So, unh, what happens when the system crashes, say in the middle of a hurricane, due to a terrorist attack, or because, simply (oops!) the power grid goes down.

Forgot to add this, but the Protectors ("ancestral humans") and teelas (future humans) of Known Space are much more unbelievable. I rather like the concept of Plateau Eyes, though.

Yes. There are three big problems with Puppeteers, although Ken's solution sort of solves one.

I guess it's worth two kind of vital points:

Bingo. I was just about to write the same thing.

Not good form to respond to one's own posts, but I later realized something that needs to be pointed out: in the European bronze age, we know from identifying materials via their molecular and isotopic makeup that items were traded between Cornwall and the Middle East, between Sweden and the Middle East, and between…

I was alternately cheering this on and banging my head on this one. Sheesh!

Wow, that would be like driving around in my dad's 1968 Dodge Dart, like, forever. Wouldn't that be a wonderful idea?

Little slippery there. For example, Pitcairn Island was uninhabited when the Bounty landed, but there were archeological remnants of a previous settlement, and this was also true for some of the northwest Hawaiian Islands. I'd suggest that all of the tropical Pacific Islands were visited by Polynesians or…

Good to see these again. I loved them when I first saw them in Omni, and I always thought the movie crap was bollocks in comparison.

Actually, the absolute quantity of resources and energy remains the same. Theoretically, they would be easier to gather, if, for example, we could pave the moon with solar cells and use them to create fuel for the stellar probe. Paving the moon may be, erm, somewhat difficult, as would dedicating that energy output…

Oddly, I wrote about this two weeks ago: http://heteromeles.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/int…. Yes, it's set in the language of the Cthulhu mythos, but strip out the Lovercraftiana and it's one explanation for why we see the Fermi Paradox.

No. When they dropped those bombs, no one knew if they would work. The Nagasaki bombing very nearly failed anyway.

Well, going by Richard B. Frank's Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire, here's what would have happened.

I've been through a couple of bloomings of a titan arum. If you want to smell it at full blast, you've got to be there in the evening, because it stinks the worst after dark, on the *one night* it fully blooms. And yes, you can smell it a very long way away.

Cruel, yes. On the other hand, I think it's interesting that the Haitians (and AFAIK, the African groups from which they came) believe that loss of free will and individuality, as embodied the soul, is worse than death. The zombification process is believed (per Davis) to strip the soul from the body, resulting in a…

All good points, and thanks for making them. I didn't see your comments at the bottom, so please forgive me for not giving you primacy of place here.

Um, I *very strongly* suggest you read Wade Davis' Serpent and the Rainbow about zombification.

I do expect that, in the tradition of the late columnist Jack Smith, I'll have a higher record of accuracy than this article by repeating each of the predictions above, prefaced with: "The following will not happen...."

Personally, I prefer the sword of chaos in <i>Thief of Time</i>, to wit: