. - Narración: Juan Carlos Albarracín - Locución Sintonía: Antonio Runa - Música: Epidemic Sound, con licencia - Imagen: Pixabay, con licencia https://pixabay.com/es/illustrations/marte-planetas-fondo-de-pantalla-7518243/ ----- Contrata tu IVOOX PREMIUM anual desde este enlace y además de obtener un suculento 50% de descuento y de poder escuchar TODOS los programas de esta plataforma sin publicidad, estarás ayudando a sostener Los Cuentos de la Casa de la Bruja: https://www.ivoox.vip/premium?affiliate-code=27e5799d254c8a29ecdab3d8d5bfa96f ----- Los Cuentos de la Casa de la Bruja es un podcast semanal de audio-relatos de misterio, ciencia ficción y terror. Cada viernes, a las 10 de la noche, traemos un nuevo programa. Alternamos entre episodios gratuitos para todos nuestros oyentes y episodios exclusivos para nuestros fans. ¡Si te gusta nuestro contenido suscríbete! Y si te encanta considera hacerte fan desde el botón azul APOYAR y accede a todo el contenido exclusivo. Tu aporte es de mucha ayuda para el mantenimiento de este podcast. ¡Gracias por ello! Mi nombre es Juan Carlos. Dirijo este podcast y también soy locutor y narrador de audiolibros, con estudio propio. Si crees que mi voz encajaría con tu proyecto o negocio contacta conmigo y hablamos. :) Contacto profesional: info@locucioneshablandoclaro.com www.locucioneshablandoclaro.com También estoy en X y en Bluesky: @VengadorT Y en Instagram: juancarlos_locutor CONVOCATORIA ABIERTA – Los Cuentos de la Casa de la Bruja. ¿Eres escritor o escritora y te gustaría escuchar uno de tus relatos narrado en el podcast Cuentos de la Casa de la Bruja? Estoy abriendo la puerta a autores emergentes que quieran compartir relatos originales dentro del tono del programa: historias de terror y ciencia ficción con atmósferas inquietantes, elementos fantásticos, oscuros o insólitos, y una cuidada calidad literaria. ¿QUÉ TIPO DE RELATOS BUSCO? • Relatos de terror y ciencia ficción • Con una extensión de entre 3.000 y 4.000 palabras • Con una narrativa sólida, buen uso del lenguaje y que se presten a ser narrados en voz • Textos originales e inéditos (o que al menos no estén vinculados a compromisos editoriales) ¿CÓMO PARTICIPAR? Puedes enviar tu relato en formato Word o PDF a info@locucioneshablandoclaro.com con el asunto: Relato para el podcast. Acompáñalo, si quieres, de una pequeña nota biográfica para que pueda presentarte adecuadamente. IMPORTANTE: La recepción de un relato no garantiza su publicación. La selección dependerá de criterios narrativos, temáticos y de estilo, siempre con el objetivo de mantener la atmósfera y el nivel que caracterizan al podcast. ¡No se trata de emitir juicios definitivos sobre ningún autor o texto! Yo no soy crítico literario, ni pretendo serlo. Se trata de encontrar aquellos textos que mejor encajen con el universo del programa. Si tu relato es elegido me pondré en contacto contigo. En caso contrario agradeceré igual tu confianza y el gesto de compartir tu trabajo. Gracias por hacer crecer esta casa con tu obra. ¡Espero leerte! Juan Carlos “Corman” Albarracín Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
Le numéro de cette semaine est lié au précédent qui, rappelez vous, se terminait par The Gathering en 1998 . Celui-ci débute par sa chanteuse de l'époque : ANNEKE VAN GIESBERGEN qui vient de publier un nouvel EP intitulé "La Mort". Rien de dangereux à y tendre une oreille, bien au contraire et vous pourrez transformez l'essai en live. En effet Anneke est en tournée mondiale pour célébrer les 30 ans de sa première participation au sein de The Gathering, sur l'album "Mandylion" en 95 avec quelques dates en France, dont notre Hellfest en juin ! Yvan Jacquin, chroniqueur (Webzine Pavillon), musicien, producteur est à l'initiative de plusieurs projets, comme Raging Project, Psychanoïa ou pour ce qui nous intéresse dans ce numéro FOREIGN. Un rock- opéra en deux parties intitulé "The Symphonie Of The Wandering Jew" dont le premier volet est paru en 2014 (le second en 2020). Deux extraits de la première partie viennent d'être réenregistrés dont celui que je vous proposais ce soir : "Activated" avec au chant l'américaine AMANDA SOMMERVILLE (une voix à tomber ! ). Amanda que vous avez peut-être déjà entendue si vous êtes fan de métal symphonique, notamment au sein de Kamelot ou Epica. Cette nouvelle version de "Activated" a été mixée et masterisée par Andy Menario (Secret Rule) et le résultat est magnifique ! Pour celles et ceux qui n'auraient pas écouté l'émission en direct, jugez en par vous même avec ce replay et pour les autres, n'hésitez pas si comme moi vous lui avez trouvé un petit goût de "reviens-y" ! L'autre extrait réenregistré sera bien entendu diffusé d'ici la fin de la saison ! Flash back en 1970 avec les légendaires MOODY BLUES. Fort des talents de leurs multiples compositeurs qui se respectaient (et aussi il faut bien le dire, à l'instar de nombre de leurs collègues de cette époque, de quelques substances illicites) l'album "A Question Of Balance", dont le support état alors le vinyle (je dis ça pour les plus jeunes ! ), proposait en face A de poser des questions existentielles sur le monde et en face B d'apporter des élément de réponse. Reste un album indispensable à toute bonne discothèque d'aficionados de cette musique des seventies ! L'actu de ces derniers jours a été un peu éclaircie par cette aventure spatiale "Artemis II". Alors j'aurais évidemment pu vous passer "The Dark Side Of The Moon" qui aurait été tellement de circonstances, mais la ficelle eut été un peu grosse (rassurez-vous ami.es du grand Floyd, on aura bien des occasions ! ) et d'ailleurs les astronautes ne semblent pas avoir confirmé les textes de Waters ! Mais pour rester dans ce thème spatial, j'ai laissé s'exprimer Bill Anders depuis sa capsule d'Apollo 8 en orbite autour de la Lune pour la première fois, en 1968. On lui doit d'ailleurs aussi à cette occasion la première photo d'un "lever de Terre". La voix de Mr Anders depuis l'espace fut gravée sur l'album "Songs From Distant Earth" de MIKE OLDFIELD, musique inspirée du roman SF d'Arthur C. Clarke qui à même fait l'honneur au Maëstro de rédiger quelques notes sur la pochette de l'album publié en 1994. Extrait de circonstance donc ! Encore un peu en apesanteur avec Calogero … Euh pardon KING CRIMSON ! Un titre extrait de l'album THRAK sorti à la même époque. Après un retour l'année précédente (Vroom 1994), THRAK est donc dans les bacs et ne boudions pas noter plaisir à voir Robert Fripp réactiver (et ce n'état pas la première fois après une très longue pose) sa machine progressive et à qui l'on doit quand même le "lancement officieux" de notre courant musical de prédilection ! Pour l'anecdote, durant l'inactivité de Roi cramoisi avant 94, son guitariste Adrian Belew avait collaboré avec Oldfield sur l'album "Earth Moving" en 1989, prestation évidemment remarquable ! Une "ancienne" nouveauté, c'est pas banal. Mais c'est le cas pour cet album : "Where My Heart Lies" par les néerlandais THE SUNDAY GOOSE. La formation a vu le jour en 2009 et l'élaboration de ce 1er opus fut laborieuse, notamment en raison de difficultés personnelles traversées par ses membres. Pourtant finalisé en 2014, suite à la rupture du groupe, l'album ne sort pas et ce n'est qu'après retrouvailles entre les musiciens que ceux-ci le publient uniquement sur les plateformes en 2025 et ce jour même (9 avril) sur CD. Et mieux vaut tard que jamais car c'est un disque réussi de beau rock progressif symphonique, accessible, bref je le commande et vous le recommande ! Place à une petite trilogie "french touch" avec d'abord une formation recommandée mais que de toute façon vous connaissez forcément si vous me faites l'honneur d'écouter régulièrement ce programme : CYSEV. Au départ le duo est composé de CYrille et SEVerine rejoints depuis par Joslin. Leur nouvel EP "The World As Home" est un régal, une musique difficilement classable, originale et indépendante et (comme les textes) inspirée. Un nouvel extrait dans ce numéro pour vous en convaincre ! Pas sur que les membres de notre trio était nés lorsque ATOLL publiait son 1er album en 1974. Moi Oui (enfin pas depuis trop longtemps non plus !!). On entre là dans le chaudron magique du rock progressif français avec ce groupe qui ne survivra pas vraiment à la décennie dorée (si ce n'est quelques reformations ponctuelles et partielles). La discographie d'ATOLL se fait rare (vive les conventions et autres foires au disques ! ) et je vous proposais ce soir la face B d'un extrait de ce 1er opus "Musiciens Magiciens". Voici un groupe que j'ai découvert il y a quelques années en préparant cette émission. Ils sont excellents mais pour leur faire quand même un reproche, quelle attente interminable d'un nouvel album ! Il semble que les vœux des fans soient prochainement exaucés puisque WEEND'Ô a annoncé la sortie de leur 3ème galette originale en 2026. J'espère donc avoir de bonnes nouvelles la prochaine saison ! En attendant, retour sur leur album acoustique paru l'année dernière "Bridge Of Heart", dans lequel on retrouve avec plaisir des versions "unplugged" de quelques un de leurs titres précédents dont "Ayleen" , enregistré s'il vous plait dans le studio d'un certain Francis Cabrel ! (voici le lien vidéo ICI ) Régulièrement je vous emmène en Italie et pour ce numéro, direction Naples. Un groupe qui, comme tant d'autres dans ce pays, a connu une carrière très éphémère mais qui a laisse une trace indélébile dans cette branche transalpine du rock prog : IL BALLETTO DI BRONZO. Un extrait de leur 2ème et ultime galette qui doit son succès à l'arrivée du claviériste Gianni Leone, lequel va changer la donne au sein de la formation. Cet album " YS", paru en 1972 a pour thème une légende celtique autour de "Ker Ys" ville engloutie par l'océan et qui selon les contes, se serait trouvée au large de Douarnenez. Attention la la musique de cet album n'a en revanche rien de celtique, influencée plutôt par ELP et les sonorités typiques de cette belle musique progressive à l'italienne ! Pour conclure ce numéro, on ne change pas d'année, 1972 toujours, avec URIAH HEEP et l'album "Demons And Wizards" que bon nombre de fans considère comme l'apogée de la formation, initialement taillée pour le hard-rock mais à cette époque surfant (avec talent) sur la vague du rock progressif. On a plaisir à réentendre sur cet album la voix de feu David Byron, premier chanteur du groupe, poste tenu aujourd'hui toujours par Bernie Shaw, loin de démériter ! Thierry Joigny AMAROK, chaque jeudi, à 20h
