Futurism
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Read more: Could Our Consciousness Exist in Another Spatial Dimension?
Consciousness is the simple word for the complex processes of how we experience our world. Each of us has a vivid inner life that accompanies the firing of neurons in our brain. Yet the nature of consciousness remains one of the greatest mysteries in science. How does the soggy, electric tissue of the brain produce…
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Read more: A New Dawn for Psychedelics – Microdosing and the Road to Legalization
In the mid-20th century, psychedelic substances like LSD and psilocybin mushrooms went from scientific curiosities to symbols of the counterculture. In the 1950s and 60s, researchers explored LSD’s potential to treat mental illness, and some psychiatrists reported promising results. But by the late 1960s, these hallucinogens escaped the lab and exploded into popular use, sparking…
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Read more: Universe 25: Is This Failed Science Experiment Humanity’s Future?
1972: researcher John B. Calhoun peered into a sprawling mouse habitat that had fallen eerily silent. This enclosure, once brimming with the scurrying activity of thousands of mice, was now a wasteland. Only a few dozen rodents remained alive, and even those survivors seemed listless and on the brink of death. It was as if…
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Read more: Will the Wolves of Chernobyl Cure Cancer?
When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded in April of 1986, it created what seemed like an eternal scar on the Earth. Radiation poured into the air, soil, and rivers. Entire towns were abandoned, crops were poisoned, and the world watched in horror at the first great nuclear disaster to unfold under the unforgiving eye of…
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Read more: Sheep Dreaming of Androids: A History of Artificial Life and Our Obsession with Playing God
Lightning explodes above what could be a dark laboratory… or a workshop… a lone scientist (or is it a priest?) leans over his bench, piecing together scraps of metal, wood, or clay, determined to breathe life into the lifeless. This scene – now archetypal in human imagination – has appeared in countless forms across world…
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Read more: What Is Quantum Computing? And is it REALLY the Future?
In a chilled laboratory chamber, a gleaming contraption hangs like an elaborate chandelier of gold wires and silver plates. At its core lies a chip kept colder than deep space, holding mysterious units of computation known as qubits. This is the heart of a quantum computer, a new kind of machine that has stirred both…
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Read more: Can the Immortal Jellyfish Really Unlock Human Immortality?
A tiny creature drifts through a moonlit ocean, its translucent body no larger than a human fingernail. This unassuming jellyfish, Turritopsis dohrnii, carries an astonishing secret. When confronted with injury, starvation, or the simple weariness of age, it does not die. Instead, it undergoes a miraculous transformation—an adult medusa turning back into a juvenile polyp,…
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Read more: Buckminster Fuller: Geometry, Design, and the Imagination
Buckminster Fuller was a thinker who saw patterns where others saw only sky and stone. He became an inventor, architect, and polymath of the Space Age. Fuller famously called our planet “Spaceship Earth,” emphasizing that humanity is a crew on just one ship hurtling through space without an operator’s manual. This poetic metaphor – Earth…
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Read more: How Humans Perceive Time Now AND in the Future
What is time, really? Is it the slow wheel of the seasons, turning winter into spring each year as our ancestors watched the sky? Is it the steady beat of a heart and the rise and fall of the chest as we breathe each second? Or is it the digital numbers flickering on our screens,…
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Read more: Is There a Moral Obligation to Grant Rights to Artificial Life?
Moral progress often involves expanding our circle of concern beyond our own kind. In past centuries, basic rights were denied to many humans on the basis of race, gender, or class; over time, these distinctions have been eroded as we recognized shared personhood. In recent decades, we’ve begun to seriously discuss rights for non-human creatures.…
