A lot of you have asked what these so called “hidden references” are that you’re supposed to be hunting for, so I’m going to list a few from the first season here. This is the kind of thing you should have your ears peeled for!
Episode 1. A Womb Away From Home: What happens when women no longer have to physically bear children? Who wins? Who loses? Who takes artificial wombs to a far away planet to create a colony of super-beings?
Hidden references: The company that makes the artificial wombs is named Stavia, after one of the main characters in the book The Gate to Women’s Country. The first baby to leave the Stavia facility is named Rokeya after that author Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, a Muslim feminist and science fiction author who wrote a short story called Sultana’s Dream in 1905 about a feminist utopia.
Episode 11. Winded: What would happen if a company put up so many wind turbines that they actually changed the climate on Earth? I know this sounds totally crazy, but I swear to you this is something that scientists have actually looked into. So naturally, I talked to one of those scientists.
Hidden reference: The company that makes the wind turbines is named Vayutech, after Vayu the Hindu Lord of the winds.
Episode 19. Unseen: Humans have long dreamed of what it would be like to be able to disappear, vanish in thin air, move about undetected. But what if scientists actually invented an invisibility cloak? What would people use it for, and how would lawmakers and the public react?
Hidden reference: The invisibility cloak is named The Dalton after James Dalton who wrote The Invisible Gentleman in 1833.
Episode 20. The Climate Gene: There’s a lot we could do to curb climate change — reduce our driving, eat different foods and stop taking so many flights. But what if instead we decided to alter our genes to make climate change prevention easier?
Hidden reference: The lab that provides these genetic modifications is called Haldane labs, named after J B S Haldane who wrote a book called “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” in 1924. In the book, he talks about a transhuminist future where people control their traits through in vitro fertilization, long before that technology was figured out.