Send us Fan MailWhat makes science fiction so powerful? And why do these stories stay with us long after we've finished them?In Episode 103, we explore the minds that helped shape the genre. From early works like New Atlantis and Somnium to the groundbreaking stories of H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip K. Dick, this episode dives into the ideas, predictions, and strange realities that define science fiction.Then, for the first time, I share my own journey into the genre—what inspired me, how the story developed, and what it took to bring my first novel to life.Featuring a live reading from Drawn to the Stars: Book One — The Exchange.Two planets. Two wars. One connection that could decide everything.Support the show
In this episode, Crystal gets distracted from the investigation to nerd out about a dead Italian neuroscientist whose name she cannot pronounce, explains why your brain is basically running malware that makes you afraid of the one thing that could help you, overshares about her butthole, makes a case for why the craziest sounding people in this community deserve a microphone just as much as the credible ones, references Jesus and Allen Dulles in the same train of thought then cuts it not because it sounds too crazy but because she ran out of tape, same reason she butchers a famous Arthur C. Clarke quote ya'll will never hear, plays distracting background piano because low production quality is a tradition on MM, and then has the F-ing audacity to ask you to reach out when she already admitted she won't respond for weeks. Also something about worms and the return of Christ. Standard Tuesday. If that is what day this really is. If you're lonely and this is hard and everyone thinks you're nuts: moremorgellons.com. Go leave a message. She'll get back to you. Eventually. Probably. Also, lovingly but getting almost a little annoyed at this point: Put the tweezers down.
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A inteligência artificial escreve bem, responde rápido e parece entender tudo. Mas será que entende mesmo? Neste episódio, partimos de HAL 9000, de 2001:Uma Odisseia no Espaço, para explorar um fenômeno curioso do nosso tempo: máquinas que soam inteligentes… e pessoas cada vez mais dispostas a acreditar. Com Asimov, Bradbury e Arthur C. Clarke como guias, refletimos sobre um risco silencioso da era da IA: quando a aparência de inteligência começa a substituir o pensamento humano.
Weirdumentary has a forward by Stephen Bissette who wrote a book also likely to be of interest to listeners: Cryptid Cinema (affiliate link) (A follow-up to that book is under construction and will include research by your's truly about the "4-walling" tour of the PGF.) I linked to Feral House's page for Weirdumentary above at the request of Gary. If you're curious about their catalog, we talked with their owner recently about monstrous food and they also produced Al Ridenour's new book about Carnival. This is not a complete list of the films in the book - and it also covers a few TV series including In Search Of... and Arthur C. Clarke's _____ (he had three ITV series covering topics similar to ISO with each season getting a slightly different name). 1970: Chariots of the Gods, The Unexplained 1971: The Hellstrom Chronicles, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow 1972: Bigfoot Man or Beast, Monsters! Mysteries or Myths?, The Devil's Triangle, The Legend of Boggy Creek 1973: In Search of Ancient Astronauts 1974: Deadly Fathoms, In Search of Ancient Mysteries, In Search of Dracula, UFOs: Past, Present and Future 1975: Mysteries from Beyond Earth, The Force Beyond, The Legendary Curse of the Hope Diamond, The Man of Miracles, The Outer Space Connection 1976: Beyond Belief, In Search of Noah's Ark, Mysteries of the Gods, The Amazing World of Psychic Phenomena, The Legend of Bigfoot, The Legend of Loch Ness, The Miracle Healers, The Mysterious Monsters, World Beyond Death 1977: Aliens from Spaceship Earth, Journey into the Beyond, Mysteries of the Great Pyramid, The Lincoln Conspiracy, The Underground Doctors, The Unknown Force 1978: Are We Alone in the Universe?, Beyond and Back, Curse of the Mayan Temple, Manbeast! Myth or Monster?, Mysteries from Beyond the Triangle, Mysteries of the Mind, Mystery of the Sacred Shroud, Secret of the Bermuda Triangle, The Amazing World of Ghosts, The Late Great Planet Earth, The Lost City of Atlantis, The UFO Journals, UFO - Exclusive! , UFO: Top Secret, Unknown Powers, World of the Unknown 1979: Attack from Outer Space, Charles Berlitz's The Bermuda Triangle, Death: The Ultimate Mystery, Encounter with Disaster, Hypnosis and Beyond, In Search of the Historic Jesus, The Doomsday Chronicles, The Prophecies of Nostradamus, UFOs Are Real, World of Mystery 1980: Arthur C. Clarke's Mysterious World (TV), Land of Celtic Ghosts, Mysteries of the Mind, UFO Syndrome 1981: Search for the Titanic
In This Episode: Apple announcements. Coding with AI. Copyright and AI. This week the TEH Podcast is hosted by Leo Notenboom, the “Chief Question Answerer” at Ask Leo!, and Gary Rosenzweig, the host and producer of MacMost, and mobile game developer at Clever Media. (You’ll find longer Bios on the Hosts page.) Top Stories 0:00 GR: New Apple Stuff Might be a new low-end Macbook. 8:00 Lightweight? 13:00 GR: Vibe Coding Limits Coding with AI 20:00 LN: Learning how to ask for what you want Different possibilities for the future 30:00 GR & LN: Let's talk about why we use AI art again in light of https://www.theverge.com/policy/887678/supreme-court-ai-art-copyright 38:00 Faking real 40:00 How will it apply to video? How about using AI as a CGI tool? 46:00 LN: Server moves. Very geeky, but kinda interesting maybe. And how I took 50 sites offline with a single click. Oops. Ain’t it Cool 55:00 LN: The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke – (Audio) 56:00 GR: Rental Family (Disney+) BSP: Blatant Self-Promotion 58:00 LN: How Does Cloud Storage Work? – https://askleo.com/75658 59:00 GR: 10 Ways To Start Recording Video With Your iPhone Fast https://macmost.com/10-ways-to-start-recording-video-with-your-iphone-fast.html Transcript teh_262 Video https://youtu.be/E5OqViJQREk
They built a machine to handle chores, not to wait by the door or feel the sting of being left behind. When affection stops being programmable, someone has to decide whether turning it off is an act of mercy or something far worse. Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.One week from today we celebrate the 4th Anniversary of The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast. This is episode 493 and our 500th episode arrives on our Anniversary. So that's 7 stories in the next 7 days.Today's story is recognized as one of the best science fiction stories during the Golden Age of Sci-Fi. You'll understand in a few minutes. It has been republished almost 100 times in various publications over the last nine decades. Helen O'Loy was chosen in 1970 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science-fiction short stories published before the establishment of the Nebula Awards, earning it a place in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One, 1929–1964.The story was also a finalist for the 1939 Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story, where it placed second behind How We Went to Mars by Arthur C. Clarke.What makes its success even more remarkable is that it was only the second story by Lester del Rey ever to be published.From Astounding Science Fiction in December 1938 on page 118, Helen O'Loy by Lester Del Rey…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, Three men realize their ship will never slow down, and the silence between them grows more dangerous than empty space. When a final option appears, it forces them to decide what kind of survival they are actually asking for. Death Wish by Robert Sheckley.===========================☕ Buy Me a Coffee - https://lostscifi.com/coffee
Promo: The Chick and the Duck https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-chick-and-the-duck/id1866222956Film Review: Send Help (2026)Visit our WEBSITE Subscribe to our PATREON Subscribe to our YOUTUBE CHANNELVisit our MERCH STORESources:The Story We Carry in Our Bones: Irish History for Americans by Juliene Osborne McKnighthttps://irishmyths.com/2022/09/20/giants/Arthur C Clarke's Mysterious World - Simon Welfare and John Fairleyhttps://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/06/explorers-mysterious-historical-encounters-with-real-giants-in-the-new-world/https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/09/strange-tales-of-giants-in-arizona/https://ahotcupofjoe.net/2017/04/elongated-skulls-mystery-really-isnt-mystery/https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2020/02/the-mysterious-giants-of-peru/ Just some fun youtube videos about giant sightings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKBBDBXIw34https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4kaZPjlN9k Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
My guests are documentary filmmaker Robert Stone and NASA Scientist and Science Fiction author Gentry Lee. Lee is the central subject of Stone’s new documentary “Starman” which is in theaters as of Friday, February 6. In this intergalactic biopic, we follow Gentry Lee, Chief Engineer for Planetary Exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and sci-fi writer, on his journey to space and on Earth. From the Viking and Voyager missions to co-authoring the actual future with Arthur C. Clarke, Lee's life has been spent with his head in the stars and his feet on the ground. In this visually stunning documentary, the octogenarian Starman reflects on decades of space exploration alongside friends like Carl Sagan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYjTbGLgyhk&t=5s
DOING LIFE: Daily Devotions For Finding Peace in Stressful Times
"Information is not knowledge, knowledge is not wisdom, and wisdom is not foresight." (Arthur C. Clarke)
