Tomorrow, Metaphorically (Maybe)

What am I doing? Recently I half-joked that I was "watching for signs of the Apocalypse." Subtract the kooky religious implications and that's kind of true. I don't mean the Christian Apocalypse literally, nor do I really believe in the more extreme descriptions of the geek Singularity, but I do have a strong feeling that interesting changes are either imminent or happening already. They'll have broad effects, they'll catch us by surprise, and we may not even know they've happened until we look back at them. While "expect the unexpected" usually receives a response of sarcasm these days, I'm going to say it anyway; I mean by it that we need to stretch our creative faculties if we want to have any hope of understanding, let alone predicting, the nature of the changes that are coming.

The people who have done this well in the past have been the writers of speculative fiction; that's probably why I identify myself as wishing to become a writer of speculative fiction. But it's not the "writer" part or the "fiction" part that I really have in my soul, it's the "speculative" part. I can't help it. I'm like a kid on the night before Christmas; I can't sleep, I'm so excited thinking about what I'll get tomorrow.

More Eschatology

The Bafflement is the period of history between the moment a civilization discovers the facts of quantum mechanics, and the moment that civilization understands the facts of quantum mechanics.

Few civilizations survive the End of the Bafflement.

Our civilization is in the Bafflement now.

The End is nigh.

More Neutrinos!

Scientists are already building an interstellar Schrödinger gun. And they don't even know it. Super-sensitive neutrino detectors are the death of reason, I tell you.

This is the Great Filter, isn't it? Civilizations get just smart enough to disrupt cognition throughout the galaxy.

(via Slashdot)

Hey, it looks like they're making beams of antineutrinos. What happens when a beam of antineutrinos intersects with a beam of neutrinos? Do they annihilate, and release energy? That'd be neat, since they don't interact with anything on the way there. It'd be a way to deliver energy to an arbitrary point in space.