Another candidate would be the high observatories in the Atacama desert in Chile. No water, no life, thin air, but lots of great science. The highest, like the TAO infrared telescope, are close to the Death Zone of 6000 m, and so are not staffed. They could actually benefit from pressurized cabins!

Another candidate would be the high observatories in the Atacama desert in Chile. No water, no life, thin air, but lots of great science. The highest, like the TAO infrared telescope, are close to the Death Zone of 6000 m, and so are not staffed. They could actually benefit from pressurized cabins!

Here's the point - all these ideas have never been particularly realistic. That's not why SF writers used them! They were there to get to other interesting story points. No one even bothers to describe their FTL technology any more - it's just hand-waving. FTL is just a way to get to new habitable planets and…

Whaling for oil may have peaked in mid-19th century, but whaling in general peaked in the mid-20th century at far higher levels in terms of whales killed and tons taken.

One of the inspirations for Indiana Jones was Hiram Bingham, discover of Machu Pichu, flying instructor during WWI, and two-term Republican senator from Connecticut. His book Lost City of the Incas is a classic of jungle adventure.

Kirby also did costume and set design for a movie version of Zelazny's great novel "Lord of Light". You can see the results at lordoflight.com, although Google doesn't like the site. The script for that was used in the Canadian Caper, a CIA scheme to smuggle Americans out of Tehran during the Iranian Revolution in…

Kirby also did costume and set designs for a movie based on Zelazny's "Lord of Light":

I wonder about the environmental impact given that cars are getting more efficient every year. CAFE standards are increasing 5% per year, and are due to hit 54 mpg by 2025. The numbers I've heard for trains are only 70 passenger-miles/gallon, given that they don't run full. Two people in an efficient car beat that…

Then Readercon is for you. And it's this weekend at the Burlington Marriott in Massachusetts!

I'm in favor of this kind of long-range thinking, but worry that concentrating on extremely long-range scenarios like grey goo will discredit the entire enterprise. Eric Drexler's vision of nanotech - tiny molecules interacting mechanically - has gone nowhere in the 20 years since "Engines of Creation", and has been…

But we like dead trees! That's more carbon on the ground instead of in the upper atmosphere. Now that this fungus has been sequenced, can we find the parasite that kills just it? If we can prevent wood from rotting, we could use it where ever we use sand and gravel now. Wood chip roadbeds, foundation filler,…

I agree with a lot of the other commenters here - this style of video is so associated with corporate deceit that it makes my skin crawl. Yet I pretty much agree with it's saying! I ran across this same problem with a recent book, "The Rational Optimist" by Matt Ridley. It talks about how life really has gotten…

Thanks for this map! I see that Canada was actually hit by a lot of these intercontinental non-ballistic non-missiles. Did Canada and Japan actually fight in WW II? Apparently the Canadians interned some Japanese, and there were some Canadians in Hong Kong when it was overrun, but did they really come into conflict?

"I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room."

Is this peculiar to the US and UK? I can't think of large cities in Canada and Australia that have died off like this, and elsewhere cities seem to be growing enormously. Maybe it only happens in countries run by financiers.

You mean no one's working on extracting avatars from our digital life trails that will emulate our behavior after death? Preserving a Facebook site is a poor substitute. This was the premise of my hero Greg Egan's "Zendegi", and OK, that didn't work out well...

I like it! Mind you, the world can't even agree that Iran shouldn't have nuclear weapons, so getting consensus on something vastly more expensive and intangible is rather unlikely, but that shouldn't stop speculation.

Isn't there a giant-machines-vs-monsters-at-sea movie in the theaters right now? And isn't it widely considered to be terrible? And will probably flop? Even though it has name actors and beautiful women, which this doesn't.

There were two of those, and one for an unrelated Huckleberry, so the real count is 22. The earliest version of Huckleberry Finn was in 1920, and the latest 2013. Not bad for one of the greatest American novels!

I see a lot of routine stuff in the works on this list. Maybe "Wool" is an exception, but there's a huge amount of paranormal romance and medieval fantasy. I wonder if that's a drawback of the economic model. Since there's no money for marketing, the only way to succeed is to fit into a standard genre slot. You've…