Does It Fly‪?‬ Roddenberry Entertainment

This episode of Does it Fly? is presented by ScreenUK. ScreenUK is a free discovery platform celebrating the very best of UK-produced film, television, animation and gaming and sharing it with audiences around the world. ScreenUK is the go-to place to discover your next favorite movie, show, or game and features tons of exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews and all the info you need to find out how and where to watch or play your newest obsessions, wherever you are in the world. Make ScreenUK.org your next stop.

The very crux of beloved sci-fi comedy Red Dwarf comes from how Dave Lister was kept in time stasis for three million years (yes, you read that right) emerging only after a radiation leak killed the rest of the crew.Thus, the series follows Lister—the last living human—as well as a hologram of his old coworker (Rimmer), a humanoid creature who evolved from the offspring of Lister's smuggled pet cat (Cat), the sanitation android (Kryten), and the ship’s computer (Holly).

At its most functional, the Stasis Booth from Red Dwarf and related technology is meant to keep people from dying of old age during long interstellar voyages. We look at the scientific feasibility of placing living beings in states of suspended animation for long periods of time to slow down or prevent aging, a concept that you probably already know well from when it has appeared elsewhere in popular culture, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, and Futurama. What parallels are there to hibernation as we know it in nature? How does Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity factor into this? And what unique combination of sci-fi high concept and cult appeal has made Red Dwarf such an enduring success? Oh yeah, and we might as well discuss what a “red dwarf” actually signifies, too, while we’re at it!

All these questions and more will be answered (or at least discussed) in the latest episode! Remember that you can join in on the conversation in the comments on our YouTube page, so be sure to like, subscribe, and come back for more!

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FURTHER READING

Do you want to delve a little deeper into the facts, concepts, and stories Hakeem and Tamara referenced in today’s episode? Here are a few recommendations!

Red Dwarf
“Well, that’s the show, but the red dwarf itself is the smallest type of star, and the most common type of star in our galaxy. There are tens of billions of them.”
See also: The Transit Method.

Mass-Energy Equivalence
“When Albert Einstein figured out E=MC2, he said there isn’t really this thing called mass, there’s just all energy. So the existence of mass means the existence of energy. But here’s where I’m going to go out on a limb…to me, saying energy exists is the same as saying time exists.”

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity
“Right now, you and I are at rest relative to each other. We’re both sitting here on our computers. Which means that together, we’re moving through space at zero, and we’re moving through time at the speed of light. But if you were to take off in the Red Dwarf going 90% of the speed of light relative to me, everything on board is still in the same time zone as you are. But now you’ve put so much motion through space that your motion through time, relative to me, has been reduced, but not to the things traveling with you in the spaceship.”

The Hibernation Gene
“According to genetic evolution studies, the ancestor of all mammals hibernated and there is a hibernation gene in all mammals. Humans, apparently, 400,000 years ago appear to have had the ability to hibernate.”

Nematode Worms
“These nematodes [are multicellular organisms that were recovered from permafrost] and they’re tens of thousands of years old.”

No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre
The source of the famed “hell is other people” which Tamara references in discussion about the themes of Red Dwarf.

SUGGESTED VIEWING

Virtually everything discussed in this episode c

This episode of Does it Fly? is presented by ScreenUK. ScreenUK is a free discovery platform celebrating the very best of UK-produced film, television, animation and gaming and sharing it with audiences around the world. ScreenUK is the go-to place to discover your next favorite movie, show, or game and features tons of exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews and all the info you need to find out how and where to watch or play your newest obsessions, wherever you are in the world. Make ScreenUK.org your next stop.



In space, no one can hear you…put hideous alien monsters up for this kind of scrutiny! Perhaps the most iconic extraterrestrial terror in cinematic history, the titular aliens of Ridley Scott’s masterful Alien and its subsequent franchise are recognizable not only by their distinct look, but their uniquely terrifying properties.



