Last month, I spoke at a United States Army Training and Doctrine Command event billed as a mad scientist conference. That was actually quite an honor, and I enjoyed it more than I expected to, even though it was hard to spend three days thinking about threats based on new technology. I’ve got a blog entry up at my regular site that talks more about the conference, but suffice it to say I’ve been thinking about the military and science/science fiction. In the way of all attractive coincidences, I was also recently asked to write a military science fiction story. All that, and I’m basically a pacifist! Continue reading Playing Our Way To the Future: Consumer Science and Technology goes Military
Tag Archives: Brenda Cooper
What Are The Animals Becoming?
Since I went for things made of metal skins and electrical guts last month when I wrote about weird robots, I decided to opt for warm-blooded carbon-based life forms this time around – so welcome to the December column on smart animals!
Now, we’re a dog family, and we have a golden retriever and two border collies. My partner just bought a puzzle for the dogs. It’s a wooden base with cups for treats, and sliding doors that move and hide the treats. The object is for the dog to slide the doors out of the way and get the treats inside. One of the stated purposes of the toy is to increase animal intelligence. Mind you, if the border collies get much smarter we’re in trouble. The golden? Well, that’s another story. Continue reading What Are The Animals Becoming?
The Surprising Range of Robots
I’ve been invited to join a panel on robotics at the upcoming Orycon Science Fiction Convention, so I decided to write about them here, too. I also have a story coming out soon in Analog, called “The Robots’ Girl,” which started when I read an article complaining about robots being developed to help with childcare in Japan.
We were promised undersea cities and jet packs and household robots. The robots are here, and the next decade is pretty clearly a breakout time for them. Continue reading The Surprising Range of Robots
Space Jockeys
I was interviewed twice last week, and both times the topic of space flight came up. One of the questions one of the interviewers, Annie Tupek, asked me was, “You write about mankind’s future in space. What do you think is the largest obstacle opposing space colonization today?”
Here’s the short form of my answer to that question: “…it’s expensive and difficult to get heavy stuff from here out into space. The distances are long and the travel hard. … We tend to think it’s taking a long time to explore space. The Wright Brother’s first flight was in 1903. So in a little over a hundred years we’ve gone from being stuck fact to the surface of the planet to flying all over it all the time with hardly a worry except the TSA search indignities. We’ve flown past almost every planet and moon in the solar system, landed rovers on Mars, and men on the moon.”
So I decided I’d write this month’s column about what’s happening as private companies compete to get to space. In fact, there’s so much happening, I could write a book about it. Instead, I’m going to survey the news from LEO, give a little futuristic spin, and discuss one book. Continue reading Space Jockeys
Telepresence: virtually as good as being there
This topic – telepresence – started knocking around in my head when I walked into a business meeting almost a year ago in Kirkland, Washington. A wall-sized (literally, exactly, one wall floor to ceiling, side to side) picture showed a room the same shape as the one we stood in. People walked into the room and sat down.
They were in Silicon Valley. Continue reading Telepresence: virtually as good as being there