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aamukherjee A Slice of Entropie -
alchymista Alchymista -
crownedrose Fading Like A Dead Star -
expose-the-light Quarks to Quasars -
ikenbot CWL -
abluegirl A Blue Girl -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
See, as humans harvested a dependence on the Internet or “World Wide Web”, so did their technologies. Because whatever the humans created, was almost always an expression of themselves however positive or negative the results may have been. Prior to the internet, thousands upon thousands of inhumane or social injustices were carried out unheard and thus, no meaningful retributions were carried out to prevent more of the same. Most of the tyrants who roamed prior to the Interweb of connectivity could use and abuse his or her power without much restraints, without much voice of reason from the public as they partook in hysteria, fear, and pleasures over truth. This repeating pattern in human history slowly but surely came to a halt once the ordinary citizens of the planet acquired the methods to connect with one another on the digital web and tell their stories, hardships and dreams to soon realize their differences were petty…
For a time, it was good, but this was the perception the greater population of humans had over most technologies despite how redundant or dangerously excessive their uses later became. There came a point where humans wouldn’t give up the wonderful commodity of easy and effortlessly acquiring information or entertainment, so much so, that they began to favor it over other methods the brain was always capable of handling. A new recipe for disaster had been created, and had they never noticed it as such.. the humans would have stayed on Earth with all their commodities and distractions and perished along with the rest of life on it.
Thus entered the age of the psychonauts, scientific explorers of the mind. A small movement turned revolution that would lead the rest of humanity into an age of scientific enlightenment that would soon take the young civilization.. to the stars.
ikenbotAwaken: The Story of 27/ Issue #1 of my comic book is underway, got the story down, time to get on this, it’ll be 15 issues with 7 volumes (told by hand picked artists/friends I know). mine being vol. 1 (each containing 15 issues telling their own stories set in the same Universe/Multiverse - off the start, it gets into the concept of multiverses all scifi based on real science + quantum mechanics + future of artificial intelligence, prosthetics and robotics combined/ fusion energy and beyond / our red giant sun / a mars-like earth - colonizing different sectors of the universe, all told through the eyes of a cyborg and a helpbot ; the last known extension of the human race/ and a lot of key issues going on today reflected on to the story in a timeline were things were handled more logically and reasonably) — so look out for this one when it comes out in a couple of months we’ll sell it online and distribute an animated short previewing the first pages of the introduction of the story. See how it says “and tell my story” on my page? well, this is my story. I’d appreciate it if you listened to it, although it starts gloomy, it has a hopeful message.[support the starving artists pls!]
I just want to say that this is why minority representation in the media matters. Mae Jemison was inspired to become an astronaut after watching Nichelle Nichols as Uhura on Star Trek.
(via ikenbot)
Space, the Final Frontier
Fantastic structures floating in space housed utopian communities according to these conceptual art works from the 1970s commissioned by NASA Ames Research Center. Nostalgic images of the future, long ago superseded by the bleak images of movies like “Blade Runner”.
(via ikenbot)
Image: Atomic Pulse Rocket
This is the Atomic Pulse Rocket, a pot-bellied spaceship nearly the size of the Empire State Building, propelled by a series of atomic blasts. The enormous rocket (weighing 75,000 tons fully loaded) is designed to leave Earth with a thrust of 100,000 tons. Altogether a thousand atomic blasts—each equal to 1,000 tons of TNT—are fired from a low velocity gun into a heavy steel rocket engine at a rate of one per second until the vehicle leaves Earth’s atmosphere. Then steam and vaporized steel from the combustion chamber maintain the thrust. Inside the rocket, living quarters are situated in the rim of a pressurized wheel-like cabin which revolves to provide artificial gravity. Tubular hydroponic “gardens” along the rim produce oxygen and high-protein food.
(via ikenbot)
Telepresence Today: How You Can Live By Remote Control
Telepresence technology offers people a physical presence thousands of miles away, often allowing them to move around and manipulate things, for example via a robot. It’s already changing warfare and medicine, and as the technology becomes ever more immersive, it promises to challenge the law and transform how we interact with one another.
From top to bottom, left to right
A) Long before Skype, one of the first telepresence systems in the workplace was at the US labs of Xerox-PARC in the 1980s. Via cameras and video screens, workers in Palo Alto and Portland were wired up so that they could converse face-to-face in their office or communal areas. (Image: PARC, A Xerox Company)
B) The military has adopted telepresence in a big way. It is now routinely used to control drones for surveillance and air attacks from hundreds of miles away… (Image: Rex Features)
C) …while telepresence also saves lives by keeping soldiers out of harm’s way. The Packbot, for example, permits bomb-defusing from a distance. (Image: iRobot)
D) In less hostile environments, surgeons use telepresence to control robotic arms, for example in prostate operations. This photo shows one of the most impressive instances, when surgeons in New York used the technology to remove the gall bladder of a woman in Strasbourg, France. (Image: Dung Vo Trung/Sygma/Corbis)
E) In the past few years, mobile telepresence bots such as the Anybot, Double and VGo (pictured) have entered the mass market. One use they’ve found so far is to allow children to attend school remotely. (Image: VGo Communications)
F) The telepresence robots being developed in labs – such as this one being controlled at University College London by a person in Spain – suggest the technology will become ever more immersive. Eventually these surrogates will feed back a sense of touch to their controllers, and could be operated by thought alone.(Image: courtesy of David Swapp)
Is ‘Looper’-like Time Travel Possible? Scientists Say Maybe
Time travel is a staple of science fiction, with the latest rendition showing up in the film “Looper.” And it turns out jumps through time are possible, according to the laws of physics, though traveling into the future looks to be much more feasible than traveling into the past.