In this special episode of Exploring Humanity Through Sci‑Fi, Tony sits down with one of the most influential — and often unsung — figures in modern space exploration: Gentry Lee, Chief Engineer for Planetary Exploration at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and longtime collaborator of Arthur C. Clarke. Lee's fingerprints are on some of humanity's most iconic voyages into the unknown: the Viking missions, which delivered the first close‑up look at Mars But Lee is more than an engineer. He's a storyteller. A philosopher. A bridge between the scientific frontier and the imaginative frontier. His collaborations with Arthur C. Clarke helped define the future before it arrived, and his friendships with figures like Carl Sagan shaped the way we dream about the cosmos. Save 17% On Plus Today
Este episodio cuenta con la colaboración de la colección Grandes Autores de la Literatura de Gredos, que nos presenta una colección imprescindible para los amantes de la literatura. 📚📚 Una invitación a volver a esos gigantes que marcaron la forma en que miramos las historias. El primer volumen está dedicado a Cervantes y a ese caballero imposible…que cabalga todavía entre molinos y fantasmas: Don Quijote de la Mancha. Hay clásicos que merecen ser visitados, aunque sea para recordar que la ficción a veces nos salva de la realidad. Más información aquí: Colección grandes autores de la literatura de Gredos: Disponible en tu quiosco o en ⏩ www.literaturagredos.com ---------------------------------- If I forget thee, oh Earth” de Arthur C. Clarke, 🚀 Este relato fue escrito originalmente en el año 1951, bajo el título en inglés de “Tales from the planet Earth”, donde una vez más Clarke vuelve a dar muestras de su talento, pues este espacial cuento es uno de los más conocidos y famosos de este autor, donde contemplamos a un planeta totalmente arrasado tras una devastadora guerra nuclear que ha acabado con la humanidad, donde claro está que los únicos supervivientes de tal hecatombe son los habitantes de la colonia lunar, encontrándonos a un padre que muestra a su hijo (Marvin) en qué condiciones ha quedado el pobre planeta azul, el cual no es la sombra de lo que era. El título de este relato postapocalíptico está basado o inspirado en un texto bíblico, concretamente el Salmo 137, donde se lamenta la destrucción de Jerusalén en el año 597 a.C. por Nabucodonosor, rey de los babilonios, que arrasó absolutamente con todo, de ahí la estructura de la historia, que Marvin, el jovencito de 10 años, junto a otro grupo de personas observen desde su particular mirador lunar las ruinas del planeta Tierra. Clarke vuelve a realizar una sonora crítica sobre el problema de las armas nucleares, su mal uso y el potencial destructivo que llevan consigo, poniendo en peligro el futuro de la humanidad, teniendo en cuenta que en el año en que fue escrito este texto tanto los EE.UU, como la ya extinguida Unión Soviética ya andaban a la gresca, tirándose los trastos a la cabeza y, amenazando a media humanidad con lanzarse todo tipo de pepinazos al cual más destructivo, como veis no hemos cambiado nada, y nuestra estupidez sigue encabezando con diferencia abismal los defectos del llamado hombre, especie que nunca aprende de sus (nuestros) errores, por tanto Clarke ya nos avisaba de la terrible amenaza que podría provocar ese resplandor apocalíptico que nos podía esperar a la vuelta de la esquina. "Desde la Luna, contemplamos la Tierra… y sentimos el peso de lo que fue y nunca volverá. Un relato de Arthur C. Clarke que nos recuerda que incluso lo perdido puede enseñarnos a mirar el futuro." Disfruten de este maravilloso viaje... ¡¡Muchas gracias por todos tus comentarios y por tu apoyo!! 🎙Voz y sonido Olga Paraíso, Música epidemic sound con licencia premium autorizada para este podcast. ⏩BIO Olga Paraíso: https://instabio.cc/Hleidas 🚀 Escucha el episodio completo en la app de iVoox, o descubre todo el catálogo de iVoox Originals
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This brings us to a look at some of Arthur C. Clarke's other stories, A Time Odyssey (1951), Tales From the White Hart (1957), The Nine Billion Names of God (1954), The Star (1955), Dolphin Island (1964), and A Meeting With Medusa (1971. These stories will wrap up our look at Clarke's Science Fiction and we have seen a lot of good stuff here. And as a final note, we cover CLarke's Three Laws. Arthur C. Clarke: Other Works, A Time Odyssey A collaboration between two of science fiction's best authors: what could possibly go wrong? Well, something went wrong. This series is not bad, but I hesitate to describe it as good. This series was described by Clarke as neither a prequel nor a sequel, but an “orthoquel”, a name coined from “orthogonal”, which means something roughly like “at right angles”, though it is also used in statistics to denote events that are independent and do not influence each other. And in relativity theory Time is orthogonal to Space. And in multi-dimensional geometry we can talk about axes in each dimension as orthogonal to all of the others. It is something I can't picture, being pretty much limited to three dimensions, but it can be described mathematically. It is sort of like the 2001 series, but not really. It has globes instead of monoliths. And the spheres have a circumference and volume that is related to their radius not by the usual pi, but by exactly three. Just what this means I am not sure, other than they are not sphere's in any usual sense of the word. In this story these spheres seem to be gathering people from various eras and bringing them to some other planet which gets christened “Mir”, though not in any way to the Russian Space Station. It is a Russian word that can mean “peace”, “world”, or “village”. I have seen it used a lot to refer to a village in my studies of Russian history. Anyway, the inhabitants include two hominids, a mother and daughter, a group of British Redcoats, Mongols from the Genghis Khan era, a UN Peacekeeper helicopter, a Russian space capsule, an unknown Rudyard Kipling, the army of Alexander The Great… Well at least they have lots of characters to throw around. They end up taking sides and fighting each other. In the end several of the people are returned to Earth in their own time. But the joke is on them. The beings behind the spheres are call themselves The Firstborn because they were the first to achieve sentience. They figure that best way for them to remain safe is to wipe out any other race that achieves sentience, making them to polar opposite of the beings behind the monoliths in 2001, for whom the mind is sacred. Anyway, the Firstborn have arranged for a massive solar flare that will wipe out all life on Earth and completely sterilize the planet, but conveniently it will happen in 5 years, leaving time for plot development. Of course the people of Earth will try to protect themselves. Then in the third book of the series an ominous object enters the solar system. This is of course a callback to the Rama object. It is like they wanted to take everything from the Rama series and twist it. While I love a lot of Clarke's work and some of Baxter's as well, I think this is eminently skippable. The two of them also collaborated on the final White Hart story, which isn't bad Other Works Tales from the White Hart This collection of short stories has a unity of the setting, a pub called White Hart, where a character tells outrageous stories. Other characters are thinly disguised science fiction authors, including Clarke himself. Clarke mentions that he was inspired to do this by the Jorkens stories of Lord Dunsany, which are also outrageous tall tales, but lacking the science fictions aspects of Clarke's stories. Of course this type of story has a long history, in which we would do well to mention the stories of Baron Munchausen, and of course the stories of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt as found in Tales from Gavagan's Bar. And Spider Robinson would take this basic idea and turn it into a series of books about Callahan's Place. Stories of this type are at least as much Fantasy as anything, but quite enjoyable, and I think I can recommend all of these as worth the time to while away a cold winter's evening while sitting by a warm fire with a beverage of choice. The Nine Billion Names of God This short story won a retrospective Hugo in 2004 as being the best short story of 1954. The idea is that a group of Tibetan monks believe that the purpose of the universe is to identify the nine billion names of God, and once that has been done the universe will no longer have a purpose and will cease to exist. They have been identifying candidates and writing them down, but the work is very slow, so they decide that maybe with a little automation they can speed it up. So they get a computer (and in 1954, you should be picturing a room-sized mainframe), and then hire some Western programmers to develop the program to do this. The programmers don't believe the monks are on to anything here, but a paycheck is a paycheck. They finish the program and start it running, but decide they don't want to be there when the monks discover their theory doesn't work, so they take off early without telling anyone, and head down the mountain. But on the way, they see the stars go out, one by one. The Star This classic short story won the Hugo for Best Short Story in 1956. The story opens with the return of an interstellar expedition that has been studying a system where the star went nova millennia ago. But the expedition's astrophysicist, a Jesuit Priest, seems to be in a crisis of faith. And if you think it implausible that a Jesuit Priest could also be an astrophysicist, I would suggest you look into the case of the Belgian priest Georges Lemaître, who first developed the theory of the Big Bang. Anyway, in the story, they learn that this system had a planet much like Earth, and it had intelligent beings much like Earth, who were peaceful, but in a tragic turn of events they knew that their star was going to explode, but they had no capability of interstellar travel. So they created a repository on the outermost planet of the system that would survive the explosion, and left records of their civilization. And when the Jesuit astrophysicist calculated the time of the explosion and the travel time for light, he is shaken: “[O]h God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?” Dolphin Island This is a good Young Adult novel about the People of the Sea, who are dolphins. They save a young boy who had stowed away on a hovership that subsequently had crashed, and because