We’re asking all the big questions in this episode. Just how worried should we be about the kinds of parasites that can do, well, what these aliens so famously do? Is that gestation period something seen elsewhere in (terrestrial) nature? And what the hell is up with their acid blood, anyway? And while these are very specific fictional bio-horror creatures with roots in nature, what was their inspiration and how were they designed for the screen? Like the film, this episode of Does it Fly? is not for the faint of heart.



And that’s only the beginning of the fun in our latest episode! Remember that you can join in on the conversation in the comments on our YouTube page, so be sure to like, subscribe, and come back for more!



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FURTHER READING



Do you want to delve a little deeper into the facts, concepts, and stories Hakeem and Tamara referenced in today’s episode? Here are a few recommendations!



Parasitoid Wasps

“The alien life cycle [as depicted in the movies] in part mimics parasitic or parasitoid animals here on Earth like parasitoid wasps who lay their eggs in caterpillars. But it’s different!” See also: Insect Life Cycles and Horizontal Gene Transfer



Tongue-eating Louse

“You know what this reminds me of? It’s so gross. Are you familiar with these arthropods that eat a fish’s tongue, replaces it, and then lives there as its tongue? They attach themselves to the base of the tongue they just ate and live life and eat with the fish. So the fish catches the food [but these creatures get the benefit].”



H.R. Giger’s Necronom IV

“For those of you who may not be familiar, H.R. Giger is an artist and his work is biomechanical. It combines mechanical forms with humanoid forms and it’s really creepy. It’s dark and it usually has sexual overtones. It’s reptilian, it’s insectoid, it’s really scary. And the actual design from the fully-grown Xenomorph is pulled directly from his work Necronom IV.”



Hydrofluoric Acid

“Speaking of the aliens’ acid blood…you can’t tell hydrofluoric acid apart from water. You could pour it on your hand and you wouldn’t feel a thing. It consumes calcium. When you go into training they show you all of these horrible training movies about what happens when you don’t do the proper care. What you’re supposed to do is wash it with water for a long time, and then there’s a cream that contains calcium that you put on it, because [the acid] migrates to where the calcium is. If you don’t do that and you go home that night, you’ll wake up with mangled limbs because the hydrofluoric acid consumes the calcium in your bones.”



SUGGESTED VIEWING



While the Alien franchise is as vast and ever-expanding as the cosmos itself, we only focused on the first three films in the franchise to get into the (gross) specifics necessary about alien incubation for this episode.



Alien



Not only one of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time, but one of the greatest horror movies of all time! The word “masterpiece” is thrown around a little too freely these days, but in

This episode of Does it Fly? is presented by ScreenUK. ScreenUK is a free discovery platform celebrating the very best of UK-produced film, television, animation and gaming and sharing it with audiences around the world. ScreenUK is the go-to place to discover your next favorite movie, show, or game and features tons of exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews and all the info you need to find out how and where to watch or play your newest obsessions, wherever you are in the world. Make ScreenUK.org your next stop.



The film that launched the careers of a Star Wars star, a Doctor, and even a DC superhero (albeit a deep cut)! Yes, that’s right, we’re talking about cult classic, Attack the Block, this week. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure yet (and seriously, this movie is a blast, so if you haven’t seen it, go check it out right now!), Attack the Block is a 2011 science fiction/horror film written and directed by Joe Cornish and starring future Star Wars franchise hero John Boyega and historic Doctor Who star Jodie Whittaker. The film follows a group of teenagers living in a South London housing estate who defend their neighborhood from an alien invasion.



So what flies and what doesn’t? Well, these aliens have come from the outer reaches of space and crash-landed on Earth, with the females spreading their pheromones and attracting a horde of ferocious males from across the solar system to Earth, so Hakeem takes a look at everything from the basic concept of pheromones to how the sun’s magnetic field allows for things like “solar sailing” to take place. Tamara unpacks not only the aliens themselves, but also gives everyone some background info on how the unique look of these terrifying creatures was realized onscreen.



