I appreciated your article a lot, tweeted, shared and discussed it. I totally agree on "a militant strand of atheism that lectures other people about the non-existence of God is actually counter to a spirit of open-mindedness and inquiry that I think people will get from reading SF." To me, "militant atheists" are…

Very good article, thanks for writing it.

Coffee and cigarettes work for me. Lots of both.

These 7 scenarios can co-exist, and this is the most likely scenario in my opinion. Today's humanity may split in countless future humanities. Adopting Hugo de Garis' categories "Terrans" (those who choose to stay on Earth as humans 1.0) and "Cosmists" (those who choose to move on), Terrans may stay on Earth in a…

I guess weird physics and exotic technologies to be developed by future generations may be able to take us to Alpha Centauri at the speed of life or even faster. But this will not happen for a long time, if ever. In the meantime, for our mental health as a species we need to know that there are people in route to…

@John - If you don't like the idea, don't listen to the "Brain Guys" and don't try to preserve yourself, or others. Others like the idea, and they should have the option to try it. I hope chemical brain preservation services will be available in a few years, for those who want them. Who will get to choose who gets…

YES! Boring like hell! Life is Boring! Death is Fun! FUN!

I think this is a good solution to the Fermi paradox: [ieet.org]...

Welcome to George, a great writer who covers interesting things. I will avidly read all his articles here.

Re "Do I think that human cognition is tied to some mystical component? No. But it would be a fallacy to claim that it isn't a possibility."

The Feynman's Lectures on Physics were my favorite textbook, and I always wanted to see them on video. Watching now.

I think this is a VERY good idea. Public funding for science without the wasteful and often corrupted bureaucracy.

Does anyone know of new results or comments on this? There have been many articles of the "time travel discovered" sort, but I am looking for something more sober written by physicists. What does this _really_ mean?

Hugh Everett's daughter Liz committed suicide in 1996. In her suicide note, said she was going to a parallel universe to be with her father. Source: [space.mit.edu]

Oh, my. The over-bureaucratized NASA, which seems to have run out of gas, imagination, and spirit long ago, says "we are the explorers?" This must be a joke. Nice video though, and communicating the space vision to people on TV is good (even if they don't believe a word themselves). I hope some NASA admins and…

@Starlionblue More info at [www.carboncopies.org] and [brainpreservation.org]

@Starlionblue - we don't know enough to _use_ the information in a frozen brain yet. Even if we could manage to read and store all the information, we don't have yet computational systems able to process the same data in the same way. In other words, we have not decoded the firmware and system software of the brain.

I don't think so, download into a machine requires more complex technology. It will come eventually, but later.

Yes, these very sad things happen, but in my opinion an authoritarian regime that decides who can and who cannot reproduce would be even worse. If everyone had a good education and a decent living, there would be less crack mothers who abuse babies. This should be our goal, not a totalitarian Big Brother world.

I am for two simple rules, non-negotiable: