The Netflix original series Black Mirror has attracted a surprising number of critics, some ridiculing the very premise of the series - and having that backfire - others just dismissing it as "pretentious," while others claim the very title sailed over their heads, and finally a whole subsection out there blowing it off because it's similar to The Twilight Zone franchise. Um, yeah, that's the whole point! For those out of the loop: Black Mirror is a modern speculative fiction anthology series with a UK production beat (irregular seasons with episodes stretching to movie-length). It focuses on hard sci-fi dystopian scenarios, taking recent developments in technology and extrapolating the "what if?" factor from there to view the human impact. Usually, it's a grim and rotten, cyberpunk world. "And they all lived happily ever after" said no Black Mirror story ever. At any given time since the dawn of mass electronic media, we've never been far from a speculative fiction anthology series. You…
Once upon a time, there was a caveman who wanted to make energy. Maybe he wanted to stay warm at night, or he wanted to cook food, but that's not the point. The point is, his first idea to generate energy was to gather up wood, rub some flint and steel together, and make a fire. Setting things on fire proved out to be a handy way to generate energy. This method was the preferred way to make energy until after millenniums of progress, through the Stone, Bronze, and Iron Ages, into the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution until we finally progressed to…
NOTHING! We still set things on fire. Our propensity to set things on fire to make power has led us to a problem. We're baking ourselves right off the planet because fire makes heat. Climate Change is the result, a worldwide worrisome story. Never mind the climate science deniers. That's a tiny group of idiots, literally not worth the wasted breath. No sane, informed person in the world denies that climate change is a problem, an…
The Present Author will repeat a maxim he's uttered for decades now, which is still on track to prove out: "Bio-Technology will impact the 21st century to the same degree that computer technology impacted the 20th." Don't look now, but it's well on its way already! And let's be perfectly clear up front: I want it to happen. I think we're on the cusp of an exciting leap in science, a pathway to augment the building blocks of our biology, and I think we should embrace it. I want clones, GMOs, bio-hacking, genetically engineered super-beings, replicants, Jurassic Park, gene-editing, and genetic human enhancement. No, I'm not afraid of the consequences - we will have something squirmy get loose for a while at some point, no doubt, but I'm willing to take that risk ten times over rather than turn our backs on the progress we've made up until now. Let's back up a bit because the backlash against biotech has fired up before biotech has even gotten started… Here We Go With The Monkeys Again… …
"The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube cannot speak. In the event that the Weighted Companion Cube does speak, the Enrichment Center urges you to disregard its advice." -- GLaDOS, Portal
On February 12th, 2019, NASA reported its Opportunity rover mission to Mars was no longer functioning. After its fifteen years of service, a considerable extension past the original 90-day mission it was designed for, it was trapped in a Martian dust storm in June of 2018 and entered a special hibernation mode, hoping to recover when natural winds blew the dust off its solar panels. That salvation didn't come, and after NASA mission control's repeated attempts to raise a signal from the power-drained rover, NASA declared Opportunity dead. So far, so typical. Opportunity was only the fifth of six robotic expeditions made to Mars, each time increasing in functionality as technology progresses. The 1971 Soviet "Mars 3" rover stopped communicating only 20 seconds after…
Score: 1.54
Privacy settings changed!
Article is saved. Do you want to continue editing the article or leave and edit later?
