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…
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…