When humans began evolving they were quite savage. Slavery was accepted without question. Was this due to the lack of ethics, or lack of an effective ethics? As the ions passed, we got more humane, but why? Was it by reasoning out ethics or was it by observing each other's societies and noting some lifestyles that were more peaceful were more enjoyable, more productive? War, the practice of killing/dying to obtain materials, was a common practice, even if its goal was hidden, e.g., The Crusades. But, when Aristotle's philosophy was made public, reason, science spread, making prosperity possible. That was countered by the old superstition, a faith in force. That is where the final battle of ideas needs to be resolved. Will reason reign or will superstition? Reason leads to non-violence, communication, cooperation with consent. Will it finally replace fear, delusion, the momentary emotion? Will humanity boycott "The Most Dangerous Superstition" (Larken Rose)?

If I were asked, "Aren't you worried extraterrestrials might be hostile, a threat to our species?" I would reply, "I'm much more worried our species might be a threat, based on our history." As a "Trekkie" I had to forgive the invention of the universal translator. It was needed to speed up the story. I think this might always take time because it deals with new intelligence.

I was turned off at the beginning when a "ghost-like figure" appeared and seemed to be preaching religion. I'm atheist. When I heard: "If we don't know the answer, then it must be god", I cringed. God is NOT the answer to any science, quite the opposite. Science answers questions people once thought gods answered, but didn't. For example, when it rained, thundered, or lightning appeared, it was "explained" by inventing (saying) the rain god made it rain or the god of thunder made that sound or that flash of light was done by the lightening god. Does this really explain? It might to a very ignorant person who doesn't question (think) beyond that, e.g., who made that god? The answer was: "You can't ask that." If you asked "Why can't I ask who make the god?, there was no answer. Posing a god as a creator of rain was a dead end. It relieved the primitive fears, temporarily, but only until one began to really look for an answer.

Just purchased and really looking forward to reading, Mike! Congratulations. As a fellow self-published literary author, I know how rough it can sometimes be (emotionally and psychologically). The experience can be even more brutal when you're broaching the literary category and not pigeonholing your story within the rigid molds of genre fiction. And, as I can see by the # of viewers, the social media logorithms are merciless when it comes to trying to get the word out. This never showed up on my suggested views even though I'm subscribed to you. I had to discover it by directly visiting your channel. I promise to post a review and share my feelings with my tiny group of readers and spread the word. Meanwhile, should you ever be interested in trudging through a pseudo-science philosphical hero's journey about a guy who has the ability to end all of existence with a thought and struggles through his life trying not to use it, you could check out my first novel, Shrugging. :) At least we authors should stick together for technical and moral support. :) Absolutely love your videos and can't wait to dive into Water Lily Pond! UPDATE: Just burned through the preview chapters on Kindle. I'm loving it. I'll be totally honest, I'd have thought the continual inner dialogue between Walter and Chuck would be distracting, but somehow you're making it work very well.

watched this with my dad and we both loved it. love these reviews as well. i wanted to ask: my dad says the whole staircase plan was ridiculous and impossible because you could never harness nuclear energy with such accuracy and that there would be no way to use the bombs as momentum without destroying the probe. what do you think? neither him nor me have any knowledge of astrophysics

11:19 … aaand like a bad James-Bond villain, she spills the San-Ti's plot. So, not sorry for not enjoying the first book, nor the first four episodes. I'll always appreciate your videos, though. Cheers!

So the sophons can hack the visual display screen of a voice-recorder .... but they don't do anything useful like: turn off all the power plants or encrypt all the data on Earth into San Ti level encryption

What's funny is that phonetically sophons and cellphones sound really similar and when I first watched this I was like, "huh?" Mean phone apps!

The commentary on Dina Meyers character😂😂 I couldn’t agree more, she played her character so well. I remember being so mesmerise by her onscreen presence when I was 18 watching this back.

I've only watched the Netflix version - but I've argued a little bit on Reddit about this. From what is presented about the sophons - is your expectation that sophons could break nano-fibres by banging into them like they do the particles in the accelerator, or is there something about the fibre that would make it impervious to a proton-computer travelling nearly at the speed of light? Anyway - I find the show incredibly frustrating as they show the sophons can hack the global internet and all phones (all that security) all at the same time - which would utterly cripple global trade, comms, research, travel, diplomacy ... yet they don't do anything useful like encrypt it all with San Ti tech, or fill the internet with junk AI spam, or turn off all power grids, or open all virology labs ... seems MASSIVELY powerful and utterly under-utilised. Hack the whole world just to threaten That the sophons can create full open-eyed hallucinations with sound and speech means that at any moment they could make on of Wade's bodyguards mistake him as an enemy and shoot him - also utterly underutilised capacity

Great commentary at the end!

