Get Ready for the Greenish Revolution
Food, drinking water and shelter are three essentials of human life. More than the other two, limitations in food production threaten well-being and create suffering. After all, more shelter can always...
View ArticleTastes Like the Singularity, But Less Filling
What is the artificial intelligence singularity? At its core it is simply the claim that when (if) computers get smart enough to figure out how to make themselves smarter, they will do so. At that...
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Floating prairies of the sea
Time frame: next 100 million years Prairies - the rainforests of the temperate flatlands of the North American Great Plains. Lush and dense with life, they burst with vitality and multifarious...
View ArticleSpace Empire: From Mercury to Pluto
It is a refreshing fact that the prospects for human survival are substantially higher if we live on two worlds, instead of just Earth. The moon, say, or Mars… every extraterrestrial body poses unique...
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Chasing the future: spoil sports of the prediction game
Ever have a day when everything went wrong? You predicted you would have a normal day, but your alarm clock didn’t ring. Already running late, you couldn’t find your briefcase or backpack. Staggering...
View ArticleSaving Daylight (in memory of daylight savings time, R.I.P.)
Daylight savings time was invented to save energy by lessening the use of electric lights. First proposed by postal worker and entomologist George V. Hudson, it was published in the Transactions and...
View ArticleWikiwikiwikipedia
The Web (called at times The World-Wide Web, WWW, W3, cyberspace, the infobahn, and the information superhighway) is the most recent in a series of communications revolutions. Stretching back through...
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If the Universe As We Know it Ends, When Will it Happen?
The universe as we know it might not end unexpectedly and unpredictably. That's good. But on the other hand, it might. That's bad. Consider just one way the universe could change unexpectedly....
View ArticleAccelerating Evolution
Increasing diversity means accelerating evolution. The number of different kinds of organisms has been increasing, on average, over the past few hundred million years. Things appeared to level off for...
View ArticleNew Plant Paradigms
Predatory plants will probably not trot over to attack us as we amble to our cars any time soon, John Wyndham's classic sci-fi novel Day of the Triffids notwithstanding. And yet, truth may well turn...
View ArticleTopsy-Turvy: When the North and South Poles Switch
The Earth is, among many other things, a giant magnet. And like magnets in general, the Earth has north and south poles, and a magnetic field that sweeps between them. This field envelopes the entire...
View ArticleCheaper Teaching, Faster Learning
Today most students, most of the time, are educated not that differently from the way they were when records began over 3,000 years ago. Classes of students taught by an instructor have existed at...
View ArticleWarm, Poison Planet
Global warming is bad. But just how bad could it be, worst case? Could it make the Earth hotter than a self-cleaning oven, like it did Venus? Venus is even hotter than Mercury even though Mercury is...
View ArticleScience and Destiny
Advanced technology is perhaps the most striking aspect of modern times. It did not just happen, however. Modern technology would be literally unthinkable without the understanding science provides of...
View ArticleBattle for the Mind
In 1988, shocking memories of childhood sexual and even satanic ritual abuse began to sweep America. Buried and forgotten for many years, these seemingly repressed memories were finally dredged up by...
View ArticleAsteroid Apocalypse
Back in 1908 - just yesterday, geologically speaking - a huge blast occurred over a swampy area near the Lower Stony Tunguska River. In case you forgot from high school geography class, this is a minor...
View ArticleFrom Highly Centralized to Highly Decentralized Societies
Techno-civilization seems to advance inexorably, and to spread - no longer just Western civilization, it is increasingly world civilization. Yet like the mythical Greek hero Achilles, modern...
View ArticleQuestions
Will the universe as we know it, with mankind in it, disappear in a false vacuum implosion in a few years or a few millennia? Will our comfortable big bang universe reverse course and die in a big...
View ArticleWhat it Means that an Hour’s Work Yields a Week’s Food
We all eat, but how many people actually work in agriculture? In the year 1900 it was 41% of employed people in the US. In the year 2000, just 1.9% had agricultural jobs. So if all people wanted was to...
View ArticleDay of Contact
To the reader: the following account was automatically translated (necessarily imperfectly) from the underlying semantic information, received from future year 2439 via quantum realtime semantic...
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