With NASA planning missions to explore the next planet along, they need to make sure they’ve covered every eventuality. Not just the obvious things, like how much fuel they’ll need or how much radiation an astronaut can be exposed to, but those tricky issues that no one ever wants to be first to bring up – like, what do you do if someone dies or becomes mortally ill en route to Mars? Ethical questions are tricky at the best of times, but when you factor in the isolated and resource-short environment of an interplanetary spacecraft, NASA has a whole philosophical minefield to pick their way through.

A little while back, Google announced their intentions to go ‘corporate green’, and start supplying a large chunk of their power needs through solar panels. The project isn’t done yet – in fact, there’s a long way to go – but you can see “artist’s impression” drawings of the planned alterations to the Googleplex, which seems to consist of covering the roofs and car-parks with photovoltaics. Of course, Google being Google, you can also see the plans in 3D with the relevant Google Earth download. I wonder how much extra traffic this story would need to generate to cancel out the increased proportion of clean energy?

Biotechnology and bioengineering have huge potential, but the costs involved have prohibited progress. Up until now, that is – all that may change with the invention of a $10 device with no moving parts that generates multiple copies of a single DNA strand more accurately and more quickly than the current lab-grade equipment, which could have the same effect on biotech that miniaturisation had on computing. [FuturePundit]

The big news of the moment is the Great May 1st Mutiny on Digg. The hoo-ha kicked off because a few stories were posted publicising the HD-DVD crack code, and the code’s rights-holders applied legal pressure to get the infringing material removed; then the users of the site rallied in protest at being censored by the owners and pressured the owners into taking a stand against the take-down notices.

This has interesting implications way beyond the DRM debate (although it’s sure to affect that in some way, too). What it does is highlight the power of user-driven social networks, for better or for worse. Perhaps the truth of the matter is that, as systems, they are inherently open to being gamed, for fun or for profit. But does that mean they’ll be a short-lived phenomenon, or is the power of crowds here to stay?

Gone are the days when computer games involved little more than mowing away descending hordes of pixellated aliens. Now people are beginning to see the potential of games as ways of teaching and learning, not just individually but in groups and, theoretically, as a planet. Hence World Without Oil, an alternate reality game that runs for the next month, with players attempting to imagine plausible solutions to the not-entirely-hypothetical scenario of the world running out of oil yesterday, 30 April 2007. It’s still early days for this sort of project, but I think we can expect to see a lot more of them as time goes by. [Clickable Culture]