And that’s only the beginning of the fun in our latest episode! Remember that you can join in on the conversation in the comments on our YouTube page, so be sure to like, subscribe, and come back for more!



FURTHER READING



Do you want to delve a little deeper into the facts, concepts, and stories Hakeem and Tamara referenced in today’s episode? Here are a few recommendations!



Pheromones

“Pheromones are chemistry and biology. Chemistry and biology have something in them that physics doesn’t have. Do you know what that is? Nasty! Bodily fluids and things like that.”



‘Oumuamua

“We know it came from outside of our solar system, for one reason only: the speed at which it was moving.”



Oort cloud

“There is allegedly a spherical distribution of comets called the Oort cloud that surrounds the solar system, so sometimes comets do come in from over the poles of the sun or something like that, so it’s not in the plane of the orbit.”



Parker Solar Probe

“As far as traveling through space on solar rays, that is something that can actually be done. There’s different forms of propulsion. There’s electric sail propulsion. You can have a physical sail. You can have an electric sail, where you create an electric field, and because the particles streaming away from the sun and other stars are electrically charged you can get a thrust out of that. Or you can have a magnetic sail [which] is pretty clever.”



Attack the Block’s Aliens Were Just as Terrifying Behind the Scenes

Tamara gives everyone some info on alien performer Terry Notary but there’s all kinds of additional fun info here for you to help fill in the blanks on just what made these creatures so convincingly scary.



SUGGESTED VIEWING



Attack the Block is so much fun very much because of the unique sensibility of writer/director Joe Cornish. And first of all, we must once again ask, if you haven’t seen Attack the Block yet, what are you waiting for? This movie is a treasure! Go watch!



Cornish wrote (along with Edgar Wright and Stephen Moffat) 2011’s criminally-underrated The Adventures of TinTin film (where’s the trilogy we were promised?!?) But you can also see his i

Follow us as we take it back to 2006 with the Academy Award-nominated Children of Men! Adapted from the 1992 P.D. James novel of the same name, the film, directed and co-written by Alfonso Cuarón, is set in a gritty, dystopian 2027, where humanity faces imminent extinction after years of global infertility. Amidst this chaos, former activist Theo (Clive Owen) is reluctantly drawn into a mission to escort a miraculously pregnant woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey), to the safety of a scientific organization dedicated to finding a way for people to once again have children. When the world is reduced to a single lifetime, how do we as a species overcome no guarantee of an assumed future? In this episode, Hakeem and Tamara nail down the realism behind Children of Men’s hopeless society and get down to business discussing whether or not ALL of humanity could suddenly become infertile.



From a narrative perspective, Tamara investigates the world of Cuarón’s mid-apocalyptic dystopia. Does the film’s lack of explanation of where infertility came from impact the world-building? When humanity no longer has hope, how would we behave and react? Would we replace children with something else? And most importantly, what does the title “Children of Men” even mean?



On the scientific front, Hakeem investigates the feasibility of a species-wide infertility epidemic. Could such a disease only affect humans and not other species? How can the same disease get inside all of us? What would it take for such a disease to spread planet-wide? Looking towards the future, would it be possible for babies to be born without ever being in a mother's womb?



Our latest episode includes all this and more! Remember that you can join in on the conversation in the comments on our YouTube page, so be sure to like, subscribe, and come back for more!



FURTHER READING



Do you want to delve a little deeper into the facts, concepts, and stories Hakeem and Tamara referenced in today’s episode? Here are a few recommendations!



The Children of Men by P.D. James

The modern science fiction classic that inspired the film!



Growing A Baby Lamb in an Artificial Womb

“There was some small animal, a lamb or a goat, that was actually bred in a plastic bag; it had its own umbilical cord… You probably don’t need a womb anymore.”



Making Synthetic Human Embryos

“How do we create new human embryos and bring them to complete their gestation cycle artificially?”



