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Lefty types have been predicting the demise of America for the last century, but in 2008 even the most conservative elements of the US government are predicting it too. Every four years, the US National Intelligence Council issues a future-looking report about global trends, and this year one of those trends is the decline of American power in the world. More »
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The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's biggest physics experiment, was all set to start up a few months ago - its miles of underground tunnels would provide answers to deep physics questions about the nature of everything from atoms to black holes. And then it broke. Big time. Six tons of ultra-cold liquid helium spilled into one of the tunnels after an electrical failure. Now Nature reports that repairs will cost $21 million, and the vast facility hasn't even gone online yet. Can a shrinking global economy support the LHC? More »
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Many economic crisis periods in the U.S. have spawned drug epidemics. During the late-nineteenth century "long depression" or "crisis," the use of opium reached epidemic proportions, and a few decades later the innovation of intravenous injection made heroin the drug of choice among 1930s Depression-era junkies. Heroin made a comeback during the 1973 Oil Crisis, while cocaine and crack use spiked directly after the early 1980s Recession. Meth was the drug of choice during the early 1990s recession, and we're sure to get another dose as the Neo-Depression of the early twenty-first century marches on. We've got some ideas about what drug it might be — and you can offer your opinion in our poll below. More »
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Science fiction never fails to predict bizarre, unwelcome futures and the current global economic meltdown is no exception. We love to imagine all the ways our world will end not with a bang, but with a flood of hemorrhaged garbage cash. Two of this year's scifi film crop, Babylon A.D. and The Road, predict a geopolitical landscape shredded by scarcity. But unlike most politicians, science fiction tales offer a wide range of solutions to economic peril: everything from time-travel-enhanced investments to interstellar hypercapitalism. And yet at the heart of even the most Utopian solution to financial collapse there lurks a tale of human self-destructiveness, a not-so-buried wish to see the species destroyed or enslaved for its economic choices. Do our fantasies doom us to financial failure? More »
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