Over at Space.com, Stuart Atkinson is thinking about SETI, and wondering whether we’d actually recognise or understand a signal from an alien civilisation if we found one. After all, our concepts of meaning are pretty tied up in our own conception of the universe, and what is or isn’t possible – perhaps the lightshows of distant stellar and galactic events are themselves a form of communication.

George Dvorsky thinks we should keep looking, even though he’s skeptical of us ever detecting another sentient species. The trouble is that the Drake Equation doesn’t take into account all the factors that could derail a species before it makes the leap to interstellar civilisation – and the more we refine our hunt for ‘the others’, the more likely we are to realise how close we are to falling down before the first hurdle.

There’s a whole lot happening beyond the confines of this ball of rock we call home. Compared to us – even compared to our species – stars live a long time. But even stars die eventually, collapsing into pulsating red giants and shedding stellar mass before finally collapsing in on themselves. And if you zoom out another level, you find that galaxies like our own have acted as cannibals in the distant past, subsuming and assimilating huge swathes of other smaller galaxies and clusters. As above, so below, eh?

Via pretty much everywhere, even places that normally don’t mention science fiction, comes the news that the Department of Homeland Security have reformed ‘Sigma’, a conclave of well known science fiction writers (Bear, Niven, Pournelle, Andrews, Walker), to think up some brilliant new ideas to keep the US safe from terrorism. Um, OK. I love science fiction as much as anyone reading this blog, I’m sure, but I can’t see that having five authors thinking up neat ideas like a “brain-scanning skullcap that could tell agents what kind of explosive material a dog had picked up” is really the best answer to this particular problem.

The technological wings of the blogosphere are all of a flurry about the revealing of Microsoft’s new touch-based interface technology, known as ‘Surface’ – and from looking at the footage, it’s easy to see why. It looks a whole world more fun and friendly than mouse and keyboard. Futurismic essayist Jamais Cascio* believes that this sort of new interface will have it’s biggest impact not in the document-based applications that computers are used for, but in the ‘metaverse’ applications like augmented reality, where the more intuitive mechanism of hand gestures will enable greater control over large flows of data.

*Yeah, I know – we’ve not had an essay from Jamais or anyone else for a long time, thanks to ongoing technical issues. We’re still working hard on a new iteration of Futurismic which should be not just more enjoyable for you the reader, but easier for us to maintain and keep filled with quality content. Don’t think we’ve forgotten you – we’re just trying to fit it all in between our other commitments in the world outside the internet!

I think this is probably a front-runner for the “massive knee-jerk technophobic reaction by a major nation’s goverment” award for this week; there are reports that Russia has suspended the export of human tissue samples for fear that genetic material could be used to make biological weapons tuned specially to attack people with Russian DNA. Now, I’m not a genetic scientist (nor do I play one on television), but while it strikes me that such a thing is probably possible, it certainly doesn’t strike me as being very likely. But who knows? Maybe the new Mutually Assured Destruction scenarios will be based on biological weapons, not nuclear.