Google is backing the new $30 million X Prize for the first private team to put a robot on the moon.
Futurismic needs YOU!
OK, ladies and gents – Futurismic is looking for a few good bloggers.
What we need from you is enthusiasm for the sort of topics we cover here (science fictional near-future phenomena and technogeekery with a slant toward the plausible), a commitment to doing at least one post per weekday (or more if you like), and some sort of writing experience, be it as a blogger or anything else.
What can we offer you in return? The chance for your writing to reach a wider audience, and to share your enthusiasm for science fiction literature and the ideas it deals with. What we can’t offer you is money – the only people who have ever made money from Futurismic are the authors of the short stories we publish, because that’s what the site is all about. The Futurismic team do it for the love – no matter how much our families and loved ones may rue us for it sometimes!
Still interested? Good! Drop me (Paul Raven) an email to the address hyperlinked in my name on the staff page. Put ‘Futurismic blogger enquiry’ in the title so as not to get caught in my spam traps, and send me the following:
- A short paragraph about yourself and your relationship to science fiction
- Links to your own blog, or other writing of yours available online
- A couple of samples of the sort of post you’d contribute to Futurismic – we’re happy for you to have your own voice, indeed we’d prefer you to, but we like to keep things fairly short and snappy. If you follow the site regularly, you should know what I mean.
I’ll read them through, and get back to you as soon as I possibly can. Looking forward to hearing from you! [Awesome Futuristic City image borrowed from P1X3L]
The Disunited States – the American economic model has five decades to live
Paul Saffo, notable futurist and advisor to the World Economic Forum, believes there’s a fifty percent chance that the United States will have ceased to be a single nation within the next half a century – and that this would be a desirable outcome. I’m not an economist (nor do I play one on television), but I think I can see the points he’s making here. The question is – would the end result be something like the ancient Greek city-states, or some bizarre balkanized smorgasbord of corporations and micro-nations, as in Stephenson’s Snow Crash? [BeyondTheBeyond]
Fixing the future – Karl Schroeder on technological solutions for climate change
Many of the commonly tabled options for dealing with the incipient ecological crisis our planet is facing involve turning our backs on technology. One of the people taking the opposite position – namely that sustainability isn’t a zero-sum game – is Canadian science fiction author and foresight consultant Karl Schroeder, who talks about the potential of technologies like fusion power and vertical farming to avert catastrophe without destroying the potential of the human species in an interview at EcoGeek. [Vertical farm image borrowed from VerticalFarm.com]
And sometimes you just need to look at the bright side of things – for example, the rising cost of gasoline might reduce the incidence of obesity. It all ultimately boils down to personal lifestyle choices, though, at least as much as technology – so maybe we should think seriously about having less children.
Black holes eat black holes
It’s (relatively) common knowledge that black holes consume pretty much anything and everything … and apparently that includes each other, as astronomers speculate that the black hole at the center of our own galaxy may have gobbled up a smaller sibling over 100 million years ago.
While we’re on the subject of astronomy, and just in case you get asked by a curious child and don’t want to get caught on the hop, you may wish to learn why space is dark. [Image by D P Hershman]