Category: Uncategorized
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In my lifetime, the great quest of humanity has changed, from putting a man on the moon to finding one there. Even a hint of a modest bacterium on Mars would set off a global mindquake–would leap toward an answer for Carl Sagan’s great question, are we alone? But suppose the alternative to finding life…
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Suppose we find a planet that looks habitable, based on physical factors of temperature, solar spectrum, water, elemental composition and so forth. But how can we really tell? What if we missed something, before we step down and try to live there? SFreader suggests we can try out some terrestrial microbes, and see if they…
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Let’s look closer at how intelligence might evolve in a five-eyed creature such as Opabinia. Our eyes are now understood to be extensions of our brain, like visual coprocessors. Vision is part of our intelligence; fundamental to how we see the world. Is our binocular vision the reason we tend to divide the world into…
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Let’s turn on our science fiction circuits today and imagine: What would earth look like if evolution had gone differently in the Precambrian? Suppose instead of boring bilateral creatures, the five-eyed Opabinia had been the way of the future? What if the ultimate intelligent species on our planet turned out to be an Opabinid? Known…
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In The Highest Frontier, a methane quake in the Atlantic causes a tsunami that floods Manhattan. A methane quake is the sudden release of marine sedimentary methane hydrates, a cool form of methane ice that you can hold in your hand while it burns. But release enough of it in one place, and you have…
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The idea of virtual life is commonplace in science fiction. In real life, the closest thing we may find is parasitic DNA–sequences of DNA that may jump, copy, and/or get stuck in a genome. Some called HERVs form virus particles out of our own genome. Fully half the human genome consists of sequences that got…
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An opening figure of my virus chapter shows how biological viruses parallel the behavior of computer viruses. Both kinds of entity infect a host system to propagate their own information, which contains the instructions to spread, infect, and spread again. Are viruses alive? Biologists have long argued they are not, largely because isolated virus particles…
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Does the “identity” of a person depend on the atomic level, with all the implied quantum weirdness? It cannot–otherwise, you would be a completely different person from who you were in the previous nanosecond, let alone yourself a year ago. Or yourself as a baby–completely different, yet the same? That is one reason the “holidays”…
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Our recent questions, directly or indirectly, have implied that animals in some sense share our human identity. Animals may have rights–to live, not to be eaten, not to suffer. If animals have rights within human society, does that imply that they are “part human,” or that animals and humans share a common philosophical identity? Have…
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There’s a lot of buzz about in vitro meat. The idea is to grow animal muscle cells in tissue culture for human consumption. This could be helpful for the various space-faring scenarios on Charlie’s blog, and for respecters of animal rights who enjoy the taste of meat. Norwegian researchers aim for “a large-scale process industry…
Joan Slonczewski 