Filed under: futurism, science fiction, Speculation, Uncategorized | Tags: future, science fiction, Speculation
First off, I wanted to share a neat video from Bad Astronomy, showing just how, and how fast, bacteria evolve. Yes, this is evolution in action, captured on a video. Share it with your creationist frenemies. Isn’t the 21st Century awesome?
And now, a thought experiment: normally, when we think of a science fictional future, it contains antibiotics, either explicitly or more generally, implicitly. Antibiotics are routine, not just for treating infections, but more importantly for treating wounds such as you would get from surgery. Anything involving a transplant, a replacement, or even opening up the body goes much better if there’s a course of antibiotics afterwards to clear up whatever bacteria got into the wounds that the surgeons made.
It’s not news that antibiotics are ephemeral products, and that the more we use them, the faster they become ineffective. They knew that when they commercialized penicillin. My question is, what would an antibiotic-free future look like? Especially one that is high-tech? Continue reading
Filed under: colonizing space, Real Science Content, Uncategorized | Tags: Interstellar Travel, science, science fiction
Most of a year ago, I posted about the first tardigrade genome sequence, which apparently had a lot of bacterial genes in it. Now, another group has published another genome (io9 article here, report here), and this apparently changes everything, possibly in a better way. Or possibly, we’ll see some horror move remake of The Fly, only with Ramazzottius varieornatus at the hybridizing end (paging John Scalzi. I’ve got your vacuum-sucking warriors right here). Continue reading
Got to hot link this one (here’s the permanent link). I suspect some climatologists will grumble about how smooth that line is, and I caught one probable error and a couple of maybes (dates in the middle). Otherwise, it’s his usual thought provoking work.
Filed under: Altithermal, climate change, futurism, Speculation, Uncategorized | Tags: climate change, Labor Day thought experiment, New US capitol
While I don’t want to kill the previous conversation, I’d like to post a rather silly question, if you’ve got some down time this weekend and want to swat at it. The idea is based on the USA kind of following in the caligulae of the Roman Empire as it crashed. The question is, when Washington DC floods due to sea level rise, what city becomes the new capital, the American Constantinople?
Putting the life back in science fiction 