Why limit yourself to war on the planet’s surface? Think big like the Pentagon, and militarise space with ground-based anti-satellite lasers. After all, you wouldn’t want anyone else being able to take satellite images of the surface with the same degree of accuracy as yourself, would you?
Call The Space Police
Space exploration is a given – provided we don’t immolate ourselves in pointless wars or avoidable climate disasters, natch. But what about when we actually get out there? Dr Patrick Lin, of the The Nanoethics Group in Santa Barbara, California has called for us to start considering the ethical implications of space exploitation before we export all our human follies to other planets and environments.
True Transparency
Just because you can see through something doesn’t make it truly transparent. Even the finest glass still loses some light to reflection, leading to loss in optic fiber, for example. So this new completely transparent and optically loss-less material from Japan is good news for the future information infrastructure of the world.
IBM Unveil Nanoscope
It’s easy to forget that the boys at Big Blue don’t just do computers – they have their fingers in a whole lot of other pies too, one of which is the development of electron microscopes. They’ve just demonstrated the latest advance in this field, an ‘atomic force microscope’ which doesn’t just produce images of materials at the nanoscale, but can manipulate individual molecules with incredible precision. The future is tiny.
EYELID MOVIES by Will McIntosh
The latest Futurismic short story is “Eyelid Movies” from Will McIntosh. What would you do if your dreams were hacked?
Eyelid Movies
by Will McIntosh
Laughter, conversation, and a mildewy smell drifted from the back of the bus. Casey stared out the window, his eyes semi-focused. The power lines rose and fell, rose and fell as they passed.
“Casey, my friend, I got some bad news for you.” Rob Blanke said, clutching at the seat backs on either side of the aisle. Rob was smirking. He sat down next to Casey. “Got a text message from Champ Rottenbucher last night.” Rob stuck his finger into a hole in the seat fabric, worked it around a little. “One of the dream-channels—” Rob busted out laughing. “One of those—” he tried to continue but couldn’t.
He flicked his finger out of the hole, making the fabric pucker. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, shaking his head and forcing the ends of his mouth to straighten. “It’s really not funny.” He cleared his throat. “Your dreams were on the net last night. One of the pirated dream-channels must have got hold of your private code.” Continue reading EYELID MOVIES by Will McIntosh