Choosing Pets Over Babies

“We see in our own time now millennials who are like ‘I’m putting off having kids’ and lather their animals with love, affection, and goodies.”



Hauntologyーmourning a future that we were promised.

“We always assume that tomorrow is going to come. We talk about leaving a better world for our children, but this is a world where tomorrow is not going to come.”



Could an Airborne Disease Spread Globally?

“Suppose a government is doing space research, and they’re putting some aerosols in the upper atmosphere, and it's some chemical. Because of the winds of the earth, it could spread around the world.”



Brain Droppings by George Carlin

Hakeem’s reading recommendation is filled with thoughts, musings, questions, lists, beliefs, and curiosities from his “all-time favorite word nerd,” George Carlin.



The Girl with All the Gifts by M.R. Carey

Mentioned by Tamara, another modern sci-fi classic that follows a civilization ravaged by a fungus-based infection. “If there is a fungus because they spread via spores, fungi spores could get in humans around the world before we knew it.”



And speaking of fungus and spores…



SUGGESTED VIEWING



If you’re in the mood for more dystopian sci-fi thrillers like Children of Men, here are some recommendations for other movies and shows with catastrophes, apocalypses, and everything in between!



The Last of Us

Based on the critically acclaimed video game franchise, the Emmy

This episode of Does it Fly is presented by ScreenUK. ScreenUK is a free discovery platform celebrating the very best of UK-produced film, television, animation and gaming and sharing it with audiences around the world. ScreenUK is the go-to place to discover your next favorite movie, show, or game and features tons of exclusive behind-the-scenes interviews and all the info you need to find out how and where to watch or play your newest obsessions, wherever you are in the world. Make ScreenUK.org your next stop.

It’s “time” (sorry) for a unique piece of sci-fi technology from the legendary Doctor Who! TARDIS stands for “Time and Relative Dimension in Space.” The Doctor is a Time Lord, from the planet Gallifrey, and a TARDIS is a technology that allows Time Lords to travel through space and time while having all manner of timey-wimey adventures. And yet, despite the name of our show, TARDISes do very little actual flying. They are designed to dematerialize and re-materialize in the desired place in space and time. Though there are episodes where audiences see the TARDIS doing what is more akin to traditional flying, doing that too often can damage them.

TARDISES have a Chameleon Circuit that allows them to blend into their surroundings. The Doctor’s TARDIS has a rather unique shape as an old police phone box, but that’s not their standard form. Instead, the Doctor’s famous TARDIS got stuck this way while disguising itself as something commonplace using that Chameleon Circuit. They are also, perhaps most famously, bigger on the inside than they are on the outside (if this concept gives you a headache, don’t worry).

In this episode, Hakeem and Tamara examine just how feasible it is for the TARDIS to traverse both time and space in such a unique fashion as well as a number of its other unique features. In the process, they discuss some key episodes in Doctor Who history, as well as the scientific concepts that do (or don’t) power the TARDIS.

Hakeem and Tamara explored a number of concepts to try and figure out what makes the TARDIS tick in this episode.


FURTHER READING

Black Holes

“There's a lot of brilliant physicists who have been studying this for a very long time. When you study black holes, basically you're studying the geometry of space-time. Black holes, not only are they bigger on the inside than the outside, but they grow continuously with time on the inside. So even if they shrink down and evaporate on the outside, the inside volume doesn't change.”

White Holes

“Armies have tried to get inside the TARDIS and they can’t, because it’s impenetrable. A white hole is a time-reversed black hole…Physicists…came up with this idea of a white hole…because they wanted to look at wormholes. How do you do interdimensional travel? They realized that if you have a time-reversed black hole, you form this thing called a white hole. So just like nothing can come out of a black hole, nothing can go into a white hole.

The Totalitarian Principle

“Any physical process that's not strictly forbidden from occurring by the laws of physics must occur. Unless the laws of physics say it can't happen, it must happen.”