no one knew about him he was left among the wreckage when the crew takes off in the life boats. And from here it is the typical Bildungsroman you find in most Young Adult novels. The dolphins bring him to an island, where he becomes involved with a research community led by a professor who is trying to communicate with dolphins. He learns various skills there, survives dangers, and in the end has to risk his life to save the people on the island. If you have a 13 year old in your house, this is worth looking for. A Meeting With Medusa This won the 1972 Nebula Award for Best Novella. It concerns one Howard Falcon, who early in the story has an accident involving a helium-filled airship, is badly injured, and requires time and prosthetics to heal. But then he promotes an expedition to Jupiter that uses similar technology, a Hot-Hydrogen balloon-supported aircraft. This is to explore the upper reaches of Jupiter's atmosphere, which is the only feasible way to explore given the intense gravity of this giant planet. Attempting to land on the solid surface would mean being crushed by the gravity and air pressure, so that is not possible. The expedition finds there is life in the upper clouds of Jupiter. Some of it is microscopic, like a kind of “air plankton” which is bio-luminescent. But there are large creatures as well, one of which is like jellyfish, but about a mile across. This is the Medusa of the title. Another is Manta-like creature, about 100 yards across, that preys on the Medusa. But when the Medusa starts to take an interest on Falcon's craft, he decides to get out quick for safety's sake. And we learn that because of the various prosthetics implanted after the airship accident Falcon is really a cyborg with much faster reactions than ordinary humans. As we have discussed previously, Clarke loved the sea, and in this novella he is using what he knows in that realm to imagine a plausible ecology in the atmosphere of Jupiter. Of course when he wrote this novella no one knew about the truly frightening level of radiation around Jupiter, but then a clever science fiction writer could come up with a way to work around that. Clarke's Three Laws Finally, no discussion of Arthur C. Clarke can omit his famous Three Laws. Asimov had his Three Laws of Robotics, and Clarke had his Three Laws of Technology. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This concludes our look at Arthur C. Clarke, the second of the Big Three of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. And that means we are ready to tackle the Dean of Science Fiction, Robert A. Heinlein. Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Time_Odyssey https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_the_White_Hart https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Jorkens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baron_Munchausen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tales_from_Gavagan%27s_Bar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callahan%27s_Crosstime_Saloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Star_(Clarke_short_story) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_Island_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Meeting_with_Medusa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://www.palain.com/science-fiction/the-golden-age/arthur-c-clarke/arthur-c-clarke-other-works/ Provide feedback on this episode.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, as Arthur C. Clarke put it. In that spirit, the way we get closest to “magic” in physics is not by memorizing more facts or equations, but by learning a few mental tools that help us see through the illusion of complexity by extracting the wheat from the chaff. They are all simple at heart, but nevertheless quite powerful, and they form the core of what I call the Gestalt of Physics—the worldview that governs how physicists approach nature. And some of them can actually seem like magic to the uninitiated! I'm also pleased to share a quick PSA. We're organizing our next Origins travel adventure: a sailing expedition through the Greek archipelago (July 24 to 31) with bestselling author and Biblical and ancient civilization scholar Bart Ehrman and me, with a possible Cyprus add-on (July 18 to 23). If you're interested, it's worth raising your hand early. These trips tend to fill quickly. Express interest at http://originsproject.org/greece-2026In Lecture 1, I used powers of ten as an intellectual zoom lens, a way to escape the trap of human scale. Lecture 2 steps back and asks a more fundamental question: how do physicists consistently make progress when the world looks hopelessly complicated?This lecture focuses on the fundamental toolkit for seeing. We will use these tools throughout the series, because they are the difference between being dazzled by nature and being able to interrogate it, and ultimately understand it.First, order of magnitude thinking, the art of using powers of ten and rough estimates. It is how you keep your intuition tethered to reality, and how you avoid being bullied by big numbers dressed up with false precision.Second, approximation, which is where I introduce my super cow. It is not only a spherical cow. It's better. My super cow has exactly the features we need for the question at hand, no more, no less, and it politely agrees to ignore everything irrelevant. I introduce it with a joke, but it is also the core of how we turn messy reality into something we can actually calculate without lying to ourselves.Third, dimensional analysis, one of the great bargains in science. The fact that there are essentially only 3 fundamental ‘dimensional' quantities describing nature—Length, Time, and Mass—means that all physical quantities can be related to other physical quantities through a small set of relations. Keeping track of dimensions allows us to often guess what the relations are, without knowing any details of specific physical situations. It seems like magic. By keeping track of the dimensions underlying quantities, you can often infer the form of an answer and you can catch nonsense instantly. Sometimes the most important result is realizing something cannot be right, because that is where new physics likes to hide.Along the way I adopt some Fermi style challenges—named after the remarkable physicist Enrico Fermi—to show how these ideas work in real time, and why they are not parlor tricks. They provide a training in scientific judgment. I also end with a preview of what comes next, symmetry, a concept that quietly runs far more of the universe than most people realize.Enjoy, and feel free to share.LawrenceAs always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe
Open the cast bay doors, POD The Becks are bringing you a brand new episode on 2001: A Space Odyssey! Codie may be struggling with the pains of Gym Life, and Billy is recovering from the SuperFlu, but that doesn't stop them from dissecting the plot, structure, and themes of Arthur C. Clarke's novel and its film adaptation by Stanley Kubrick. Enjoy! linktr.ee/soonmajorpod ko-fi.com/soonmajorpod Next episode homework: Arrival (2016)
Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke is pure, distilled classic science fiction — wide-eyed wonder, cool-headed astronauts, and mysteries big enough to swallow a planet. This one looms large in both Tom and Tony's memories as the benchmark for hard sci-fi done right.A giant alien cylinder drifts into our solar system. Humanity pokes its nose inside. What we find is both awe-inspiring and maddeningly enigmatic. Clarke gives us a story that stops short of first contact… and somehow that makes it even better.And are there parallels to the imaginings of Clarke and the reality of 3I/Atlas, the interstellar visiter even now approaching the Earth IRL? Join us and find out!TTYPodcast.comThumbingThroughYesterday.com
Science Fiction's Secret Power: How Stories Built the Modern WorldThe Cold Star Project - Season 2, Episode 99Hosted, Directed, and Produced by Jason KaniganWhat if science fiction didn't just predict the future — but helped create it?In this conversation, we explore how post-World War II science fiction shaped how societies think about nuclear war, AI, surveillance, and autonomous weapons before those systems fully existed.My guest is Matt, creator of Feral Historian. We examine the feedback loop between imagination and reality — how stories made invisible threats understandable, emotional, and politically usable.We talk about writers like Arthur C. Clarke, films like They Live, and how science fiction shifted from optimism to pessimism as technology and power consolidated.We also ask a harder question: Did sci-fi help kill the space-age dream — or did it simply tell the truth about where civilization was heading?If you've ever wondered whether science fiction influenced the military-industrial complex, or why modern futures feel recycled instead of bold, this conversation will give you a framework for understanding why.Topics Covered:* Science fiction and nuclear war psychology* AI, autonomous weapons, and cultural conditioning* Cold War fear narratives* Surveillance and control in sci-fi* Why the future stopped feeling new.“The real conversations behind the new space economy, defense tech, and policy—straight from the insiders building it.”Feral Historian YouTube Channel: @feralhistorian Ninti's Gate book: https://www.amazon.com/Nintis-Gate-Matthias-Pierce/dp/B0D8HK9YJT/Peter Thorpe space artist interview:https://youtu.be/0R7WpYCtZaE?si=RvDvY6PMSb-gjnW0Executive Clarity Assessment: https://coldstartech.com/assessmentJason's latest Space industry book, for space startup founders - "The Evolution of Space Ownership": https://coldstartech.com/evospaceFair Use Disclaimer: https://coldstarproject.com/fairuseAll referenced material is used here for commentary and analysis purposes.Remuneration Disclaimer: We were not remunerated by the guest or their organization if any for this discussion.This show is for educational/commentary and entertainment purposes only and is not meant to be what is termed "professional advice".The Cold Star Project is sponsored in partnership by Cold Star Technologies and the Operational Excellence Society. Jason Kanigan is a member of the OpEx Society board of advisors.https://jasonkanigan.com