The Einstein joke was her. She is Einstein. And the Heaven she thought would be harmonious is still dreadful, you cant play with God…ONLY God gets to play instruments in Heaven, God doesn’t give many options

In the first and last book they described what the aliens looked like and they have arms and legs but have glass/mirror like bodies so they could reflect the heat from their stars. They also light up? Like that's how they communicate, probably a reason why they don't have the concept of "thinking". Um, also I'm a bit confused by how they reproduce bcs it's mentioned that male and female merge and that's how they make their offsprings, so how do they multiply? I do hope they show it in the upcoming season.

The Narada is only heavily armed and appears the way it does because it was radically modified and retrofitted by the Romulan Tal Shiar at a cloaked deep-space experimental research facility using a bunch of salvaged and reverse-engineered Borg technology. While it may have started off as humble mining vessel, it was so heavily modified with Borg upgrades and future tech that it might as well had been a different ship entirely by the time the transformation was complete. Basically the only feature that remained from its life as a mining ship was the integrated planetary plasma drilling platform. While I agree that it did look rather silly with all of the spikey bits and such, I do kinda understand what they were going for with those design elements... Plus apparently part of the rationale behind all of the spikes and tentacles was to enable the vessel to physically latch on to asteroids and the like in order to mine and extract the available resources within. Although I've also heard that all of those spikes were a result of the retrofitting performed at the The Vault (the aformentioned top-secret Tal Shiar research installation) and that they are some kind of necessary component involved with the advanced weapons systems. Frankly I find both of these explanations to be somewhat lacking, especially the first one. It just seems redundant and ultimately pointlessly regressive to design a futuristic mining vessel equipped with physical and/or mechanical armatures intended for grasping onto and hauling asteroids and various types of space debris in a universe where advanced directed energy-based tractor beam technology already exists in the current year - which is the past from the perspective of the Narada - and is widely available to essentially all space-fairing warp-capable species in the Alpha Quadrant. The weapons array explanation is perhaps a bit more feasible, but still rather absurd nonetheless.

I’ll call you Doctor is you’re an MD. Your PhD means nothing to me and it affords you no compelled respect. There is also no evidence that females and ‘minorities’(whatever that means) are treated any different in general than anyone else. Especially in a time where white men are being openly and systemically discriminated against.

In the book they could manipulate the CMB. They actually made the CMB flash in the books whereas they made the stars flash in the TV series. The books are way out there and I don’t really like it. People defend it by saying it’s science ‘fiction’, but sci-fi doesn’t mean that the science is fiction. Sci-fi means that the story is fiction and the setting is typically something to do with space or at least something extraterrestrial. I don’t mind a bit of indulgence like we see in Interstellar, but I like at least some attempt to use real science or at least far fetched but still ‘theoretically possible’ ideas. For instance, I can deal with a warp drive or wormholes because they are at least ‘theoretically’ possible, however implausible they are in real life.

We have this painting as/on our shower curtain, and my artistic daughter painted the bathroom in coordinating colors, even stenciling water lilies a couple places on the walls. She also mounted a framed portion of an album cover [Grateful Dead?? I dunno] of Ophelia floating in the stream, on the wall.

Keep doing what you are doing, as someone who wanted to study Physics but had to go the Actuarial Science route I always love when physicists explain stuff. I was a little disheartened by quantum entanglement not being a thing we can use for faster than light communication. But what I love is that not only do you explain this you understand that liberties have to be taken to make the story possible the Fiction in Science Fiction. Keep going man, also hard science Fiction writers need a new concept for this communication since quantum entanglement gets broken when you observe that one particle. I learned something

Just a quick update. Publication will be delayed a couple of days. I've come down with a summer bug so a bit late in uploading the final text. Update: It's COVID. Fun. Be careful out there, folks!

I laughed. Thanks for all the fun content Edit to add: Lewis Grizzard was a childhood favorite of mine. His columns, books...such a fond memeory. Thanks again

Will there be an audio book version?

Congratulations! I will order the book, and read this summer, getting a knee replacement so will be laid up for 6 weeks, perfect time for a good read.

I just grabbed the kindle version and devoured a few chapters. It's thoroughly engrossing so far. I could maybe make some minor criticisms, but minor is all they'd be. edit: I just finished this in the kindle version. Really well done. I look forward to picking up in a physical edition once it's available.

