For those of us fortunate enough to be born into the right circumstances, life is good, with antibiotics, modern dentistry, vaccines, climate-controlled homes, big-screen TV’s, smart phones. The sum of this, however, is worrying to some: What is the toll to the planet, to the ecosystems that support us and the rich diversity of animals and…Continue Reading…
A joint NASA/Library of Congress symposium held today in Washington DC asked: Will human civilization on Earth be imperiled, or enhanced, by our own world-changing technologies? Will our technological abilities threaten our survival as a species, or even threaten the Earth as a whole, or will we come to live comfortably with these new powers?…Continue Reading…
Oh, for the days: Remember when everyone used to be really, really worried about power lines? youtube.com/watch?feature=… — Ketan Joshi (@ArghJoshi) June 13, 2013 Those were worried Australians in the mid-2000s, so it wasn’t all that long ago. In the United States, people were really, really worried in the 1980s and 1990s about getting cancer from…Continue Reading…
Wired magazine has an interesting interview with biologist and science entrepreneur Craig Venter, who, as Wikipedia describes, is most famous for his role in being one of the first to sequence the human genome and for his role in creating the first cell with a synthetic genome in 2010. The discussion is wide-ranging. At one point, Venter…Continue Reading…
Eduardo Zorita packs a lot into this post. I’m not sure it coheres but it’s quite interesting. He touches on the importance of expert authorities and the IPCC and muses on “the interaction between technology and democracy”: We have now several new technologies that have been developed in the last few decades, which the individuals…Continue Reading…
What a long, strange trip it’s been, from apeman to hydrocarbon man. Is it time we humans aped Donald Trump and named a geological age after ourselves? I can see the argument laid out in this essay, but don’t we already know we’re masters of the universe? I don’t see how making it official is…Continue Reading…
From 3 Quarksdaily, an intriguing post flows from this question: Will historians and archaeologists a few thousand years from now believe that scientists in the mid-twentieth century split the atom? That they even created a nuclear bomb? There’s a good chance the answer will be “no.” The author, Sam Kean, argues that our collective behavior…Continue Reading…
The allure of technology is so great as the Ultimate Answer that politicians, policymakers and engineers continually chase after it the way a drug addict chases after that first high. And so, speaking of drugs, we learn today that a squad in the Homeland Security Department is trying out all manner of hi-tech gimmickry to…Continue Reading…