Send us comments, suggestions and ideas here! In this week's episode we embark on part 3 of our deep scan into the dimly lit chambers of Cyber Magick with the guidance of our programmer friend Chillz who volunteered this week to take the helm and guide our little discussion into the watery abyss yet unexplored. In the first half, we discuss what technology has to do with the Age of Aquarius along with its occult counter-part, the energies of Leo and how the field of Cybernetics was born in the first place. From there we discuss how cybernetic teleology was applied to spirituality through the work of Mike Morgan, Peter Carroll and of course Frater U.D. who was the guy responsible for splintering the Initiates of Thanatos after introducing its members to Nazi ice magick. Before wrapping up the free side we discuss how to perform Thumbnail Cartomancy along with some variants before flipping the tape and continuing in the extended side with TTS Yoking, Loop Mantras, Sigil Visualizers and of course, Videogame Mystery Plays. Thank you and enjoy the show! Listen to the extended show here! https://www.patreon.com/posts/147520234In this week's episode we discuss:Technology and the Age of AquariusAndy Warhol The History of CyberneticsTeleology vs. Metaphysics Mike Morgan and CyberCraftRalph Tegtmeier and Ice Magick The 4 Active Principles of MagickThumbnail Cartomancy In the extended show available at www.patreon.com/TheWholeRabbit we go further down the rabbit hole to discuss:TTS YokingNever Listen to Aleister Crowley Loop MantrasVishnuAgentic Servitors Sigil VisualizersMystery Games in First Person Shooters?! This episode was written by Chillz with his parts in Black, Luke in Red, Heka in Purple, Mari in Blue, and Tim graced us with moral support. Where to find The Whole Rabbit:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0AnJZhmPzaby04afmEWOAVInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_whole_rabbitTwitter: https://twitter.com/1WholeRabbitOrder Stickers: https://www.stickermule.com/thewholerabbitOther Merchandise: https://thewholerabbit.myspreadshop.com/Music By Spirit Travel Plaza:https://open.spotify.com/artist/30dW3WB1sYofnow7y3V0YoSupport the show
In this host-only bonus episode, Charlotte and Jo discuss some of their most memorable reads of 2025. Authors discussed include Arthur C. Clarke, Shon Faye, Sarah Schulman, Ai Yazawa, Marjane Satrapi, Ariana Reines, Kyung-Ran Jo, and more.Please consider supporting us on Patreon, where you can access additional materials and send us your guest (and book!) coverage requests. Questions and kind comments can be directed to readingwriterspod at gmail dot com. Charlotte Shane's most recent book is An Honest Woman. Her essay newsletter, Meant For You, can be subscribed to or read online for free. Her social media handle is @charoshane. Jo Livingstone is a writer who teaches at Pratt Institute. To support the show, navigate to https://www.patreon.com/ReadingWriters Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
2001: Una odisea espacial (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968) de Arthur C. Clarke es una novela de ciencia ficción que se escribió al mismo tiempo que la película del mismo nombre dirigida por Stanley Kubrick. En ella, acompañamos a un equipo de científicos emprende un viaje espacial para descubrir el propósito de un extraño monolito. ¡Escucha el análisis de este libro en este episodio del podcast! Contacto www.alaaventura.net/contacto jboscomendoza@gmail.com www.facebook.com/alaaventurapodcast www.instagram.com/alaaventura/ X: @alaaventura Ayuda a hacer posible este podcast a través de Patreon http://wwww.patreon.com/alaaventura ¡Obtén hasta dos meses de servicios gratis en Libsyn al iniciar tu podcast! Usa el código AVENTURA en al registrarte en http://libsyn.com Música de entrada y salida: The Consouls - Arashi no Saxophone 2 (The King of Fighters '96) Funk Cover. Encuentra toda la música de The Counsouls en https://theconsouls.com/
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This brings us to a look at some of Arthur C. Clarke's other stories, The Sands of Mars (1951), The Deep Range (1957), and The Fountains of Paradise (1979). These are just a few of his well-regarded stand-alone novels. Links: https://www.sffworld.com/forum/threads/the-clarke-asimov-treaty.46067/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sands_of_Mars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islands_in_the_Sky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Trilogy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Deep_Range https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dolphin_Island_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_from_the_Grand_Banks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fountains_of_Paradise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminsterfullerene https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_Who_Sold_the_Moon https://www.palain.com/science-fiction/the-golden-age/arthur-c-clarke-other-novels-part-1/ Provide feedback on this episode.
The 365 Days of Astronomy, the daily podcast of the International Year of Astronomy 2009
Hosted by Dr. Pamela Gay. A gentle fancy for the Christmas Season—an oft-told tale with a wistful twistful of Something that left the Earth with a wing and a prayer. Earlier today, I had the stark realization that at the core of many Christmas stories is a core of sorrow or longing that must somehow be transformed into joy. Scrouge must learn charity. Ralphie longs for a bb gun and is betrayed by his joy. George is on the brink of suicide when his Guardian Angel intercedes. John McClane just needs to keep his wife alive (yes, Die Hard is a Christmas movie). Over and over, the holiday spirit can only enter on the wings of struggle. This realization came to me as I looked for an old school (aka public domain) science fiction story to narrate for tomorrow's episode of 365 Days of Astronomy. The first story I came across (which I'll personally share tomorrow), was Arthur C Clarke's, "The Star" and it was too dark for that family-friendly podcast. Instead, I read "Second Landing," by Floyd Wallace. This story originally appeared in Amazing Science Fiction Stories. Read it here: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/24958/pg24958-images.html Written in 1960 by Floyd L. Wallace, this story is weirdly timeless and felt utterly necessary for this moment. Aliens learn of Earth from our broadcasts, and they fear we are on the verge of destroying ourselves with the bomb. To say more would be to reveal the plot. I invite you to listen here and find hope in a world of too much darkness. Merry Christmas. We've added a new way to donate to 365 Days of Astronomy to support editing, hosting, and production costs. Just visit: https://www.patreon.com/365DaysOfAstronomy and donate as much as you can! Share the podcast with your friends and send the Patreon link to them too! Every bit helps! Thank you! ------------------------------------ Do go visit http://www.redbubble.com/people/CosmoQuestX/shop for cool Astronomy Cast and CosmoQuest t-shirts, coffee mugs and other awesomeness! http://cosmoquest.org/Donate This show is made possible through your donations. Thank you! (Haven't donated? It's not too late! Just click!) ------------------------------------ The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the Planetary Science Institute. http://www.psi.edu Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org.
Snak-Lytter Cem kaldte Star Maker “storslået, tidskrævende, men mindblowing”. Han havde ret på alle tre punkter. Storslået? Absolut. Syret? Uden tvivl. Men også en rigtig hård mundfuld at komme igennem. Fra lyngbakke til galaktisk bevidsthed Bogen starter forbløffende jordnært. En unavngiven englænder sidder en aften i 1937 på en bakke og betragter stjernerne, mens han tænker på sit liv og sit ægteskab. Hans kone sidder inde i det oplyste hus. Men så sker der noget radikalt: Hans bevidsthed løsriver sig fra kroppen, og pludselig kan han se gennem jorden – gennem klipperne, gennem planetens kerne – og ud i kosmos. “Looking down, I seemed to see through a transparent planet, through heather and solid rock, through the buried graveyards of vanished species, down through the molten flow of basalt, and on into the earth’s core of iron. But our home had vanished with the whole suburb, and the hills too, and the sea.” Her begynder den mest ekstreme kosmiske rejse i science fiction-historien. Først tilbringer hovedpersonen lang tid alene i det tomme rum, deprimeret og ensom. Men så opdager han The Other Earth – en planet befolket med menneskelignende væsener, der har lange ben, flade hoveder, og som lugter gennem hænderne. De har ikke meget musik, men til gengæld har de duftradio, hvor man kan opleve andres seksuelle oplevelser gennem lugten. Ja, det er præcis så syret, som det lyder. “In compensation, scent and taste developed amazingly. These beings tasted not only with their mouths, but with their moist black hands and with their feet. They were thus afforded an extraordinarily rich and intimate experience of their planet.” Hovedpersonen opdager, at han kan glide ind i de fremmedes hoveder. Han bosætter sig i kraniet på en halskør filosof ved navn Bvallthu, og gradvist smelter de sammen til en fælles personlighed. Fra denne sammensmelting vokser noget langt større. Hive minds, intelligente stjerner og kosmisk teambuilding Stapledon stopper ikke ved én planet. Nej nej. Vores hovedperson møder plantemennesker, insektlignende sværme (hvor enkeltindividet er dumt, men sværmen udgør en intelligens), symbiontiske krabber og edderkopper. Og – naturligvis – intelligente stjerner, der ikke bare kredser om den galaktiske kerne, men faktisk danser og kommunikerer med hinanden i kosmisk poesi. Hele tiden udvides den kollektive bevidsthed. Først én planet. Så flere. Så hele galakser. Stapledon bruger disse møder til at reflektere over civilisationers cykliske udviklinger. Igen og igen ser vi samfund, der når et vist niveau af udvikling, hvorefter det hele bryder sammen i konflikt og krig, og de må starte forfra. Stapledon – filosof, pacifist og ambulancefører under Første Verdenskrig – havde tydeligvis nogle meninger om 1930’ernes Europa. Duftradio-beskrivelserne lugter af propaganda-kritik. Men alle disse civilisationer, alle disse møder, peger mod ét mål. Mødet med den kolde skaber Bogens klimaks er mødet med Star Maker – universets