Sci-Fi Weekly review Plausible Futures

The folks over at Sci-Fi Weekly has written an article about this blog.

Billing itself as a “news service for the future studies community,” Plausible Futures serves up a thought-provoking and entertaining buffet of video clips and Web links, along with ongoing discussion of emerging technologies, from robotics and biotech to alternate energy and even the human quest for life extension—not to mention out-and-out immortality.

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The interaction between technology and politics is examined closely in Plausible Futures‘ articles on privacy, information warfare and emerging medicines. Other entries look at the global economy, military inventions, out-of-body experiences and even a host of Existential Threats, such as the hypothetical risks posed by nanotech devices that haven’t been invented yet and the number of possible starvation victims in the event of a nuclear exchange in South Asia.

Science fiction—particularly hard SF—has come under fire in recent years from those who feel the genre has become too concerned with the present, that in a world already filled with marvelous gadgets, writers are failing to imagine vivid, wild and yet credible futures for humankind. Within that context, a site like Plausible Futures serves as a source of inspiration, not only to authors looking for the meat of their next story, but for anyone who wants to kick back and imagine what life might be like in another decade, century or even millennium.

Source: Scifi.com. Thanks!

Depleting oil supplies threaten ‘meltdown in society’

It is downhill all the way for oil, according to a study by the Energy Watch Group (EWG) in Berlin, Germany. It reported this week that world oil production peaked in 2006 - far earlier than expected.

EWG analysed oil production figures and predicted it would fall by 7 per cent a year, dropping to half of current levels by 2030. The announcement comes as oil prices reached record highs last week, at more than $90 a barrel, and contradicts optimistic projections by the International Energy Agency in Paris, France.

The report also predicts significant falls in gas, coal and uranium production. The group warns that supply shortages could cause “a meltdown in society”, leading to scenes of mass unrest, such as those that took place in Burma earlier this month when the government pushed up fuel prices.

Source: New Scientist. Read the entire report here.

Quest for Immortality: De Grey, Bostrom and Sandberg

The World’s Smallest Piston

Tomorrow’s nanosized machines may share something in common with the workhorses of yesteryear. A team of Berkeley Lab and UC Berkeley scientists have developed a four-legged molecule that moves up and down like a tiny piston, powered only by a beam of light.

Source: Science@Berkley Lab.

Keith Olbermann on Bostroms Simulation Hypothesis

Technology’s challenge to privacy

The International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioner’s conference brings together hundreds of privacy commissioners, government regulators, business leaders, and privacy advocates who spend three days grappling with emerging issues.

The theme of this year’s conference, held in Montreal, Canada, was “Terra Incognita,” a reference to the unknown lands that typify the fear of the unknown in a world of rapidly changing technologies that challenge the core principles of privacy protection.

Yet despite a dizzying array of panels on new technologies such as ubiquitous computing, radio frequency identification devices (RFID), and nanotechnology, it was a reference by United States Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff to a simple fingerprint that struck the strongest chord.

Source: BBC.

Iran, US: Prospects for a ‘hot war’

In the first of a two-part series, ISN Security Watch examines the chances of military conflict between Iran and the US, which some believe could come at the start of next year. By Kamal Nazer Yasin in Tehran for ISN Security Watch (01/10/07)

Regional nuclear war could trigger mass starvation

A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could cause one billion people to starve to death around the world, and hundreds of millions more to die from disease and conflicts over food.

That is the horrifying scenario being presented in London today by a US medical expert, Ira Helfand. A conference at the Royal Society of Medicine will also hear new evidence of the severe damage that such a war could inflict on the ozone layer.

“A limited nuclear war taking place far away poses a threat that should concern everyone on the planet,” Helfand told New Scientist. This was not scare mongering, he adds: “It is appropriate, given the data, to be frightened.”

Helfand is an emergency-room doctor in Northampton, Massachusetts, US, and a co-founder of the US anti-nuclear group, Physicians for Social Responsibility. In his study he attempted to map out the global consequences of India and Pakistan exploding 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear warheads.

Source: New Scientist.

“Postsingular” by Rudy Rucker

Cover page from www.rudyrucker.com

In Postsingular, a mad scientist creates a race of nants — nanites — that digest the planet and turn it into a computational simulation of Earth, called Vearth. However, an autistic child memorizes a long string of numbers that poisons the nants and causes them to reverse themselves (luckily, they’re engaged in reversible computation) and put the planet back. That’s the setup.

Via Boingboing about Rudy Rucker’s new book “Postsingular”:

Alt-cultural folk strive to save Earth from digitized doom in this novel from the prince of gonzo SF. A computer mogul’s threat to replace messy reality with clean virtuality and by a memory-hungry artificial intelligence called the Big Pig propels nanotechnologist Ond Lutter, his autistic son, Chu, and their allies on an interdimensional quest for a golden harp, the Lost Chord, strung with hypertubes that can unroll the eighth dimension and unleash limitless computing power. Though he tries to unite the hard and the fuzzy sides of physics, Rucker (Mathematicians in Love) favors the flower power of San Francisco over the number crunching of Silicon Valley. His novel vibrates with the warm rhythms of dream and imagination, not the cold logic of programming (or, for that matter, plotting). Playing with the math of quantum computing, encryption and virtual reality, Rucker places his faith in people who find true reality gnarly enough to love.

I have to buy this book.