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If we ever manage to travel faster than the speed of light, we must first imagine that it is possible for us to do so — Theory of Relativity be damned. More »
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When Kevin "Wired" Kelly worked with the Whole Earth Catalog, he happened to receive a piece of mail from renowned scifi author Robert Heinlein. Apparently Kelly had mailed Heinlein, and in response he got this bizarre form letter that Heinlein sent to all his correspondents. The author would simply check the appropriate box in answer and mail it off. What's great about the letter is that some of the boxes refer to extremely granular things, like references to obscure articles about science in long-gone publications. No clue as to which answer Kelly was supposed to get: None of the boxes on his letter were checked. Later, apparently, the Heinlein family switched over to email. Click to see the letter in its full weirdness. [via Conceptual Trends] More »
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I'm Annalee Newitz, editor of io9, and I'll be your pilot on this ride across time and space and your imagination and all that crap. The first time I saw Star Wars I got so excited that I threw up. I learned about sex from reading John Varley novels about creatures with three sets of genitals living inside a giant cyborg orbiting Saturn. When I was a lecturer at UC Berkeley, I wrote a book about monsters. When I was a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, I became obsessed with end user license agreements. When I was a journalist at Wired, I convinced a doctor to implant an RFID tracking device in my arm. I love Octavia Butler, Ken MacLeod, David Cronenberg, Ursula Le Guin, Mike Mignola, Joss Whedon, and watching things explode. And now I have a Scooby Gang. More »
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Futurist Kevin Kelly has done a back-of-the-napkin calculation showing that the Internet uses about 5% of global electricity. This number doesn't include mobile devices that require charging up. This power-sucker has gone from using a tiny percentage of global electricity just 15 years ago, to using 5%. And as the internet grows, along with server megafarm-based businesses like Google, that number is likely to grow larger very quickly. Whenever I see this kind of data, I always worry about the sum total of world knowledge being dependent on electrical power. If we're not careful, the internet and all its goodies will flame out in a knowledge-apocalypse moment millions of times worse than the one that destroyed the library at Alexandria. AP Photo by Jay LaPrete. More »
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