Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
OK ladies and gents, please give a warm welcome to our second new non-fiction columnist here at Futurismic - Sven Johnson.
Sven is what I might call a philosopher of design (although I image he’ll hate me having done so in public). In his inaugural column he gets all eschatological on our asses and asks whether, as a species, we collectively design our own doom. Continue reading “Designing for the Apocalypse”
The typical ending of our lovely planet will come in several billion years when the Sun swells up and engulfs all of the inner planets. But it’s never too early to start thinking of how to rescue our beloved cradle.
According to an article in the NYTimes, the Earth faces an unknown future because it will move further out in orbit as the Sun expends its mass and the gravitational forces become weaker.
One solution is to lasso comets and asteroids, swinging them near the Earth and using their slight gravity to boost the Earth to a higher orbit, where it could escape the Sun’s expansion. Because, y’know, what could go wrong with that?
(image from NASA website)
Man, I love post-apocalyptic tales. Seeing the breakdown of social order and its ramifications - and then watching ordinary people struggle to put some semblence of order back into their lives - really entertains me. And the video game industry’s full of this stuff. One game that came out last year, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Shadow of Cherynobyl, injected some good ‘ol Soviet pessimism into the mix to bring one of the best - albeit buggy - games of 2007. And considering that other game, that’s saying quite a bit. The bugginess is excusable simply due to the raw ambition of the AI (actually called A-Life) involved in the game.
The developers at GSC Gameworld attempted to create a living world for you to follow the story in - a ballet of mutant pigs, blind dogs, and desperate humans through which the player stumble through following his own path. Sure, it broke a lot. I’d often turn up to meet somebody, only to find them shredded by wild dogs and the quest unrealizable. But, while the story you take part in is good, watching the others around you go about their business is just as great, if not more. And the best part? Clear Sky, a kind of prequel, is slated to come out in May 2008. It’s more of a v1.5 on the original tech-wise. Clear Sky covers what happens immediately after something else goes wrong at Chernobyl, while the original (I can’t be asked to type all those full-stops) is set more than a decade past.
For a rather technical discussion of the A-Life system, read this interview. If you want to read more about the original, including how the developers’ office is an abandoned military factory in Ukraine, RPS has a good interview up. And if you haven’t read the original “Roadside Picnic,” go here now.
(via Rock, Paper, Shotgun)(image from S.T.A.L.K.E.R official site)
It’s easy to forget how reliant we are on our technologies … until we are unexpectedly deprived of the means to use them, that is.
Deprived by … oooh, let’s say, an electricity grid fault that leads to an automatic shutdown at a nuclear power station and leaves a big chunk of Florida completely blacked out for an evening? [image by dogfrog]
[As a side note, I never knew that nuclear reactors could just be switched off. Disconnected from the grid, sure, but switched off?]
And that’s just one little hardware failure, hence quickly fixed. But imagine for a moment another highly electricity-dependent country, like the UK for example, being hit by some sort of environmental disaster to which it isn’t accustomed, which causes a large number of grid hardware problems which are hard to trace and fix in the absence of the electricity they provide …
… I think we have a potential cookie-cutter techno-thriller movie plot, folks! Now, who shall we cast as the plucky Prime Minister?
I mean, really. Everyone from Phillip K. Dick to the ‘Fallout’ videogame series used nuclear war as a backdrop for stories set in the American West. Now, Mother Nature gives us new possibilities, only minus deadly radiation. Seems Yellowstone National Park is a giant caldera, essentially an old volcano cone that’s collapsed upon itself. And it’s been rising rather dramatic amounts (geologically-speaking, which is three inches per year). The largest volcano system in the world doesn’t show any signs of erupting anytime soon, as a geologist studying the caldera pleaded on Science Friday last week from NPR. For those of you looking for more exciting volcanos, Ana Krakatau, the volcano created after the largest recorded explosion in history, is at it again (pictured). Beyond the obvious immediate dangers, these volcanoes potentially have effects on the climate, both good and bad.
