Let no one dare claim that The Big Lebowski isn’t Battlestar Galactica related.
They are like father and son to one another.
even though I must admit I haven’t seen TBL yet.
I’ll tell you about TBL what an asshole (but right in this case) roommate of mine a long time back told me about reading A Stranger In A Strange Land: I envy you. You only get to watch this movie the first time once, and you get to do it this week. Lucky bastard.
Netflix will have it in my mailbox tooomorrrow. I can’t wait!!
By the way Chuck, on the podcast you remarked that you loved stories with wide arcs of time and space. With that in mind: read more Dune…or at least maybe go watch the Scify Dune miniseries and Children of Dune miniseries, and then skip over to the book God Emperor of Dune.
Sean’s comment about the machines building better machines to complete an impossible task, made me think of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and Deep thought. Deep Thought eventually designed the its replacement for finding the question to the ultimate answer.
That’s awesome. I totally thought the same thing, but by the time I brought up H2G2, I didn’t manage to mention it. Like minds, indeed!
I wonder when “Hitchhiker’s Guide To GalaxyRanger” will come out…
Do hithchikers venture into the gutter?
Not really a guide so much as a dirty magazine.
I do not know but it will most likely start out something like this…
In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before — and thus was GalaxyRanger born.
It goes something like this:
…“oh, great Deep Thought, please tell us, what is The Answer?”
“I have contemplated for eons, and universes came and went while I pondered The Answer. In the end, I have finally found it. If you know what I mean.”
“I’m afraid we don’t. What DO you mean?”
“No, I mean that is The Answer. ‘IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN’.”
… stunned silence by the crowd…
“So, tell us, wise Deep Thought, you mean to tell us, The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything is: ‘IF YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN’?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, so what DO you mean?”
“I haven’t got a clue.”
… And so the hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional beings went off to design an even bigger and more powerful computer, the Deep Throat, to find out what exactly one means and he says “If You Know What I mean.” …
I suspect there will be pictures.
let’s all meetup and throw a frak party @ the restaurant at the end of the universe and we can discuss this… heheh… 
I will deposite one penny in an off world bank account so when we arrive at the End of Time the operation of compound interest means that the fabulous cost of our meal will have been been covered.
I am going nuts! Due to circumstances beyond my control, I have yet to listen to #127!! ARGH!!!
I have started it 3 times, only to be interrupted by unavoidables!
sob!
it’salrightit’sokayyoucanmakeitthroughit’llstillbethereit’sokay…
eep.
So the whole robot sentience thing struck a chord because I’ve been reading Jason T. “PhilosopherJedi” Eberl’s “Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy,” which has a chapter in it by Jerold J. Abrams called “Embracing the Children of Humanity: How to Prevent the Next Cylon War” which deals with this very issue. Essentially, as Sean says in 127, we’d have some serious communication problems come up once computers/machines learn to out-think us and we’d face a situation where we either adapt (essentially become machines ourselves by downloading our consciousnesses into robot bodies and/or computers–becoming imortal in the process, which I suppose might have its benefits) or face the extinction of either humanity or the “post-human” robots.
Wait, Brainstorm is a Douglas Trumbull movie? I HAVE to look this up now. The man has my eternal respect for standing up to McCarthy’s HUAC and writing the novel/script to Stanley Kubrik’s Spartacus.
Not to mention, a pioneer in visual and special effects for his work on ‘Blade Runner’ and ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind’.
You know what? I have Douglas Trumbull confused with Dalton Trumbo. I have no idea who Douglas Trumbull is/was. I’ll still keep an eye out for the movie, though. Carry on…
Blacklisted. Wow. He wrote Roman Holiday, Spartacus, and Papillon amongst other things.
Are you guys putting me on?