To the best of my knowledge, I have responded to all Futurismic story submissions as of this morning. If you submitted something to us before the November 18th deadline and haven’t heard back yet, please feel free to query, as sometimes submissions or responses go astray. Thanks to everyone who submitted! Look for us to reopen sometime in February.

Just a quick note: Futurismic’s server will be down for a couple of hours tomorrow evening beginning about 8pm Pacific Time.

The media and the blogosphere (myself included) have been so busy looking at the cultural impact of Second Life that we’ve neglected to ask some rather more important questions. For example: given the vast amount of server space that it takes to run the synthetic world, and that servers chew through a fair amount of electricity, is SL ecologically sustainable if you compare the power consumption of an avatar to a meatspace human?

While hogging the headlines here in the UK for entirely different reasons, Russia is making news in the space community. Not only are they planning a kind of space elevator that runs between spacecraft (rather than from a planet into orbit), they are also helping South Korea take their first steps on the space exploration ladder by launching the little nation’s first astronaut.

The state of people willing to be space adventurers is looked at in Universal Space Systems latest report. Cost? A mere $2,000. I think I’ll stick with blogs and rumors for my space tourism insight.