Futurism
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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.…
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Read more: The Singularity: Wonder & Uncertainty
In a dimly lit laboratory sometime in the not-so-distant future, a machine hums softly to itself – a machine no human fully understands. It improves upon its own design in rapid iterations, each version smarter than the last, until the pace of its thinking leaves human intellect far behind. At that moment, the story of…
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Read more: Flat Earth: Satire, Conspiracy, or Modern Folklore
If you travel to the edges of the Earth, you might find the great Ice Wall that holds the oceans in. Beyond it lies the unknown. At least, that’s what some believers in an old-new idea imagine. In a hotel conference room, a charismatic speaker clicks to the next slide of a presentation. The screen…
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Read more: Remote Viewing: History & How-To Guide
Can you really spy on someone using just your mind? This question sounds like something out of a pulp sci-fi novel, yet during the Cold War both the United States and the Soviet Union invested serious time and money searching for an answer. In one notorious 1970 experiment, a Soviet housewife named Nina Kulagina allegedly…