SUGGESTED VIEWING

Since the show has been around for 60 years, we get that jumping into Doctor Who can feel a little intimidating. And when you factor in the fact that the TARDIS has been there from the beginning and appears in pretty much every single episode, it can be downright overwhelming. So if you’re someone who’s always been curious about Doctor Who and just wondering where to start or a fan who wants to revisit the basics as well as some of the episodes we watched to get ready for this week’s discussion, allow us to point you at a few of our favorites.

For simplicity’s sake, we’re keeping our recommendations to the newer series that began in 2005, but if you’re ready to dive deeper, you can’t go wrong with Tom Baker’s long-running (and perhaps mos

SPOILER ALERT: This episode of Does it Fly? and the show notes that follow contains spoilers for Black Mirror, “San Junipero.” If you haven’t watched the episode yet, go check it out on Netflix and then come back and join us!

One of Black Mirror’s most critically acclaimed episodes! Apparently set in a seaside town in the 1980s, “San Junipero” follows the story of two women, Yorkie and Kelly, who meet and develop a relationship. But in fact, the San Junipero locale is a simulated reality where the elderly and dying can live out their remaining days in a youthful, idealized version of their choosing before deciding whether to pass on to death or remain in the simulation forever. San Junipero has cemented itself as one of the most “happy” episodes of Black Mirror, showing there’s at least a little room for positivity and hope in the future. Hakeem and Tamara are back again, looking through the mirror at our reality to see what it would take to upload one’s consciousness (and soul?) permanently.

From a scientific perspective, Hakeem investigates the technological feasibility of uploading and suspending human consciousness in virtual reality. How are our memories created, and would it be possible to upload entire neural networks? What would the ethical considerations be for having an afterlife of this nature? How would it affect our understanding of life, death, and immortality? And how much of yourself and your memories will be uploaded? Perhaps most importantly, would this version of you be a copy, an imitation, or your whole self?

Meanwhile, Tamara jacks in to tackle “San Junipero” from a story perspective. Does the episode's lack of technological explanation for its virtual reality enhance or diminish the authenticity of Yorkie and Kelly’s relationship? What’s the user interface like, and what’s San Junipero's population breakdown? Would you trust your consciousness in the hands of a corporation for eternity? And how does this episode’s positive ending reflect and challenge Black Mirror’s usual pessimism about the future and technology?

All this and more in our latest episode! Remember that you can join in on the conversation in the comments on our YouTube page, so be sure to like, subscribe, and come back for more!



FURTHER READING

Want to dive a little deeper into the scientific concepts Hakeem touched on in today’s episode?

The Hebbian Learning Rule

“Memories are fragments; some parts are in the pre-frontal cortex, some parts are in the hippocampus; it all has to do with the connection between neurons. Neurons that fire together wire together.”

Memory Retrieval and the Passage of Time

“Every time you access a memory, there’s a possibility for modification.”

Language Models, Explained

“If you’re Albert Einstein, you have a lot of writing; you have a lot of speech; I can put that in an AI learning algorithm so that it can learn to predict the next word just like ChatGPT does.”

Self-Concept

“We each have three selves: our private self, our public self, and our secret self.”



Want some sci-fi & the afterlife or anthologies? Here are some suggested readings on stories and concepts similar to “San Junipero”!

Permutation City by Greg Eagan

“A life in Permutation City is unlike any life to which you’re accustomed. You have Eternal Life, the power to live forever. Immortality is real, just not what you’d expect.”

Axiomatic by Greg Eagan

“Drawing on nine years of research, Axiomatic explores the ways we understand the traumas we inherit and the systems that sustain them.”

The Wilds by Julia Elliott

“At a deluxe medical spa on a nameless Caribbean island, a middle-aged woman hopes to revitalize her fading youth with grotesque rejuvenating therapies that combine cutting-edge medical technologies with holistic approaches.”

Replay by Ken Grimwood

“43-year-old man who dies and wakes up back in 1963 in his 18-year-old body. He relives