Pantheon - Underated Show of the Year?

Season 1 tweet review:

#Pantheon S1 on #Netflix - anachronistic near futurism based on Ken Liu stories. Ignores AI (v hard to do now IRL!) so human uploads can prat about in fantasy VR battles representing hacking. Meh. Social upheaval gets marginally interesting; will watch S2.

 

S1 trailer: https://youtu.be/wTgYeETwgKQ?si=o8UvyuGmKSQUaoYE

Watched on Netflix, but previously released elsewhere a couple years ago. Maybe a part of why it feels so dated (by the generative AI boom). Opening exposition on "The Singularity" is almost 2 decades into being cringe (for me). But maybe it brings along some general audience, from under rocks.



For demographic pleasing: high-schooler protagonist opening. Very blatant GITS references and Motoko Kusanagi character. Young parents split by death/upload (for middle-aging anime fans?)...

The whole refusal to accept husband is not dead gets tiresome. Maybe realistic. But doesn't depict him as being partly lobotomised, per plot. Or any of the uploads as being meaningfully transhuman...

Beyond time dilation, which makes no sense, because it would require exponentially more processing hardware. But instead they have arbitrary mind degradation limitation ('the flaw'). Bleh.

I was surprised that the human cloning aspect was historically plausible. But Steve Jobs dude wouldn't have had computer hardware to grapple with uploads 20 years earlier. 🤷

Season 2 tweet review:

#Pantheon S2 on #Netflix ramped up exponentially into space opera, last 2 ep's largely remix of @cstross's Accelerando!😍

Carefully constructed conclusion revised S1 mediocrity..: https://x.com/Z3R0Gravitas/status/1884676773008306303

... To fav show of year I keep talking about: [search link to my comments in the show's subreddit].

Why SETI is stupid!

Many minds have pondered the tired, old 'Fermi Paradox' (the conspicuous lack of alien buddies out there in our humongous universe).

[XKCD]

+ Susan Blackmore's solution to the Fermi paradox (see her TED lecture): the necessary paradigm shifts to each kind of replicator (genes, memes, temes) are apocalyptically dangerous. Each (necessary) transition reduces the chances of a fertile planet bearing space-faring life forms; each adds an extra constant to the Drake Equation. She speculated in "The Meme Machine" that meme's evolutionary force driving bigger brains may have overstretched the physiology of our hominid peers, driving Neanderthals extinct. Mems have also, through humans, have wiped out more genetic diversity than a mass extinction, fostered luming terrors are nuclear annihilation, or terminator style runaway AI. I'm more optimistic, seeing only the risk of delay, not unrecoverable oblivion.

[TED (2008) - http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_blackmore_on_memes_and_temes.html]

[The (standard) Drake Equation]

+ In the BBC news article (that triggered this blog article): "Alien hunters 'should look for artificial intelligence'", Seth Shostak is interviewed as saying we should look for AI aliens, rather than flesh and bones. e.g. not just concentrating observations on biologically 'habitable' planets, but areas richest in mass and energy where only machines could exist.

[BBC - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11041449 ]

So it seems the realisation may be approaching mainstream consciousness: ogling the skies for alien peers is quite clearly pointless. Not because (the conditions for) life is necessarily rare (or because of any literal religious truth), but because life (e.g. humanity) will pass through this (SETI) phase in gynaecological evolution so rapidly...