Did You Know?
Did You Know?
This is the weekly science-fiction and fantasy flavoured "Did You Know" (inspired by trivia printed on the wrappers of a famous South African bubble gum).
5/9/2025: The Antikythera Mechanism was the world's first computing device, created around 100 BC.
29/8/2025: The Mondoshawan were the protectors of the world when The Great Evil attempted to destroy it 5000 years prior to the events of The Fifth Element.
22/8/2025: The Precursors from Pacific Rim, creators of the Kaiju, are capable of living for millions of years, and had tried to colonize Earth during the dinosaur era.
15/8/2025: Betazoids were physically indistinguishable from Humans, even being able to breed with them (ask Riker). However, the irises of their eyes were completely black, and they were all natural telepaths.
8/8/2025: DC has a hierarchy of Angels, with a Creator, Archangels, Spirits, Pax Dei and even Supergirl!
1/8/2025: The TARDIS was used by the Time Lords from Doctor Who, allowing them to time-travel. TARDISes had dimensional transcendentalism (being bigger inside than out) and had consciousness.
25/7/2025: The Old Ones from Stephen King's Dark Tower tried to merge technology and magic, and used the Dark Tower's Doors for multiversal travel.
18/7/2025: The H.P. Lovecraft line "That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die" refers to the Great Old Ones, one of which was Cthulhu.
11/7/2025: In World of Tiers by Philip José Farmer, pocket universes form a multiversal megastructure shaped in the form of a huge stepped pyramid with five tiers, with instantaneous travel between them.
4/7/2025: The Magratheans in the Hitchhiker's Guide constructed a P brain, Earth, to determine the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.
27/6/2025: In The Songs of Distant Earth from Arthur C. Clarke, humans send embryos with robot parents to habitable planets, after discovering the Sun is about to go nova. It is a scientific fact that the Sun cannot go nova.
20/6/2025: The Snowpiercer is a perpetually moving train that travels a globe-spanning track, carrying the last remnants of humanity after a failed attempt to stop global warming had created a Snowball Earth.
13/6/2025: Signals from the first discovered pulsar were initially observed by Jocelyn Bell Burnell and others. Due to its almost perfect regularity, they jokingly named it little green men 1 (LGM-1), considering that it may have originated from an extraterrestrial civilization.
6/6/2025: Larry Niven's Ringworld is an artificial world with a habitable flat inner surface equivalent in area to approximately three million Earth-sized planets. The Ringworld could be regarded as a thin, rotating slice of a Dyson sphere.
30/5/2025: Eru was the supreme deity and creator of Middle Earth in the Lord of the Rings, creating life or reality using the "Flame Imperishable". Eru was transcendent, completely outside of and beyond space-time.
23/5/2025: In Mass Effect, human explorers on Mars and Pluto discovered Prothean technology, which led to their discovery of mass relays and faster-than-light travel.
16/5/2025: If aliens land and claim to be benevolent, all is never as it seems. This was the case with the Taelons in Earth: Final Conflict. The Taelons are a dying race that have to fuse with Humans to survive.
9/5/2025: In a dystopian 1987, Buck Rogers was propelled 504 years into a sort of utopian future. Bidi-bidi-bidi!
2/5/2025: In the James Bond movie Diamonds Are Forever, Blofeld, Bond's old enemy, plotted to use diamonds to build a space laser weapon.
25/4/2025: In Avatar, the human mission is to mine Pandora of the mineral unobtanium, which is valued at 20 million dollars a kilogram, often at the expense of the plant, animal and sentient life on Pandora.
18/4/2025: The Isu (or Those Who Came Before, the First Civilization, or the Precursors) are an ancient and highly-advanced species of humanoid beings who created the humans in Assassin's Creed.
11/4/2025: The Nietzscheans from Andromeda follow the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, Darwin and Dawkins, and claim to be physically perfect.
4/4/2025: In Back to the Future, Einstein, the dog, becomes the world's first time traveller.
28/3/2025: In Star Trek, Humans and many of the Milky Way's species all shared a common ancestry back to the Ancient Humanoids and the DNA code they produced and seeded across the galaxy. This was a clever plot device to save Costume Design and Makeup Artistry costs.
21/3/2025: The Yautja (Predators) revere the Xenomorphs (Aliens) as the most worthy of all prey.
14/3/2025: Realmspace in the Forgotten Realms is analogous to our Solar System, with a sun and eight planets. The third planet from the sun was Toril. Faerûn was in Toril's supercontinent, inhabited by humans, dwarves, elves, halflings, and gnomes.
7/3/2025: Jules Verne once criticised the gravity shielding substance cavorite used by H. G. Wells in his 1901 novel The First Men in the Moon.