Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest book “2312″ is set in that titular year in a Solar System alive with busy humans and thousands of artificial habitats carved from asteroids. Earth is a crowded mess, home to eleven billion humans, but no longer the home of thousands of species, now only preserved, flourishing in fact, in the
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R.J.Spivey writes a provocative essay for the arXiv… From Fermions to the Fermi Paradox: A Fertile Cosmos Fit for Life? …basically Spivey suggests we’re jumping to conclusions too soon about Life in the Cosmos, that the real party is after our current Stelliferous Era, when Life exists in a multitude of planets formed from supernova
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A commenter on a discussion of femtotech at HPlus gave a detailed breakdown of how to feed 30 billion people on Planet Earth and squeeze them in… Work Free Future / There’s Still Room on Earth – BUT SHARE …was kind of a non-sequitur in the context. Here’s my reply… Nice, though kind of unrelated.
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The human brain as a linearly scaled-up primate brain. There are truisms in brain-science which hide more than they reveal. For example, the old line that there’s 100 billion neurones in the brain and ten times as many non-neurones as neurones. It’s true, and not true, but the details are complicated. From the diagrammed average
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NEANDERTALS LIVE! from Assoc. Prof. John Hawks’ weblog. John Hawks discusses how Neanderthals have survived to the present day, as recently revealed by their sequenced genomes. More interestingly it means the Neanderthals were the same species as Homo sapiens – they really were Homo sapiens neanderthalis, a sub-species variant, as a lot of older paleoanthropologists
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Dr. Michael Persinger is a researcher in neuroscience at the Laurentian University in Sudbury, Canada. He has made a wide-range of often controversial claims for the origins of “spiritual” experiences – for example, that magnetic stimulation of the brain can cause out-of-body and “Sensed Presence” experiences, or that natural geomagnetic disturbances, from “earth-lights” and similar
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Theology and theodicy are fraught with pitfalls and surprises. Amateur theology even more so. Here’s a review that is a case in point… A caring God would not have designed us like this …discussing a review of a new book, Inside the Human Genome: A case for non-intelligent design by John C. Avise, which argues
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Prof. James Tabor is a scholar whose work on Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity I have a lot of respect for. His teacher, in turn, was Morton Smith, who attracted a storm of controversy in his life because of his discovery of “Secret Mark”, quoted in a previously unknown letter by the early 3rd
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Long, long after Earth has dried up it may end up locked tidally into facing the Sun on one side and the Cosmic Heatsink on the other, forever. What would such an Earth be like? Earth: 7.5 Billion AD …a description of an end-state scenario described by Jeffrey Kargel in 2003 (“New Scientist” article… “Hell
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