September 11, 2020
The Indelible Influence of Asimov: Apple’s Streaming Service Debuts Foundation
It has inspired innovations in sociology and psychology. It has sparked the imagination of liberals like Paul Krugman and conservatives like Newt Gingrich. It even shares credit (or blame) for some of Elon Musk’s innovations. Isaac Asimov’s…
August 24, 2020
The Impact of Ancient Encryption
Communication is an essential part of humanity, and, presumably, we need to be honest in most of our communicative acts in order for society to function. Yet, dishonest communication has often been a driver of history, and systemic communicative…
August 21, 2020
Sci-Fi Pets Roundup
In Poor Richard’s Almanack, Benjamin Franklin includes dogs in his list of essentials for a good life. “There are,” he writes, “three faithful friends: an old wife, an old dog, and ready money.” In many science fiction scenarios, spouses and money…
July 21, 2020
Are We In A Videogame, Or Something Else?
A prominent theme in both science fiction and advanced physics is the possibility that our lives are not truly our lives, that everything we thought was true was an elaborate lie—that this reality is not what we think it is. The most popular…
July 18, 2020
Furry, Feathered or Otherwise Non-Human Electoral Candidates in Fact and Fiction
Humans have been imagining non-human animals as human for at least 40,000 years and probably longer. The “Lion-Human” of Hohlenstein-Stadel cave in Germany is 32,000 years old. We have invented non-human beings who stand for human traits, and…
July 1, 2020
Robots May Gain The Right to Vote, But Can They Electioneer?
This is not about the potential of Android phones to facilitate voting. It’s about whether the other kind of android—the artificially intelligent robot type—would not only have the abstract right to vote, but would have the potential to be a full…
May 11, 2020
“All You Need Is Love” and the Comm Tech Marvel of 1967
At a time when political activists and campaigns can host Zoom conferences with over a thousand attendees, and when astronauts can make outer space Skype calls, it’s easy to feel numbed to the sense of wonder that may come from contemplating our…
May 10, 2020
The Colonization of the Moon Is Already Underway
Cyberpunk lit pioneer William Gibson once said “The future is already here — it’s just not very evenly distributed.” There’s no doubting the second part—new technology will replicate the inequality of old technology. But for the next few paragraphs,…
April 28, 2020
A Black Hole’s Gravity is Like a Spirograph
Space and time are not fixed–or more accurately, seemingly fixed or regular movement across spacetime is actually “warped.” That warping causes the trajectory of motion to manifest as dynamic rather than nondynamic. A straight line is never really…
April 21, 2020
Truly Toxic Speech: When It Comes to Pandemics, We Really Talk Too Much
This was already in the news last December, and not in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic. A UC-Davis study had found that “the louder people talk, the more airborne particles they emit, making loudness a potential factor in spreading…