I'm very keen to see some thoughtful work done on the issue of how society will be affected by wide-scale robosourcing and AI, and what the economic options are for dealing with this seeming inevitability. The linear trend (which is not what I would necessarily bet on) is towards a Blade Runner-like world (sans…

Did we watch the same film? I loathed the first JJ-Trek movie, finding it too "Star Wars-y". This being the case, I had low to moderate expectations for this one and found, to my surprise, that I actually liked it. While I'd still like the reboot series to become a little more true to the utopian humanism ethos of…

The first Biosphere 2 mission was for 2 years, and they did complete 730 days (with a lot of bad juju, as the article mentions). A second mission - as I recall also originally slated for 2 years - was cut short due to a schism between Allen and Bass in which the latter seized full control, and resulted in the second…

As far as I'm concerned, Blade Runner is the greatest movie of all time. So while part of me would love to see a first-class sequel that extends and deepens the themes explored in the original, I'm also realistic enough to know that this is very unlikely to happen. So ultimately I wish they'd leave the whole thing…

Thanks - and I didn't know that about Skylab 4 so back atcha.

I thought the first astronaut "strike" was Apollo 7, when Schirra/Eisley/Cunningham were all suffering from colds and refused to acede to demands from Mission Control that they felt were unreasonable. The result was that none of those guys ever flew again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_7

That whole series was indeed very well-done. As I recall, it was by the same producers who did HBO's "From the Earth to the Moon" (which was also great but in a different way, being dramatized). I think I read that in making FTETTM, they were so inspired by all the amazing stores and the whole endeavor that they were…

Martin Rees' essay is speculative, and so presumably even he would acknowledge that not everything he speculates on should be accepted uncritically. But you're qualified to characterize the Astronomer Royal (and former President of the Royal Society) as "wow-woo" exactly...um...how?

Hmmm. U.S. military intervention in one of the most socially complicated countries in the most volatile part of the Middle East.

What could possibly go wrong?

A. If you know that it "will take hundreds of years [for climate change] to become irreversible", then you must have some kind of Magic 8 ball, because scientists are working very hard to ascertain the real answer to that question. Suffice to say that no one knows yet for certain, but it's likely to be much shorter…

Mad Men is a great show, though I've often wondered why there is almost no mention of the space program. So my interest is definitely piqued and especially if it has writers of such caliber there is a lot of potential. I hope AMC agrees.

Knowing a little about how much it takes to produce something like this though,…

George Dvorsky, I thought this essay did a great job at summarizing some pretty notoriously obscure concepts. Kudos. One thing - and this is an addition rather than a criticism. I heard an interview with Hameroff discussing the differences in computational power implied by the Orch-OR concept (microtubules) and the…

Exactly. The idea is that these are issues not of technological tractability (which would be, at least in principle, solvable) but rather of logical impossibility. Some people want mind uploads to be true so much (and who can blame them, given the radical undesirability of death?) that their wishes are fairly…

And your assertion that "we're going to see minds uploaded into computers, and in our lifetimes at that" is different than faith, exactly...how?

I keep hearing io9 use the term "genre show" instead of the more direct "science fiction" label. Why?

I understand that the term "science fiction" carries a certain connotation that makes it unappealing for some (not me, obviously) and that - like all labels - it's fraught with imprecision. I get that. But is "genre…

"the rich are still in high orbit rather than on the moon or...Mars"

Hollywood budget restrictions, and/or because otherwise we'd have to sit through interminable 6 month travel times as Matt Damon stages a raid on the 1% hideway in Saturnian orbit. (Plus, that would give them that much longer time to be tipped off and…

Sounds like a mash up of Northern Exposure meets Iain M. Bank's Culture. (If it were done intelligently, which, given that it's network TV, is dubious.)

Correction: the Saturn V was the largest and most powerful rocket ever launched, not "one of the...". Further, total thrust of the rocket was over 7.5m pounds of thrust - it had five F-1 engines, each of which had 1.5m pounds of thrust.

Does anyone else not think it's a little weird that there is a lot of footage of Mercury, Gemini, Shuttle, and ISS but very little (given its prominence/importance) of Apollo?

Also, I know this was largely funded by Big Aero, but the absence of SpaceX and prominence of the SLS/Orion is rather glaring. I'm not anti-…

I've worked on field conservation projects in New Guinea (just north of Australia), which has the same species of croc. Given the distinct possibility that we might actually come into real situations wherein said large crocodiles could be in our close vicinity, we used to tell the following graveyard humor joke:

Q:…