Congratulations! Regardless how a work of fiction is „born“, it is a serious accomplishment! 🎊 🎉 👏😁👍

When they say they were able to expand a proton to something massive by manipulating a higher spatial dimension wouldn’t this make sense? If we think of how many 2d squares could fit within a 3d cube that both have the same length and width would the answer be infinite? And even if the Planck length was used as a constraint for how thin the 2d square would be that would still allow 10^35 squares within the cube. Applying this to the size of a proton would then make sense for how large it could be, no? I have no background in science or mathematics so I’m likely missing something but just curious if this line of reasoning is correct and could apply to taking something within 3d space and expanding into 4d. Thanks

Loved your entire review series and loved the show. But - Aerospace engineer here … so I must say that nothing in space is static, everything is moving in some orbit… so to “line up” hundreds of bombs to be encountered so EXACTLY that each needed to go through a hole in the center of the sail was ludicrous.

There's 30 eps Tencent's Chinese adaptation of the 1st book is completely available for free on KZbin... Also there's an animated adaptation called 'Three Body Animation' which starts from judgement day from the first book and ends midway of the second book...

I could be wrong, but I believe this episode makes a reference to an old X-Files episode. When the cop & his supervisor are talking about the Wow signal, the supervisor asks who it could be, and the cop replies, "little green men". This happens to be the title of an X-Files episode (S02.01) that deals with alien contact, and also discusses the Wow signal. If so, that's a cool little nod to an influential TV show whose fingerprints can be seen on this show, along with so many others.

It's always a good day when CCH Pounder shows up.

Wouldn't the neutron flux ruin the material? Regardless of what the sail or the capsule is made of, neutrons ruin everything.

Great videos I really enjoyed this show and your videos. Hope to see ya back when they come out with season 2!

1. Jim Lovell was in mission control, not at home, when Neil Armstrong made his "One Small Step". 2. The Acapulco trip was cancelled for the Apollo 8 mission, not the Apollo 13 mission 3. Ken Mattingly was dropped from the crew *three days* before launch, not two. 4. The clock doesn't start running until the hold downs release, and the rocket begins to lift off the pad. 5. They'd already figured out a procedure for using the LEM as a lifeboat. They'd simulated it on a previous mission.

Oxygen doesn't burn.

If there had been openness, instead of cold war secrecy, the Apollo 1 tragedy would probably not have happened.

Perhaps I am wrong but as far as I understood you a one bit info transfer would still be possible via entanglement. Or does measuring the other side lead to a reorientation of the spin before the spin it curently has is observed like the collapse of the wave funtion on the first. In that case how do we know it even takes on the spin at all. It could still be undefined and the entanglement is just broken as soon as you seperate them. Might be wrong though. I would love some insight on this

The Dark Star from the movie of the same name. Both "hero ships" of Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda Ascendant series. The first introduced the Harika Maru has that lived in look and feel, the Titular Andromeda Ascendant is the unrealistic fancy pants ship.

There is a long history about why "Mister" is used instead of "Doctor" in the UK. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1119265/

I like that you cite the difference between a book and a movie made from that book. People dunk on film adaptions "in relation to" the book, but films need to stand on their own and should generally be judged that way. As to the time it takes to make your reactions, "...I don't know how other people do it," those other people aren't thinking about it, they are (usually) just reacting to it. I think what you're doing is more like a personal review, but science biased, which is fine; I've really enjoyed these reviews/reactions. I'm a bit tired of seeing things just thrown into a story without any real thought. Perhaps one day a writer will take the time to just get everything straight before making their film. Very nice work, Mike!

Seriously, the San Ti like to over complicate their lives. If they want to take Earth for themselves, and have the technology to make sophons and have them act on humans and their technology in all the ways seen in the show, then don't engage at all with the humans. Just have the sophons covertly sterilize everyone, and by the time the San Ti reach Earth, there would be no one to oppose them and Earth would have had about three centuries to clense itself from our pollution and restore the environment to a fairly pristine state.

If you do more series reactions The Expanse would definitely be the most interesting. The science is incredibly accurate with great effort put into it being as realistic as possible and it's a great show in general.

I was wondering why they only allowed three bombs successful. That was way too few.

13.8 billion years ago. There was a slight revision in the age after the initial finding. You already know that it is a trap to draw me out as anal retentive. OK, I will hold back on any more corrections.

12:53 " *Doctor* Durand, thank you very much! I didn't spend six years in Oxford to be called "Mister"! "

Subscribed and waiting for you to read the book 😀

Maribou and I had completely different opinions on which scientists we liked and which scientists rubbed us the wrong way. Maribou's theory is that the five were specially calibrated for every single viewer to really like one of them and really hate another of them and, thus, keep everybody coming back for the next episode.

Thank you.

Oh man, you are losing so much content by leaving the books apart, and you get some totally useless political correctness, by the way.

I really liked your review series on this. You have a way of converging a lot of information in a very pleasant manner and I bet are a great teacher. If you did a review series on The Foundation (one of the original big science fiction) or Dark Matter a contemporary popular science fiction author, both on Apple TV, I would definitely watch them!