Scientists are anxious these days about the advent of artificial intelligence. They all seem to infer that as soon as one such cyber entity awakens, it’ll deem humanity evolutionary and intellectually inferior and will plot to exterminate its creator.
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Science matters
Morlock or Eloi: A Choice in Evolution
The debate over climate change is one of those strange human things. In a logical or analytic sense, there really shouldn’t be such an argument. If you see danger up ahead, you would naturally take action to avoid it, right?
Not so simple when dealing with humans.
Let’s take humanity out of the equation. Once you do, then it doesn’t matter which way the temperature goes on the Earth, or on any other planet. Planets don’t care either way. If you talk to the sun, it’s just pissed off it didn’t achieve black hole status and that it now has to wait for another ten or so billion Earth years before it gets another crack at it.
This Universe Wants To Kill You
Why are punters so afraid of nuclear technology? Is it the technology? Is it the word nuclear? This is as puzzling to me as modern politics and economics.
It makes no sense. This fear.
We exist in a universe that is constantly creating and destroying. Life is spawned from all this violence, and threatened by it. Life has to combat disease, superstorms, earthquakes, meteor impacts, supernovas, and gamma-ray bursts and that is just the natural world. The human world is even deadlier.
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Mars! One Way
It’s really hard not to facepalm when confronted by headlines stating that 100,000 have signed up for a one-way trip to Mars. A Dutch, non-profit (yes, that’s right, non-profit) company called Mars One is collecting human specimens, and raising six billion dollars, to send these people some 225 million kilometres, one way, to the planet Mars.
They call it colonization. They market it as a “stepping stone in human galactic expansion.”
Yes, that’s right, Galactic.
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Supernations, Mega City-States and Virtual Countries
Writing science fiction gives an author the opportunity to have a go at predicting the future. For me, the best tool I always find helpful is this; in order to build a world in which to set the novel, you start by going back into history. ‘To see the future, one must look into the past’ and follow the trends. In the case of ‘A Hostile Takeover,’ I began by asking ‘What is a nation? A state? A country?’ and then went on to research different types of sovereign nations throughout history.
I followed the trends and discovered the future of the world’s political landscape is obvious and surprising. The one prediction that seems most definite among all the others is that the nation-states we live in today are not static, rigid institutions, but evolving, changing political creatures.
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