skaber. Men det er ikke et kærligt, varmt møde med en omsorgsfuld gud. Nej, Star Maker betragter sit kosmos med den kliniske interesse, en kunstner har for sit værk. Han noterer fejlene. Føler ingen stolthed. For det her kosmos er bare ét eksperiment i en lang række. Star Maker er stadig i udvikling – fra baby-starmaker, der lavede legetøjsuniverser (ét univers bestod kun af musik uden rumlige dimensioner!), til mester-starmaker, der skaber stadigt mere komplekse kosmosser. Vores univers? Meh, et mellemstadie med “irrevocable flaws”. “For I had been confronted not by welcoming and kindly love, but by a very different spirit. It seemed to me that he gazed down on me from the height of his divinity with the aloof though passionate attention of an artist judging his finished work, calmly rejoicing in its achievement, but recognizing at last the irrevocable flaws.” En teologisk vision, både fascinerende og foruroligende. C.S. Lewis hadede den så meget, at han kaldte den “amoralsk” og skrev sin Space Trilogy som modsvar. Men Arthur C. Clarke elskede den og kaldte den den mest indflydelsesrige bog i sit liv. Efter mødet vender vores hovedperson tilbage til bakken, til lyngen, til konen i huset. Men nu med et radikalt ændret perspektiv på menneskehedens plads i kosmos. Og hans kone? Hun må have været bekymret. Han har været væk i milliarder af år – selvom der kun er gået et øjeblik. En bog der ikke er en bog Stapledon skriver selv i forordet, at bogen “by the standards of the novel, is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.” Og han har ret. Intet plot. Ingen karakterudvikling. Ingen dialog. Bare en filosofisk meditation, en kosmisk traktat, en 300 siders stream of consciousness. Sproget er tungt – næsten 100 år gammelt og tit vanskeligt at følge. Som Anders siger: “Det føltes som en bog, der var skrevet 100 år før den faktisk blev skrevet.” Gang på gang beskriver Stapledon nye planeter, nye racer, nye samfund – som alle gennemgår de samme cyklusser. På et tidspunkt begynder man at skimme. Anders indrømmer blankt, at han “skimmede 10-20 sider ad gangen” gennem store dele af bogen. Men den er også fuld af idéer, som formede science fiction: Hive minds, galaktiske imperier, intelligente stjerner, telepatisk kommunikation, multivers-teorier. Kim Stanley Robinson sagde det bedst: “Every few pages contain all the material of an ordinary science fiction novel, condensed to something like prose poetry.” Vurderingen Jens: ⭐ (én stjerne). “Jeg havde ikke læst den færdig, hvis det ikke var for Sci-Fi Snak. Det er simpelthen killeren på en bog. Jeg kan godt se, at der ligger kvaliteter i den, men den er utrolig træls og langsomt skrevet. Jeg havde absencer, mens jeg læste.” Anders: ⭐⭐ (to stjerner – men med et spaltet sind). “De første 100 sider var smukke og poetiske. Den 17-årige hippie Anders indeni mig blev vakt til live af den kropsløse bevidsthedsrejse i kosmos. Men så blev det repetitivt. Jeg var tæt på at forsvinde helt ud af bogen.” En bog for alle? Næppe. “Hvis ikke jeg var 100% sikker på, at Henning allerede havde læst den, så ville jeg nok anbefale den til Henning,” griner Anders. Men hvis du er forfatter og leder efter idéer? Så er Star Maker en idébank uden lige. Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov, Le Guin og Kim Stanley Robinson lod sig alle inspirere. Og hvis du vil have en special science fiction-oplevelse – lidt spirituel filosofi, lidt mind-blowing kosmisk vision, lidt Iron Man læseoplevelse – så kan Star Maker være noget for dig. Jens og Anders har SCIFI SNAKKET Star Maker. Shownotes til episoden om Star Maker Siden sidst Jens Er totalt gået i Mick Herron-læsemode og læser spionthrillers Ser Pluribus på Apple TV – “Jeg er så glad for den, jeg næsten kan finde på at stå lidt tidligere op fredag morgen for at se et afsnit” Anders Har læst Dream Hotel af Laila Lalami – en bog om predictive policing og AI-drevne drømmeanalyser Hovedpersonen bliver tilbageholdt på et “opbevaringshotel” for folk, der måske vil begå forbrydelser i fremtiden (kafkask, men underholdende) Har læst Quantum of Menace af Vaseem Khan – en thriller om Q fra James Bond-universet Ser også Pluribus – “Den er crazy god” Lytternes input Fra Goodreads: Steen spørger om lydbogstjenester til bilkørsel. E-reolen og Libby har gratis biblioteksmaterialer (danske og engelske). Mofibo har et stort sci-fi-katalog. Og så er der selvfølgelig Audible. Julerabat fra Science Fiction Cirklen: Lise tilbyder en decemberrabat på den danske udgave af Stjernemageren – 200 kr. i stedet for 298 kr. Det er faktisk ret fedt, at den findes på dansk! (sciencefiction.dk) Rettelse: David Mondrup, som anbefalede Zoi, er ikke Jane Mondrups mand – de er fætter og kusine. Undskyld, David! (Episode 99 af LæsDen! handler i øvrigt om Zoi) Mail fra Søren Bjørn-Hansen: Søren skrev fra sit sygeleje, hvor Sci-Fi Snak var “en tryg favn når febervildelserne raser”. Han gav input om Arthur C. Clarke og geostationære satellitter – Clarke skrev om kommunikationssatellitter i Wireless World i 1945 og forudså atomdrevne raketter inden for 20 år. Sådan gik det ikke helt. Søren foreslog også, at vi læser James Coreys The Mercy of Gods (den nye bog fra teamet bag Expanse-serien). Næste gang Anders vælger: Naomi Aldermans The Future (2023) – en nærfremtids-thriller om tech-milliardærer, der får en advarsel fra deres predictive software: apokalypsen er på vej, og de skal ned i deres hemmelige bunkere. Samtidig følger vi Lai Zhen, der pludselig bliver jagtet af en lejemorder og kun overlever takket være mystisk software på hendes telefon. Margaret Atwood kalder den “gripping”. Lauren Beukes: “A little Atwood, a little Gibson, all Alderman, it’s brilliant.” Alistair Reynolds: “A rollicking, fun-packed thriller.” Vi håber på en page-turner efter Stapledons filosofiske sejtrækker. Bonus-anbefaling: Se Guillermo del Toros nye filmatisering af Frankenstein på Netflix – der skulle være ret bognær. Måske vender vi tilbage til det senere.
- Una técnica para terminar con la mala onda con las mujeres. - ¿Existieron los atlantes? ¿Dónde estaba ubicada la Atlántida? - La chica fantasma de la discoteca. - Cursos de Hipnotismo por correspondencia. - ¿Qué es ser varón y qué es ser mujer? La esquizofrenia en la educación. ¿Qué sería la evolución mental? Celeste y rosa. - La Reencarnación. ¿Casos o argumentos? ¿Retrocognición? Hipnosis regresiva. El "Síndrome de Estocolmo". - ¿Hay una ola de creciente violencia en el mundo? - Arthur C. Clarke, Sai Baba y Ernesto Sábato. Aclaración: Este episodio se elaboró a partir de diferentes grabaciones de Gustavo Fernández en su programa de radio AM, en LT14 Radio General Urquiza de Paraná (Entre Ríos, Argentina), en algún momento entre agosto de 1988 y junio de 1994. Hemos quitado la música original por cuestiones de derechos de autor. No contiene publicidad. Relacionados: Más texto, audio y video sobre los temas del Misterio en nuestro portal: https://alfilodelarealidad.com/ Utiliza el buscador o busca por categorías y etiquetas. Plataforma de cursos: https://miscursosvirtuales.net * * * Programa de Afiliados * * * iVoox comparte con AFR un pequeño porcentaje si usas uno de estos enlaces: * Disfruta de la experiencia iVoox sin publicidad, con toda la potencia de volumen, sincronización de dispositivos y listas inteligentes ilimitadas: Premium anual https://www.ivoox.vip/premium?affiliate-code=68e3ae6b7ef213805d8afeeea434a491 Premium mensual https://www.ivoox.vip/premium?affiliate-code=7b7cf4c4707a5032e0c9cd0040e23919 * La mejor selección de podcasts en exclusiva con iVoox Plus Más de 50.000 episodios exclusivos y nuevos contenidos cada día. ¡Suscríbete y apoya a tus podcasters favoritos! Plus https://www.ivoox.vip/plus?affiliate-code=258b8436556f5fabae31df4e91558f48 Más sobre el mundo del Misterio en alfilodelarealidad.com
Send us comments, suggestions and ideas here! In this week's episode we unzip the hidden file on the bonus floppy disk that came with the Necronomicon, upload its contents directly to the miniature astral hard drive hidden inside our pineal glands and begin installing Chaos Magick #6 an instruction manual on Technomancy 101 also known as the weird art and science of Cyber Magick! In the first half of the show we discuss the overlap between technology and magick, the promise and threat of AI gods and retrocausality. In the extended half of the show we talk shop about making AI sigils (do they even work?) and how to use the Cosmic Control Terminal like an ultra dangerous chaos magick hacker edge lord, like me. Thank you and enjoy the show!In this week's episode we discuss:Arthur C. Clark's Three LawsTrick Rock Into ThinkingState of the ArtDoes AI have Ka?Peter Carroll's PsybermagickJoshua Madera's Technomancy 101In the extended show available at www.patreon.com/TheWholeRabbit we further down the rabbit hole to discuss:The Hacker Method // Cosmic Control TerminalAstral AI SigilsVirtual Reality MagickAI as a Lovecraftian DeityGhost In the Shell Each host is responsible for writing and creating the content they present. Luke in red, Heka in purple, Tim in black-green, Mari in blue.Where to find The Whole Rabbit:Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0AnJZhmPzaby04afmEWOAVInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/the_whole_rabbitTwitter: https://twitter.com/1WholeRabbitOrder Stickers: https://www.stickermule.com/thewholerabbitOther Merchandise: https://thewholerabbit.myspreadshop.com/Music By Spirit Travel Plaza:https://open.spotify.com/artist/30dW3WB1sYofnow7y3V0YoSources:Peter Carroll's Blog:https://www.specularium.org/blogTechnomancy 101, Joshua Madera:https://technomancy101.com/Psybermagick, Peter Carroll:https://www.amazon.com/PsyberMagick-Advanced-Ideas-Chaos-Magick/dp/1935150650Support the show
If you enjoyed this episode, consider joining our Patreon. Your support helps us keep the show running. Find out more at http://www.patreon.com/whyisthisgoodpodcast In this episode, we discuss “The Nine Billion Names of God” by Arthur C. Clarke. What can we learn from this classic story? What guides the length and development of a short story? […]
