Sci-Fi Monsters: Past, Present, Future | StarTalk

less than 1m read

·Nov 11, 2024

Who doesn't love the zombies? You know, they're always chasing you. There's always more of them, and they keep you alert. But also, who doesn't love a good alien? We all want to meet the aliens.

So, when I think of these forces that rise up in the storytelling of science fiction, I think it all started with Frankenstein—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. I'm not sure what might come next. We still ride in that zombie thing—that's been going for decades. Zombies? I don’t see them fading away anytime soon.

Vampires? I don't know. I was never scared of vampires. I think I can kick some vampire butt! It's like, he's gonna get that close when you bite my neck? Just get out of here! So, I don’t—I was never distracted by vampires. Zombies are a little scarier. Plus, zombies are the beginning of the end of the world, whereas vampires, they're just trying to— they're just trying to live.

But I have no idea; I'm not a good future predictor. I mean, I think I'm an acute observer of how the past has influenced the present, but how the present might influence the future? I don't know.

This Video Is A Lie

If we extend lifespan, the greatest challenge is going to be boredom

View All

Lockdown Around the World | National Geographic

It was just a little bit of like a calm before the storm. People were waiting for something very bad to occur. Sydney, Australia, is a very vibrant city. It is usually bustling. Seeing it so stark is one of those things that you would expect to see from o…

Eating the Invasive “Frankenfish” to Stop Its Spread | National Geographic

[Music] The snakeheads are a pretty smart fish. I think I’ve seen them where they’ll stir up mud, and they’ll sit there, and they won’t move. They’ll stir up that mud to make a camouflage for their s, but then they won’t make any more mud. So as the curre…

Creativity break: how can students expand their creativity in biology? | Khan Academy

[Music] I’d encourage every single one of you to spend some time immersed in a different culture or maybe even spend some time working in a totally different part of the world from where you grew up. Now, it doesn’t have to be quite that drastic; it coul…

Bitcoin: The Currency of The Internet

Over time, things tend to change a lot. Earth was once devoid of life, and then one day, it wasn’t. Horses used to be a normal form of transportation. Fast forward a hundred years, and we now have half a million pounds of metal to sit in as we soar 400 mi…

The Absurdity of Detecting Gravitational Waves

1.3 billion years ago in a galaxy far, far away, two black holes merged. As they violently spiraled into each other, they created traveling distortions in the fabric of space-time: gravitational waves. In the last tenth of a second, the energy released in…

Complex exponentials spin

In the last video, we did a quick review of the exponential and what it means. Then we looked and figured out what the magnitude of an exponential is. The magnitude is equal to one. Now we’re going to look closely at this complex exponential as it represe…

Sci-Fi Monsters: Past, Present, Future | StarTalk

More Articles