Bruce Sterling is talking about how the Chinese are gearing up how to manage the fall out from massive natural disasters. Not unexpectedly, their tactics call for big, centrally planned, multi-year approaches.
Category Archives: Blog
Life in cometary clay?
Panspermia seems to be in season at the moment; as well as a Scots professor testing the ability of microbes to survive space and reentry, one of the theory’s long-term proponents, Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe, has returned to the fray with a paper that uses data from the Deep Impact mission to suggest that cometary bodies may have the ideal conditions for harbouring primitive life.
Robot rapper quits the music business
Looks like there’s now a little less competition in the robot musician scene – Toyota’s “DJ Robot” (who, despite its name, prefers spitting mad lyrics to grappling with the wheels of steel) has turned its back on the music business for a new career as a receptionist. Give it five years, though, and I’m sure there’ll be a cash-in come-back tour. Musicians can never resist a fast buck.
Bigelow planning human-habitable space station
Emboldened by their recent success with their Genesis modules (and worried about the rising cost of space launches), Bigelow Aerospace are skipping the preliminaries and moving straight on to their Sundancer project – a human-habitable inflatable space station. [Colony Worlds]
Karl Schroeder on colonising Planet Earth
Canadian sf author Karl Schroeder has the sort of day job that anyone with a science fictional mindset would probably love to have – he’s a foresight consultant. Luckily, as internet denizens we can enjoy the fruits of his thinking without having to lash out on consultancy fees. Here’s his latest article for the consistently excellent Worldchanging blog, wherein Schroeder discusses the ecological footprint of humans as a species, and how we should approach our existence on Earth in much the same way as we would build a colony on another planet.