How do planetary ring systems rings form, and what keeps them in line? What exactly is the Dragon Cloud of Saturn? And what's up with quasi moon 2025 PN7? To find out, Dr. Charles Liu and co-host Allen Liu welcome Cornell University's dynamical astronomer Dr. Phil Nicholson for a refresher course in orbital mechanics. As always, though, we start off with the day's joyfully cool cosmic thing, which is right up Phil's alley: the recent discovery of quasi moon 2025 PN7. Phil unpacks the orbital mechanics to explain the critical differences between quasi moons and regular moons, and also 2025 PN7's strange relationship to Earth's orbit. He also explains the dynamics of the sun's tidal forces and Earth's Hill Sphere. For our first question from the audience, Jameson asks, “Are meteorites smaller copies of planets. Are all of them the same?” Rather than discuss meteorites, which are the tiny survivors that have crashed on Earth, Phil pivots to where many of them come from in the first place: asteroids. Really big asteroids share some characteristics with planets, like being spherical in shape, whereas the smaller ones can be highly irregular, like the dumbbell-shaped asteroid 216 Kleopatra, or Arrokoth, previously known as Ultima Thule. Chuck asks Phil about the different shapes large asteroids can come in, and Phil points out 433 Eros, the second largest Near Earth Object, which is banana shaped. The ensuing brief discussion of the “is it a long, skinny asteroid or an interstellar starship?” debate, like the one sparked by Oumuamua, leads to a conversation about Arthur C. Clarke's “Rendezvous with Rama”, which described just such a starship back in 1973. Somehow, we end up looking at the “face” on Mars and the “Death Star,” aka, Saturn's moon Mimus as it was imaged by the Cassini spacecraft. Phil actually worked on the Cassini mission, and Chuck asks him to talk about his experience peering hundreds of miles deep into Saturn's atmosphere with the spacecraft's Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS). Along with other instruments run by other teams, the mission changed our perception of Saturn's “boring” atmosphere, documenting aurora, lightning, and giant storms like the “Dragon Cloud of Saturn.” Our next student question comes from Marvin, who asks, “What exactly is a Shepherd moon?” To answer, Phil describes what Saturn's rings are made of, how they form, and how they're structured. He explains what happens when particles that make up the rings collide, why some rings spread over time, while others stay very narrow, and the role Shepherd satellites play in the process. We end with Chuck soliciting a few classic sci-fi recommendations from Phil, who suggests anything by Arthur C. Clarke, the Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov, and almost anything by Larry Niven, including Ringworld, his most famous series. We hope you enjoy this episode of The LIUniverse, and, if you do, please support us on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/theliuniverse. Credits for Images Used in this Episode: Orbit of quasi moon 2025 PN7 – Credit: NASA/JPL Earth's Hill Sphere extends between the Lagrange Points L1 and L2. – Credit: Creative Commons / Xander89 433 Eros, a banana-shaped asteroid. – Credit: NASA/JPL/JHUAPL 216 Kleopatra, a dumbbell shaped asteroid – Credit: NSSDC, NASA Arrokoth, previously known as Ultima Thule – Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/Roman Tkachenko The “face” on Mars next to a higher resolution image of the same hill. – Credit: NASA / JPL / University of Arizona Mimus as imaged by the Cassini spacecraft. – Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Space Science Institute Visible and Infrared Mapping Spectrometer (VIMS) image of Saturn – Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Dragon Cloud of Saturn – Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Shepherd moon animation showing Prometheus (right) and Pandora (left) both orbit near Saturn's F ring. – Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute Uranus ring schematic, solid lines are rings; dashed lines are moon orbits. – Credit: Public Domain / Ruslik0 #LIUniverse #CharlesLiu #AllenLiu #SciencePodcast #AstronomyPodcast #DynamicalAstronomy #PhilNicholson #OrbitalMechanics #Rings #SpaceStorms #QuasiMoons #2025PN7 #HillSphere #433Eros #Asteroid #216Kleopatra #Arrokoth #UltimaThule #Cassini #VisibleAndInfraredMappingSpectrometer #VIMS #DragonCloudOfSaturn #ShepherdMoon
This show has been flagged as Clean by the host. This brings us to a look at Arthur C. Clarke's other famous series, Rendevous with Rama and its sequels. This is frequently refered to simply as the Rama series. Links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendezvous_with_Rama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BBOumuamua https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_II_(novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Garden_of_Rama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rama_Revealed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gentry_Lee https://www.palain.com/science-fiction/the-golden-age/arthur-c-clarke-rama-and-sequels/ Provide feedback on this episode.
We continue to drive down deeper into our real-time worldbuilding experiment armed with the comments of our listeners. Science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages known as Clarke's Laws that he expounded on in his writings. The third of these is the most famous, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”In this episode, Tony, Chris, and Dave begin to unpack this idea of ancient technology being what makes magic in the ever-evolving, crowdsourced Boomtown Campaign Setting. Make sure to Join the Conversation!0:24 DM Dave's audio homage to the famous “slapback” effect of Sam Philips' Sun Studios.4:33 The current state of technological advancement in Boomtown.6:40 How much magic is discovered at 1st level? Where is the floor for magic in the campaign setting?10:15 Magic is being used to build and power the world.11:25 We love the idea of Masterwork and Weapons of Quality handling anything that is +1.15:30 What can you find in a general Boomtown? How damaging are run-of-the-mill firearms?16:30 Leaning into the idea of Misfires and Wild Magic. We also discuss adjusting Attunement.33:00 Building and creating magic – giving agency to the players in rediscovering magic.40:50 Flaws ands vulnerabilities in the characters and the world are what make the greatest stories.41:45 Final Thoughts.
A desperate treasure hunt on the frozen surface of Mars turns explosive when three men uncover the legendary weapons of a vanished civilization. But the greatest danger is not what the Martians left behind — it's the ambition boiling inside the humans who find it. The Last Weapon by Robert Sheckley. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.You've done it again! Thanks to your incredible support, we're officially the #1 Science Fiction Podcast in Finland. That makes 32 countries where we have hit #1 thanks to you!This milestone is far more than a ranking. It reflects a passionate community that continues to embrace classic sci-fi, rediscover forgotten treasures, and celebrate the authors who shaped the genre. Every listen, share, and review helps our podcast reach new audiences, keep these timeless stories alive, and shine a light on the legends of yesterday for listeners today. Thank you.There was a time when I had never even heard the name Robert Sheckley — until our friend Jesse urged us to explore his work. Since then, Sheckley has become one of my absolute favorite authors.Our previous story, The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke, first appeared in Star Science Fiction Stories in February 1953. While researching that story, we discovered this one as well — published in the very same volume — and we knew we had to share it with you.Turn to page 155, The Last Weapon by Robert Sheckley…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A routine survey of an unremarkable planet spirals into dread as two explorers discover a network of perfectly round holes that seem to defy nature, physics, and common sense. What begins as scientific curiosity soon becomes a race to understand what's growing beneath the sand—and why the holes are widening. The Holes by Michael Shaara.Newsletter - https://lostscifi.com/free/☕ Buy Me a Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsVFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheLostSciFiPodcastTwitter - https://x.com/LostSciFiPodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguy❤️ ❤️ Thanks to Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee$200 Someone$100 Tony from the Future$75 James Van Maanenberg$50 MizzBassie, Anonymous Listener$25 Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener$15 Every Month Someone$15 Amy Özkan, Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener$10 Anonymous Listener$5 Every Month Eaten by a Grue$5 Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous ListenerPlease participate in our podcast survey https://podcastsurvey.typeform.com/to/gNLcxQlk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A team of engineers travels to a remote Tibetan monastery to install a computer meant to complete a centuries-long sacred task. But as the machine nears the end of its work, the engineers realize the monks believe its final output will trigger something far greater than they ever imagined. The Nine Billion Names Of God by Arthur C. Clarke. