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SPACE: How Many Humans Could Live on the Moon?

moon base - deposit photos

It’s the year 3000. Having used up all of Earth’s natural resources, humans have become a spacefaring race and established colonies on the moon. Vast, sealed domes cluster across its surface, housing cities populated by hundreds of thousands of people. This cold, gray rock has somehow become humanity’s new home. Of course, this is pure science fiction. But no vision of the future is complete without an exterrestrial colony of humans, and since the moon is the closest celestial body to our planet, it’s the easiest to imagine as our futuristic home. But does this vision align with reality? Will … Read more

FOR WRITERS: Really Alien Love

human alien - deposit photos

FOR WRITERS Today’s writer topic comes from QSFer Jim Comer: Different planets will have incompatible chemistries– writers as far back as Doc Smith realized this. Who’s written stories with beings who can’t eat each other’s food or copulate because they’re poison to each other, but who share bonds of love (and lust?) anyhow? Editor’s Note: Romantic sci fi often sidesteps this by making different races compatible with each other. But here we’re veering more to the hard sci fi side, looking at what would happen if two species weren’t compatible at all, but still found love or meaningful relationships across the … Read more

SCIENCE: CRISPR Gene Editing To Be Used Inside Humans For the First Time

dna - pixabay

The first study to test the gene-editing technology CRISPR inside the human body is about to get underway in the United States, according to news reports. The study plans to use CRISPR to treat an inherited eye disorder that causes blindness, according to the Associated Press. People with this condition have a mutation in a gene that affects the function of the retina, the light-sensitive cells at the back of the eye that are essential for normal vision. The condition is a form of Leber congenital amaurosis, one of the most common causes of childhood blindness that affects about 2 … Read more

Did Exploding Stars Bring Us to Our Feet? – Live Science

nova - NASA

As human ancestors went from swinging through trees to walking on two legs, they may have received a boost from an unlikely source: ancient supernovas. These powerful stellar explosions may have showered Earth with enough energy to shift the planet’s climate, bathing Earth in electrons and sparking powerful, lightning-filled storms, according to a new hypothesis. Lightning then could have kindled raging wildfires that scorched African landscapes. As savanna replaced the forest habitat, early humans that lived there may have been pushed to walk on two legs, the new study suggests. However, don’t go jumping to conclusions just yet. Many factors … Read more

Are We in An Alien Zoo?

human zoo - pixabay

Why hasn’t Earth received any messages from extraterrestrials yet? Perhaps because we’re already unwitting inhabitants in a so-called galactic zoo. This was one of the scenarios a group of international researchers explored on March 18 at a meeting organized by the nonprofit organization Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI). The gathering, which took place at the City of Science and Industry museum in Paris (Cité), brought together about 60 scientists who research the possibility of communication with hypothetical intelligent extraterrestrials. There, they debated “The Great Silence” — why aliens haven’t contacted us — exploring one possibility known as the “zoo hypothesis.” First … Read more

SPACE: NASA Wants to Send Humans to Live in the Clouds on Venus

Venus Cloud Living - NASA==

Popular science fiction of the early 20th century depicted Venus as some kind of wonderland of pleasantly warm temperatures, forests, swamps and even dinosaurs. In 1950, the Hayden Planetarium at the American Natural History Museum were soliciting reservations for the first space tourism mission, well before the modern era of Blue Origins, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic. All you had to do was supply your address and tick the box for your preferred destination, which included Venus. Today, Venus is unlikely to be a dream destination for aspiring space tourists. As revealed by numerous missions in the last few decades, rather … Read more

SCIENCE: Humans Will Kill All the Aliens

aliens - pixabay

If you’ve ever looked up into the unfathomable night sky and wondered, “Are we alone?” then you are not alone. About 70 years ago, physicist Enrico Fermi looked up into the sky and asked a similar question: “Where is everybody?” There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone, Fermi reckoned, and many of them are billions of years older than our sun. Even if a small fraction of these stars have planets around them that proved habitable for life (scientists now think as many as 60 billion exoplanets could fit the bill), that would leave … Read more

SCIENCE: Ancient Virus May Be Responsible for Human Consciousness

virus - pixabay

You’ve got an ancient virus in your brain. In fact, you’ve got an ancient virus at the very root of your conscious thought. According to two papers published in the journal Cell in January, long ago, a virus bound its genetic code to the genome of four-limbed animals. That snippet of code is still very much alive in humans’ brains today, where it does the very viral task of packaging up genetic information and sending it from nerve cells to their neighbors in little capsules that look a whole lot like viruses themselves. And these little packages of information might … Read more

SCIENCE: What Will Humans Be Like in a Thousand Years?

Humans in 1000 Years

TechInsider tackled the question, and found that humans will probably incorporate more bionic parts, be taller, and may finally crack the secret to immortality. And after all that time, we will likely be even closer to our machines, if we don’t destroy the planet and ourselves first. By Rob Ludacer and Jessica Orwig – Full Story at SOURCE

Future Talk: Robot Marriage, Coming Soon?

robot - pixabay

Experts are predicting that humans will be able to marry robots by 2050. David Levy, author of a book on human-robot love, made the prediction at a ‘Love and Sex with Robots’ conference. It’s claimed that because society used to look at same-sex marriage as unthinkable, which is now legal in some countries, the prospect of robot marriages is now on the cards. The University of London event predicted that the human-robot marriages will be legal by 2050. Though it may seem far flung, robots that humans can have sex with have long been in the pipeline. Now those in … Read more