We have some high hopes from British astronomers, who have told goverment ministers that they expect to discover the first evidence of simple extraterrestrial life with the next decade. While it’s easy to be cynical (after all, if your funding depends on being seen to be doing something worthwhile, it’s important to look like you are nearing some sort of definable goal), I personally feel it’s a much more likely scenario than that privately-funded Mars mission coming off. Six out of the seven astronomers also declared their belief that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, which prompts Centauri Dreams to take another look at the SETI question, examining the notion that we may never find an advanced civilisation elsewhere because they’ve all retreated into species-wide uploaded navel-gazing.

Probably not – but the fact that someone’s bold enough to release a novel in which the majority of the action takes place in Second Life (rather than some generic unnamed metaverse platform) speaks volumes about the confidence of people who use it. (Confidence in the concept at least – I’ve been considerably riled by the bug-ridden software in recent days. Meh.)

Talking of platform confidence, in-world builders fearful of losing their cutting-edge status are grappling to learn their chops with the new ‘sculpted prims’ … and given that a mere week after ‘sculpties’ went live in the standard client software, someone has managed to animate a pretty impressive horse simulacrum already, odds are good that there’s going to be some pretty awesome stuff floating around within a few months.

Others still are concerned about Linden Labs’ apparent acquiescence to external legal pressures, worried that the heretofore pseudo-libertarian cyber-paradise will gradually be eroded into a sanitized simulacrum of meatspace.

Of course, there’s always the option to up sticks and leave for pastures new – science fiction author and new media marketing CEO Jason Stoddard has been roaming the invite-only beta of China’s ‘Second Life killer’, HiPiHi, and it looks like it will have a lot to offer … especially if you speak Chinese.

Good news via Engadget for those concerned about the proliferation of easily-hacked RFID technology in personal documents and forms of identification – Paper Tyger announce a new line of paper which can be printed on and worked with just like the normal stuff, but which will shield your arphid-laden documents and cards from 1337 h4Xx0rz. Something tells me that this will be a remarkably successful niche product.

Performance-enhancing drugs for atheletes? Soooo last century, man, get with the program. The next big scandal destined to hit the world of professional sports may well be “genetic doping” – using drugs that hack human DNA to increase athletic endurance and stamina. This reminds me somewhat of a post from Csven Johnson at reBang, in reponse to an earlier NYT item about athletes whose prostetic limbs are considered to be augmentations. As it becomes increasingly possible (and indeed acceptable) to hack the human body, how will we draw the lines of what is acceptable under certain circumstances?

It’s something that Jamais Cascio examined in an essay here a while ago, but now New Scientist is mooting the science fictional idea of ‘solar shields’ in the upper atmosphere as a potential geoengineering solution to climate change. Although described as a ‘quick fix’ solution (which is a term that rings loud bells in the head of this engineering-educated reader), they’re keen to point out that it’s also a ‘last-chance saloon’ option to be considered only when everything else has failed … or when we realise it’s too late to try anything else. If the latter scenario proves to be the case, there’s going to be a lot of demand for that new low-tech dew-collecting device.