Filed under: alt-future, futurism, Speculation, sustainability, Uncategorized | Tags: alt-future, space, space 2020, sustainability
I’m supposed to be writing about the upcoming election right? Because my job as an American citizen at this pivotal moment in our nation’s history is to help spread all the psychological warfare tactics being deployed by all sides to get us to be afraid and either vote or not.
Screw that. By the way: Vote! That’s all I’m going to say right now. It’s not that I’m not busy with local politics (hence the silence on this blog). Rather, it’s that I suspect that your adrenal glands are getting worn out by the psywar, so I wanted to give you a little respite. Over the last month, I’ve read two very different visions of space for the 21st Century, and I wanted to share them.
Filed under: alt-future, deep time, disasters, fantasy, fiction, science fiction, Speculation, Uncategorized | Tags: alt history, science, Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis
Just a quick note for those who, like me, need to fiddle for a few hours while the world burns. Oh wait, that’s not quite what I meant, but anyway, if you want a distraction, here’s one: the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis.
Filed under: livable future, Speculation, sustainability | Tags: Innovation, sustainability
Note that I’m more a consumer of nonviolent strategies and tactics than a practitioner, at least at this point. However, I did participate in the climate strike on September 20, and I’m concerned that this movement is not going to work. This isn’t to discourage the people fighting for action on climate change to stop working. Rather, it’s to get them to start working much, much smarter.
Filed under: climate change, futurism, nonviolence, Speculation, sustainability, The Internet | Tags: disasters, Internet
I’ve been a bit busy with environmental stuff, including the climate strike on 9/20. In honor of that, of the MCAS Miramar Air show that’s rattling my windows this weekend, and this little article from June about how the US military is one of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters on the planet, I figured I’d add in one of my normally bleak predictions about the future.
Filed under: American politics, book, economics, Legacy Systems, Speculation, Uncategorized
Time to use the blog to take a break from real life. With our overheating hot local economy, there are numerous and problematic developments going through. Since I work on conservation issues for an NGO, I’ve my energy the last three months dealing with all these projects, writing letters and testifying. It’s basically something new every week. I won’t get a serious break until the next recession, looks like. Or until I write a blog entry.
Anyway, I haven’t been completely busy, and I have had time to read. This isn’t a book review, more of an impressionistic rant based on some of the stuff I’ve been reading. In part as opposition research, in part as research for how to write a wealthy villain, in part because it sounded cool in a radio interview, a few months ago I read (and recommend) Brooke Harrington’s Capital without Borders. It’s a sociological study of wealth managers, the profession that helps the super-rich hide their money through offshore financial centers. Prof. Harrington did a really neat study: she embedded herself in the community by taking (and passing) the wealth management training and certification course, interviewing as she went. She was quite open about what she was doing, but because she has exquisite people skills and put in her time in the trenches studying with the rest of the students, passing the tests and getting credentialed, she got wealth managers to open up to her and to talk about their world and the clients they serve. Her book is a very lucid exploration of an industry that prides itself on discretion and secrecy. This book necessarily is about the nuts and bolts of how things work. Anecdotes are used to illustrate more than titillate, and all of the identifying details are stripped off. Continue reading
Filed under: Real Science Content, science fiction, Speculation, Worldbuilding | Tags: red dwarf worlds, science fiction
I’ve been running a blog post on Antipope while the owner is otherwise occupied. Part of that posting was a short riff on what it would be like to colonize an earth-like world that orbits a red dwarf star Rather than bore that (largely techie) crowd over there to tears with an extended botanical geek-out, I figured I’d post it for the smaller, more discerning group here.
Here’s the question du jour: what would plants look like on a red dwarf world? Continue reading
Filed under: deep time, fantasy, science fiction, Speculation | Tags: black holes, science fiction, spring silliness
Hi, I’m avoiding writing yet another response to yet another badly conceived development. So I’m wasting time writing a blog post. This here dubious speculation is something I cooked up over on Antipope a little while ago, and just to make it easier to find the idea and mock it (or whatever), I figured I’d write it up here. This is my two-bit, I’m-not-even-good-at-physics-let-alone-a-cosmologist take on multiverse formation. Read it in that spirit.
As background, I’ve come to the conclusion that a rational society, especially an interstellar society, could do worse than to revere black holes. After all, without SgrA*, the giant black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way wouldn’t exist and neither would we, so that’s our creator, at least in the local sense. Since it appears that our ruling demon sultan SgrA* may be surrounded by a swarm of lesser black holes, I sometimes wonder if we should rename SgrA* “Azathoth.” Especially if it turns out that those lesser black holes are emitting either drum-like beats of gravitational waves and/or monotonous, radio-frequency fluting whines. Unfortunately, calling our creator and ultimate doom “Azathoth” would enshrine a rather nasty bit of islamophobia that Lovecraft emitted. But none of that’s the point here.
Filed under: futurism, Real Science Content, Speculation, sustainability, Uncategorized | Tags: geoengineering, livable future, water politics
Two down, now three (four?) EIRs to go. Oy. And one of the ones I commented on planned, perhaps, to install a meter-wide water line in the same busy intersection as another group is currently going to install a 240 KW electrical transmission line. Shocking, possibly explosive. I can only hope that the engineers already knew of the juxtaposition, even if the environmental consultants did not.
So, I want to talk about something else: peat. And beavers. And some really silly ideas about geoengineering.
Filed under: 2016, American politics, climate change, economics, livable future, Speculation, sustainability, Uncategorized
More avoidance. I was going to write about the IEA’s 2017 World Energy Outlook (Vox article). Or I could write about The Grauniad’s “seven megatrends that could beat global warming” article. Or I could write about the bright and shiny, 100% electrified future that seems to be the major global bankwagon that people like the IEA are now jumping on. But that would be avoiding the real work. Continue reading
Putting the life back in science fiction 