Category: science

• Ideas aren’t unique, execution is

  In his seminal book What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly notes that while we celebrate Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the same theory of evolution around the same time, both of them inspired by Thomas Malthus’s ideas about population growth. Likewise, Albert Einstein is history’s archetypal genius, yet the same year he…

• The Science of Fiction on Veil

  Maddie Stone published a generous, thoughtful, and mind-expanding essay exploring the implications of the near future extrapolated in my latest novel: Geoengineering, or hacking the planet to cool it down, is either a maniacal plan dreamt up by foolhardy scientists or a useful tool for staving off climate catastrophe—maybe both. It raises hard questions about…

• What If a Tech CEO Tried to Save the World With Geoengineering?

  OneZero just published an exclusive excerpt from my new novel (warning: minor spoilers): As the climate crisis grows increasingly dire, a radical question is appearing on more politicians’ lips: What if we geoengineer our way out of the mess? The notion that we could reduce global temperatures with a sweeping technical fix and for relatively…

• Kim Stanley Robinson on how we live in a science fiction novel that we’re writing together

  From The Coronavirus is Rewriting Our Imaginations: These events, and others like them, are easier to imagine now than they were back in January, when they were the stuff of dystopian science fiction. But science fiction is the realism of our time. The sense that we are all now stuck in a science-fiction novel that…

• The promises and perils of geoengineering

  I went on the Technotopia podcast to talk to John Biggs about geoengineering, the future of climate change, and the inspirations behind my forthcoming novel, Veil. Complement with my conversation with Andrew Liptak about Veil, how it feels to write fiction, and this podcast interview about how technology shapes society. This blog exists thanks to…

• Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen on the possibility space for quantum computing

  From Quantum Computing for the Very Curious: For the most part the way we understand quantum computing today is at an ENIAC-like level, looking at the nuts-and-bolts of qubits and logic gates and linear algebra, and wondering what the higher-level understanding may be. The situation can be thought of as much like programming language design…

• Maria Popova on reality’s density of wonder

  The remarkable opening line of Maria Popova’s Figuring: All of it—the rings of Saturn and my father’s wedding band, the underbelly of the clouds pinked by the rising sun, Einstein’s brain bathing in a jar of formaldehyde, every grain of sand that made the glass that made the jar and each idea Einstein ever had,…

• Oliver Morton on science journalism and humanity’s fascination with the moon

  I interviewed Oliver Morton about science writing, the relationship between science and science fiction, and the creative process behind his latest book, The Moon: In World War II, two of the signature technologies of science fiction came about in real life, in part because of people who were science fiction fans: the superweapon and the…

• Kim Stanley Robinson on how to spark hope in a future ravaged by climate change

  Maria Popova says that critical thinking without hope is cynicism and hope without critical thinking is naïveté. Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 finds the golden mean between the two. He challenges us to reevaluate our own assumptions and priorities with a vision of the future that is at once hopeful and pragmatic. The novel follows…

• Daniel Suarez on the future according to CRISPR

  Synthetic biology is changing what it means to be human. For thousands of years, we’ve used technology to shape biology. We domesticated and bred plants and animals, trained our minds with meditation and asceticism, drove species to extinction, and ingested alcohol and narcotics to alter our own brain chemistry. More recently, we’ve upped the ante…