Yet science is a positive-sum game; in fact, it's the best positive-sum game that humanity has yet devised. It doesn't hurt the US to have other countries do more science - it helps. I would be worried if the US is doing less science now than 10 years ago, but in fact it's doing more. If other countries are also…

In about 1960 Isaac Asimov wrote a column called "No More Ice Ages?", on the then arcane subject of atmospheric CO2 levels. It's collected in his "Fact and Fancy" volume. At that time humanity was putting about 6 billion tonnes of CO2 a year into the air. At that rate, the level would double in 350 years! It would…

This question of future interest in past pop was at the core of the 2007 strike by the Writers Guild of America. Both the writers and their employers knew that downloads would soon be the dominant form of media distribution. The writers had gotten a very bad deal on DVDs, and wanted to improve their position on the…

Yes it is! Thanks for finding this. It looks like Baen Books has not only kept the old, superior Heinlein stories in print, but has put a few of them on-line! You can get it directly from them here: "Expanded Universe". There's a company who is actually investing in keeping author reputations alive.

This was the subject of Heinlein's very first published story: "Life-Line", who worked out the implications with his typically brilliant extrapolations. Why isn't this story the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about lifespan prediction?

I while ago I read "Soon I Will Be Invincible", a funny take on a morose supervillain who is convinced that This Time It Will Work. OK, OK, stealing the moon was a mistake, and kidnapping the Pope didn't work out, but the New Scheme is going to show them once and for all.

People who actually study disasters, as opposed to writers selling gruesome stories, know that humanity behaves better under stress, not worse. Look for the work of Kathleen Tierney or Thomas Drabek, sociologists who have actually talked to people after disasters. They'll tell you that people at first don't believe…

Also agree. These are actually great times for real space exploration - there are a record number of interplanetary probes in operation. They don't involve people risking their lives for bad reasons, but they're doing real science, and the Chinese are welcome to join.

Out of 70 films mentioned, I count about 20 SF movies, along with 26 fantasies, 16 horror, and 8 comic book adaptations. Those last aren't really SF but aren't quite fantasy either. There are about 28 original stories, 22 sequels, and 20 adaptations from other media. There are only 7 SF originals, about 10% of the…

It's interesting that there's been relatively little attention paid to the Moon since Apollo. The last soft landing there was Luna 24 in 1976. There have been 5 soft landings on Mars since then. There have been 15 Mars probes total in that time, versus 10 for the Moon. Since the end of Apollo in 1972, the US has…

If Thiel wants to read some bright happy future novels, he should try the Culture series from Iain M. Banks. Humanity is a major power in the galaxy, and everyone can do whatever they want in whatever body they want. Except that there's no ownership and no money. And the major villain of "Surface Detail" is a…

The hit rate here is obviously very low, so we should ask ourselves how such a bright and imaginative guy could get so many things wrong. I think it was because he was extrapolating from the changes he saw around him, but he happened to be in a time of unsustainably high technological change. In his lifetime, for…

Most of these are the usual suspects - firms that profit off of the creations of others. Of course they want to crush the Internet - it damages their fundamental business model. I only see a couple of creator organizations here: the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the American Federation of…

Maybe a better example would be "The door dilated", Heinlein's famous line from "Beyond This Horizon". An SF fan would go "Cool!" and a mainstream reader would go "Wait, what?" When I try to persuade non-fans to give SF a try, they're constantly tripped up by details like this. It pulls them out of the story,…

You know, the Iraq War just ended, at least for the US. We no longer need to make movie after movie about heroic resistance fighters facing an overwhelmingly technologically superior enemy. The country should feel guilty about the Iraq fiasco for the next century, but we don't have to hammer the point home…

Looks like a good job for a robot. Have a hundred of them crawling across the ice and then calling someone when they find a likely rock. A lot of people would like to find the next ALH 84001, and maybe beat the Mars probes in finding life there.

Human beings have already been getting steadily more intelligent over the last few decades, as described by the Flynn Effect. It amounts to about 3 IQ points every decade. An IQ of 100 in 1932 in the US would be about 80 on one of today's tests. It's seen over a wide range of time and countries. No one knows why…

This all reminds me of Buckminster Fuller, who said that there was enough stuff for everybody if only it was designed right. Buildings could use vastly less material if they used tesselated triangles instead of rectangles. Cars could be roomy, cheap, and fast if they were done as teardrops instead of boxes. Houses…

What about any of those things depends on relativity?

An interesting point, but you know, that's a pretty minor effect as theories of physics go. Relativity is always described as one of the pinnacles of 20th century science, but what are its actual consequences in nature? It predicts the precession of Mercury somewhat more accurately than Newtonian models. It gives a…