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It's 2012, which means you'll be hearing more than your fair share of apocalyptic and gloomy scenarios soon. To help counteract the tide of misery, Tau Zero Foundation founder Marc Millis writes an optimistic future history of the next four decades. More »
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It is the year 2251. All is well on Earth – food is plentiful, climate ills are cured, and war is nonexistent. Humanity left its home decades ago, with the United Nations of Earth currently on the 20th round of colonization. How would you go about convincing a new round of colonists to brave the hazards of space? More »
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Brain implantation and manipulation is a mainstay of science fiction. Often, characters can gain extra memory or get smarter, by having chips placed within the brain. (Or you can wind up mind-controlled by a psychopath. It's a mixed bag.) More »
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Glad they don't do lobotomies anymore? Weirded out by the idea of giving kids cough syrup made with heroin? These medical practices, which were common in the twentieth century, scare the hell out of us now. More »
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If the world needs a new field of science, can you simply create one from scratch? That's the question of a group of researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The scientists recently chronicled the twenty-five year journey of sustainability science, a newly coined field with the goal of advancing society without destroying our planet. So how close did they come to creating a new discipline? More »
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About 90% of flowering plants require animals to pollinate them, and that includes about two-thirds of the world's crops. The extinction of pollinating organisms could spell disaster... but the very species that are killing them off could prove excellent substitutes. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5860153&view=rss&microfeed=true Is optimism just a crazy notion, or does technological innovation totally justify our faith? In the comments on our article about optimistic stories that could still come true, commenter Corpore-metal points out some of the ways that technology has transformed the world — even if we're never going to have a utopia. More »
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Many of science fiction's most rosy ideas of the future seem less and less likely, or they've already failed to materialize on schedule. But the future could still be a beautiful place. More »
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From an evolutionary perspective, excessive optimism is generally a bad idea. After all, if you're constantly assuming good things will happen, you'll probably be ill-prepared when bad things inevitably come along. Now scientists have an explanation...which isn't exactly flattering to the eternally optimistic. More »
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NASA recently repurposed a satellite called WISE that had completed its mission with all instruments intact and quite a bit of fuel. Renaming the mission NEOWISE, the space agency gave the satellite a new job: map the entire volume of space in the vicinity of Earth's orbit around the sun, looking for every possible rock, boulder, or planetoid that could possibly smack into our Blue Marble. What they discovered caused them to build an entirely new model of the space debris in our immediate area (see image above).

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There's been a lot of talk recently about a coming water crisis, in which there both won't be enough water to go around and what water there is will be dangerously polluted. Well, there might be some good news. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5844069&view=rss&microfeed=true One of the biggest challenges in concocting an optimistic near-future setting is just figuring out how we're going to solve the environmental and economic challenges we're facing. Peak oil. Climate change. And so on. So reading Australian professor Peter C. Doherty's optimistic history of the world, as of 2050, is like soaking your brain into a nice warm bath. It turns out we're going to use biopolymers and new, super-efficient solar power derived from copying the natural processes of ocean life to solve all our fossil fuel problems. And everybody's going to come together and agree to play nice. That's a relief. [The Conversation] More »
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Nobody knows what the future will bring, but most of us think about the future all the time. Will we succeed in our goals? Will we fail? Will the world fall apart? Is the Singularity coming soon? More »
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Everybody wants more optimistic science fiction, but the near future is full of nightmare scenarios like global climate change. How do we get around that? Alastair Reynolds has one idea: a 22nd century saga set after the climate's already changed. More »
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The 2000s left us feeling battered, but the 2010s are looking awesome. Thanks to recent scientific research and an explosion of cultural interest in science fiction, there are at least 15 brilliant reasons to stick around for another decade. More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=5437354&view=rss&microfeed=true Short fiction is returning to Futurismic, one of our favorite SF webzines which frequently publishes Ruth Nestvold, Chris Nakashima-Brown and Jason Stoddard, among others. The site has been fiction-less since last April, but plans to start running monthly free stories again in March. And for those of you who are sick of gloom and doom, new editor-in-chief Paul Raven says he thinks SF should be more optimistic about our future. [Futurismic] More »
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