How the hell do you define a ‘futurismist’, anyway?

“We overexpect dramatic developments early, and underexpect them in the longer term.”

Ah, OK. Centauri Dreams cuts a slice from a new book by Stewart Brand, ‘The Clock of the Long Now’ – a slice in praise of science fiction readers, no less.

Nothing brings back memories like a photograph. But Hewlett Packard think that having the ability to stream back audio or video to a digital device by waving at a photo would enhance your nostalgia trip immensely. Hence their development of the Memory Spot, a shirt-button sized device that can store documents, pictures, audio and more, designed to be stuck onto ‘meatspace’ documents to enhance their content. It’s basically ‘RFID plus’…though hopefully not so easy to hack.

Can your ability to pay attention be trained and improved? That is the question being investigated by scientists using real-time Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to observe the human brain in action. It’s already been shown that patients can learn to alleviate chronic pain by watching the images and using them as a feedback loop to tame thgeir minds – but can it be used to help people with attention deficit disorders to improve their concentration?

Among the many hazards facing human astronauts making long interplanetary journeys, radiation damage is one of the trickiest to combat. Sure, you could shield their capsule with lead, but then your logistics would take on epic proportions due to the massive weight of the vehicle and the subsequent need for more fuel.So you’d need to use something light – how about a few grams of hydrogen gas?

There are some fascinating complexities to living in an age of massive engineering. For example, what happens to a lake when an oil drilling platform on its surface punctures a salt mine underneath? Or how do you refill a lake that sprouted a few sinkholes?