Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to use social networking systems without being locked into one platform and bombarded with adverts? I sure think so – I might actually bother maintaining a social network profile in that situation, and get back all the friends I’ve lost through refusing to use MySpace. So I’m pinning some hopes on the success of the Appleseed Project, “an effort to create open source Social Networking software that is based on a distributed model.” [Warren Ellis, again]

Italian doctors have successfully created the world’s first biotech vagina. That is all. [Warren Ellis]

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.