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.Have you filled out our listener survey? We want to know what you think about The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, and we would really appreciate it if you would take the time to participate. There is a link to the survey in the description or you can find it at lostscifi.com. Survey - https://podcastsurvey.typeform.com/to/gNLcxQlk?Today's story is one of Arthur C. Clarke's most famous and most debated works—The Nine Billion Names of God. First published in 1953, it blends technology, philosophy, and belief in a way that only Clarke could.In this tale, two engineers trek into the remote Himalayas to help a monastery complete a centuries-old sacred project. What begins as a straightforward installation job slowly reveals an idea so vast and unexpected that it has echoed through science fiction ever since.Clarke is at his most graceful and unforgettable here. The story later earned the Retro Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 2004. It first appeared in Ballantine Books' Star Science Fiction Stories anthology in February 1953, released in both paperback and hardcover. We are looking for the last story on page 195, The Nine Billion Names Of God by Arthur C. Clarke…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A desperate treasure hunt on the frozen surface of Mars turns explosive when three men uncover the legendary weapons of a vanished civilization. But the greatest danger is not what the Martians left behind — it's the ambition boiling inside the humans who find it. The Last Weapon by Robert Sheckley.Newsletter - https://lostscifi.com/free/☕ Buy Me a Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsVFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheLostSciFiPodcastTwitter - https://x.com/LostSciFiPodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguy❤️ ❤️ Thanks to Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee$200 Someone$100 Tony from the Future$75 James Van Maanenberg$50 MizzBassie, Anonymous Listener$25 Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener$15 Every Month Someone$15 Amy Özkan, Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener$10 Anonymous Listener$5 Every Month Eaten by a Grue$5 Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous ListenerPlease participate in our podcast survey https://podcastsurvey.typeform.com/to/gNLcxQlk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In a rundown San Francisco apartment building, Ellen begins to suspect something monstrous is hiding behind her neighbors' polite smiles. When the cats go missing and the noises in the walls grow louder, she realizes she might be the only human left who knows the truth. Know Thy Neighbor by Elisabeth R. Lewis. That's next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast.Your support means a lot to us. Amy Özkan just bought us 3 coffees and added this message: “I appreciate this podcast and that you have narrated so many stories that we can choose from. I enjoy old-time radio science fiction series like "X Minus One" and others that were created for adults. I found your podcast when I finished listening to just about every old time sci-fi drama I could find. This has become a regular night time routine for me as I enjoy listening just before falling asleep. Thank you Scott.”Thank you Amy! We appreciate you.Thanks for the great feedback on our weekly newsletter! Want every Monday's issue delivered to you—along with free sci-fi and other goodies? Tap the link in the description or head to LostSciFi.com.Today's story, Know Thy Neighbor by Elisabeth R. Lewis, takes us into a San Francisco apartment building where something strange is happening behind closed doors. A dead cat, a frightened tenant, and whispers of a green-skinned intruder turn a normal morning into mounting dread.Lewis was one of many talented women who wrote for the pulp magazines but never received the recognition they deserved. It's the only story of hers we've been able to uncover, and once you listen, we think you'll feel the same way we do: if only we had a time machine to urge her to keep writing.Published in February 1953 in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine on page 100, Know Thy Neighbor by Elisabeth R. Lewis…Next on The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast, A team of engineers travels to a remote Tibetan monastery to install a computer meant to complete a centuries-long sacred task. But as the machine nears the end of its work, the engineers realize the monks believe its final output will trigger something far greater than they ever imagined. The Nine Billion Names Of God by Arthur C. Clarke.Newsletter - https://lostscifi.com/free/☕ Buy Me a Coffee https://www.buymeacoffee.com/scottsVFacebook - https://www.facebook.com/TheLostSciFiPodcastTwitter - https://x.com/LostSciFiPodInstagram - https://www.instagram.com/lostscifiguy❤️ ❤️ Thanks to Our Listeners Who Bought Us a Coffee$200 Someone$100 Tony from the Future$75 James Van Maanenberg$50 MizzBassie, Anonymous Listener$25 Someone, Eaten by a Grue, Jeff Lussenden, Fred Sieber, Anne, Craig Hamilton, Dave Wiseman, Bromite Thrip, Marwin de Haan, Future Space Engineer, Fressie, Kevin Eckert, Stephen Kagan, James Van Maanenberg, Irma Stolfo, Josh Jennings, Leber8tr, Conrad Chaffee, Anonymous Listener$15 Every Month Someone$15 Amy Özkan, Someone, Carolyn Guthleben, Patrick McLendon, Curious Jon, Buz C., Fressie, Anonymous Listener$10 Anonymous Listener$5 Every Month Eaten by a Grue$5 Denis Kalinin, Timothy Buckley, Andre'a, Martin Brown, Ron McFarlan, Tif Love, Chrystene, Richard Hoffman, Anonymous ListenerPlease participate in our podcast survey https://podcastsurvey.typeform.com/to/gNLcxQlk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Best Pick with John Dorney, Jessica Regan and Tom Salinsky Episode 323: 2001 A Space Odyssey Released 29 October 2025 For this episode, we watched Stanley Kubrick's iconic science fiction masterpiece 2001 A Space Odyssey, written by Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke and starring Keir Dullea, Gary Lockwood, William Sylvester and the voice of Douglas Rain. It was nominated for four Oscars and won one for its special effects, the only Academy Award which Kubrick ever won. It ranks sixth on the 2022 Sight & Sound critics list and it tops the directors list. Tom's new podcast: https://podfollow.com/all-british-comedy-explained Jess's amazing storytelling show: https://kingsheadtheatre.com/whats-on/16-postcodes-jhby BEST PICK – the book is available now from all the usual places. From the publisher https://tinyurl.com/best-pick-book-rowman UK Amazon https://amzn.to/3zFNATI US Amazon https://www.amzn.com/1538163101 UK bookstore https://www.waterstones.com/book/9781538163108 US bookstore https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/best-pick-john-dorney/1139956434 Audio book https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Best-Pick-Audiobook/B09SBMX1V4 To send in your questions, comments, thoughts and ideas, you can join our Facebook group, email us on bestpickpod@gmail.com, or find us on Bluesky. You can also visit our website at https://bestpickpod.com and sign up to our mailing list to get notified as soon as a new episode is released. Just follow this link: http://eepurl.com/dbHO3n. If you enjoy this podcast and you'd like to help us to continue to make it, you can now support us on Patreon for as little as £2.50 per month, but please be aware that future releases will continue to be sporadic.
Two crew members aboard a spaceship en route to Venus are thrust into fatal danger after a meteor strike severely depletes their oxygen reserves; it becomes clear there isn't enough to support both of them for the journey… one one will survive, the other will perish in the cold of space. Hear the tale from CBC Mystery Theater with “The Breaking Strain” by Arthur C. Clarke! | #RetroRadio EP0477Join the DARKNESS SYNDICATE: https://weirddarkness.com/syndicateCHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = Show Open00:01:30.028 = CBS Radio Mystery Theater, “Killer's Helper” (September 07, 1976)00:45:31.449 = CBC Mystery Theater, “The Breaking Strain” (1968) ***WD01:13:07.073 = Chet Chetter's Tales From the Morgue, “Interface To Terror” (1992) ***WD01:40:48.885 = The Clock, “Deadlier Than The Male” (September 25, 1947) ***WD02:07:45.163 = Creeps By Night, “Strange Burial of Alexander Johnson” (July 13, 1944)02:37:15.657 = The Crime Club, “Topaz Flower” (April 24, 1947)03:07:11.733 = CBC Deep Night, “The Intercom” (July 15, 2005)03:41:09.673 = The Devil and Mr. O, “House Is Haunted” (December 31, 1971) ***WD04:09:50.620 = Dimension X, “First Contact” (September 08, 1951)04:32:08.552 = The Strange Dr. Weird, “Secret Room” (February 13, 1945) ***WD04:43:58.444 = The Creaking Door, “Face To Face Music of the Spheres” (1964-1965) ***WD05:08:29.698 = The Eleventh Hour, “Sixth Sense Survivor” (1959-1971)05:33:04.990 = Escape, “A Tooth For Paul Revere” (July 04, 1948)06:02:30.977 = Murder By Experts, “The Big Money” (July 25, 1949)06:31:56.698 = Exploring Tomorrow, “Scionic Uranium Prospector” (July 09, 1958) ***WD06:51:03.491 = Dark Fantasy, “Letter From Yesterday” (May 01, 1942) ***WD07:15:10.541 = Diary of Fate, “Rollie Andrews” (August 03, 1948) ***WD07:42:07.593 = Fear on 4, “Invitation To The Vaults” (1988-1992)08:10:50.029 = 5 Minute Mysteries, “The Masquerade” (late 1940s)08:15:47.485 = Tales From The Tomb, “Do You Know Where The Children Are” (1960s)08:20:57.904 = Future Tense, “With Folded Hands” (May 14, 1974) ***WD08:49:20.216 = BBC Ghosts From The Past, “Mortmain” (April 22, 1992)09:33:24.032 = Show Close(ADU) = Air Date Unknown(LQ) = Low Quality***WD = Remastered, edited, or cleaned up by Weird Darkness to make the episode more listenable. Audio may not be pristine, but it will be better than the original file which may have been unusable or more difficult to hear without editing.Weird Darkness theme by Alibi Music LibraryABOUT WEIRD DARKNESS: Weird Darkness is a true crime and paranormal podcast narrated by professional award-winning voice actor, Darren Marlar. Seven days per week, Weird Darkness focuses on all thing strange and macabre such as haunted locations, unsolved mysteries, true ghost stories, supernatural manifestations, urban legends, unsolved or cold case murders, conspiracy theories, and more. On Thursdays, this scary stories podcast features horror fiction along with the occasional creepypasta. Weird Darkness has been named one of the “Best 20 Storytellers in Podcasting” by Podcast Business Journal. Listeners have described the show as a cross between “Coast to Coast” with Art Bell, “The Twilight Zone” with Rod Serling, “Unsolved Mysteries” with Robert Stack, and “In Search Of” with Leonard Nimoy.= = = = ="I have come into the world as a light, so that no one who believes in me should stay in darkness." — John 12:46= = = = =WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2025, Weird Darkness.= = = = =#TrueCrime #Paranormal #ScienceFiction #OldTimeRadio #OTR #OTRHorror #ClassicRadioShows #HorrorRadioShows #VintageRadioDramas #SuspenseRadioClassics #1940sRadioHorror #OldRadioMysteryShows #CreepyOldRadioShows #TrueCrimeRadio #SupernaturalRadioPlays #GoldenAgeRadio #EerieRadioMysteries #MacabreOldTimeRadio #NostalgicThrillers #ClassicCrimePodcast #RetroHorrorPodcast #WeirdDarkness #WeirdDarknessPodcast #RetroRadio #ClassicRadioCUSTOM WEBPAGE: https://weirddarkness.com/WDRR0477