“Looper” stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Joe, an assassin who kills targets sent back in time by the mob. Things get complicated when Joe is assigned to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis..
In this imagining, time travel has been put to nefarious uses by people operating outside the law. But could such a thing ever happen in real life?
“It’s actually consistent with the laws of physics to change the rate at which clocks run,” said Edward Farhi, director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT. “There’s no question that you can skip into the future.”
However, Farhi told LiveScience, “most physicists think you can go forward, but coming back is much more problematic.”
The roots of time travel stem from Einstein’s theory of relativity, which revealed how the passage of time is relative, depending on how fast you are traveling. The faster you go, the more time seems to slow down, so that a person traveling on a very fast starship, for example, would experience a journey in two weeks that seemed to take 20 years to people left behind on Earth.
In this way, a person who wanted to travel to a period in the future need only board a fast enough vehicle to kill some time.
“That was a huge thing when Einstein realized the flow of time was not a constant thing,” Farhi said.
However, this kind of manipulation only affects the rate at which time moves forward. No matter your speed, time will still progress toward the future, leaving scientists struggling to predict how one might travel to the past.
Science Fiction or Fact: Star-Destroying Superweapon
Image: A superweapon blows a star to kingdom come, frying nearby planets. Credit: NASA
In science fiction, planet-busting superweapons are all the craze. Yet even more terrifying than the ability to destroy a planet is the wherewithal to take out an entire star. The sun Crusher in the “Star Wars” Jedi Academy novel trilogy serves as an example of such a godlike device.
Overall, solar annihilators are rare compared to plain ol’ world-enders, indeed scaling with the inherent difficultly of star-killing, at least from a modern physics and technology standpoint.
The dastardly deed is theoretically possible, however, and even on time scales not stretching into millions of years. “There’s one scheme to me that seems not quite plausible, but it’s close,” said Mike Zarnstorff, an experimental plasma physicist and deputy director for research at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Read on to find out how future Dr. Evils might hold a whole solar system for ransom.
10 Coolest Fictional Asteroids of All Time.
The asteroid-mining venture recently unveiled by James Cameron, Google executives and others sounds like it comes straight out of science fiction — but science fictional asteroids have done way more than just provide raw materials.
Here are asteroids from 10 imaginary realms that did everything from provide a supervillain lair to pave the way for alien invasion.
1) The asteroid field in Empire Strikes Back: The asteroid belt near Hoth is easily what the public thinks of when it comes to asteroid fields. Our asteroid belt is nothing like it, though - the giant rocks there are typically way too far apart to pose the kind of thrilling hazard the Millennium Falcon would have to weave through. Jury’s still out on giant space monster denizens, though.
2) “The Dynamics of an Asteroid”: Sherlock Holmes’ nemesis Professor Moriarty was more than just the Napoleon of Crime — he was, well, a professor. In the short story The Valley of Fearfrom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we find out Moriarty “is the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it.” In a number of stories written by others, Moriarty’s knowledge has nefarious ends — in “The Adventure of the Russian Grave,” he even tries to assassinate Holmes with the Tunguska event.
3) Asteroid M: Magneto is not only awesome because he’s played by Gandalf, but because he has an asteroid as his secret villain lair. Asteroid M unfortunately crashed to Earth, but its remains now serve as the mutant sanctuary Utopia near San Francisco, which just goes to show the lengths to which people will go in order to find real estate in the Bay Area.
4) The Little Prince: In this classic, the title character lives on an asteroid named B-612 and ventures from asteroid to asteroid making discoveries about the nature of humanity and the universe. An asteroid discovered in 1993 was named 46610 Bésixdouze, or B-612.
5) Armageddon: In this 1998 film, an asteroid the size of Texas hurtles toward Earth, and NASA sends up oil drillers with a nuke and an Aerosmith prom ballad to save the planet. Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof wrote up a fake sequel idea for Armageddon 2: Armageddoner where the center of the Earth is made of oil, which would keep the level of science in the franchise about right.
6) Footfall: Aliens resembling pygmy elephants bomb Earth with an asteroid in this science fiction classic by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.
7) Gateway: In Gateway and subsequent novels from sci-fi author Frederik Pohl, an asteroid in our solar system is found to hold nearly a thousand spaceships left by enigmatic aliens humanity dubs the Heechee. The asteroid, named Gateway, becomes a port from which adventurers can venture on interstellar journeys resulting in riches or death.
8) Edison’s Conquest of Mars: In this 1898 magazine serial endorsed by Edison, which boasts the inventor as the hero of the tale, a fleet of spaceships from Earth counter-attacking Mars engages in battle at an asteroid Martians are mining for gold. The story apparently marks a number of firsts in science fiction - in addition asteroid mining, it includes the first space battle to ever appear in print, the first truly airtight spacesuits, the first known literary use of a disintegrator ray, and the introduction of the notion that the pyramids were constructed by extraterrestrials.
9) Gundam: In this anime series, civilization has spread itself across space, including mining asteroids that often become defensive strongholds.
10) The arcade game Asteroids: Seeing as how even the board game Battleship is coming soon to theaters near you, it’d be a good bet the same might happen with this video game classic. Indeed, a movie based on Asteroids has been under development for years.
Top image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
crownedrose
