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Time Travel Epistemology
I recently rewatched the movie Sphere, which is based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name. It is about an expedition to investigate a crashed spacecraft at the bottom of the ocean, which as it turns out is from the future. The people investigating find the titular sphere and some other things happen… — read more
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Post-Internet
What comes after the internet as we know it? It’s almost unimaginable at this point to think that we could see a future without the internet as we know it, but it’s easy to discuss an internet that has evolved to the point of being unrecognizable. Somewhat recently, a family member asked me what I… — read more
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We Are All Transhuman
Transhumanism is, nominally, a pretty fringe ideology. There are a handful of mildly (in)famous transhumanists, including Bryan Johnson, Martine Rothblatt, Zoltan Istvan, and Elon Musk, although Musk’s transhumanist ventures are relatively obscure (Neuralink certainly doesn’t make the same headlines as SpaceX, Tesla, or X nee Twitter). There are a couple of big events that are… — read more
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Slouching Towards Techo-thriller
Recently, I read the novel Seawitch by Alistair MacLean. It was a piece of extruded thriller product from 1977, about a professional terrorist trying to destroy an oil platform owned by the wealthy and disciplined Lord Worth, and it gets pretty ridiculous. Right at the beginning, Worth steals a bunch of military hardware without any… — read more
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Cosmism in Science Fiction
Recently, there has been some discourse about cosmism, both in the space community and outside of it. I listen to a few space-industry podcasts, and Casey Dreier from the Planetary Society is a usual guest on a few of the shows I listen to. One thing that he occasionally brings up is the idea of… — read more
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The Value of Illegibility
Today I finished reading Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee, and I enjoyed it a quite a bit. I don’t read much military science fiction, but I’d heard good things about the book from some acquaintances so I figured I’d give it a shot, and it really exceeded my expectations. The book is about the… — read more
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Superscience Proliferation
Yesterday, the AI company Anthropic announced something called Project Glasswing, a collective effort to patch security vulnerabilities that the company’s AI models have supposedly discovered “in every major operating system and every major web browser”. One of my friends, jokingly, talked about hackers getting a bootleg copy of this system and using it to hack… — read more
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The Dream of Mass-Produced People
I recently heard about a tech startup called R3 Bio, which intends to produce literally brainless human clones of wealthy clients, which can be harvested for organs or used for full-body transplants. Theoretically, this would allow for people to live forever, since their failing bodies can be replaced to preserve their minds. This is a… — read more
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A Promised Land in Space?
In The Expanse, one of the major early plot points is that the Mormon church, far in the future, is building an enormous generation ship to travel to another star. The ship is called the Nauvoo, and it was supposed to go to Tau Ceti. Ultimately, the ship does not go on its interstellar journey,… — read more
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Problem Gambling
Everyone hates paying for laundry. If you’re lucky, it works like an old-school vending machine, where you feed in your card and it spits it back out and you’re ready to wash. If you’re not, you have to deal with getting rolls of quarters from the bank to feed into a coin drop that only… — read more
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J. E. Landau 