Speculative Nonfiction

Note: throughout this article when I use the term "AI" I'm talking about superhuman artificial intelligence, and I'm assu...

High altitude balloon launches are cool, especially when you can clearly see the San Diego coastline. It always amazes me that in the dista...

I always thought The Hidden was an unjustifiably forgotten scifi action movie from the 80s, and this is reinforced by the positive reviews i...

Information here and here . Based on the velocity and path, this asteroid originated from outside the solar system. This is a great addit...

Cross posted at Cognition and Evolution and The Late Enlightenment . Derek Parfit makes the argument that if utilitarianism as it is comm...

The organic material on Ceres, while intriguing, appears to be native, rather than delivered from other impactors. So says data from the So...

tl;dr It's good, worthy of the original, with a much cleaner script, and what shortcomings it does have it shares with the original. Go...

A group from the University of Tokyo (Tashiro et al, 2017) argues in a Nature paper that carbon isotope ratios in rocks in northern Labrador...

If aliens visited Earth in any numbers, the result would likely be a disaster for our species. This has been the consensus of the not-incon...

Today, this place is in Hungary. In 1241, it was also in Hungary - and it's where the Mongols eviscerated the only army that had a seri...

A paradigm shift is a plot twist that changes the setting and therefore the whole meaning of what the characters are doing. Science fiction...

At least one person has the theory - and enough confidence in it to post a Youtube video about it - that Blade Runner is deliberately full ...

tl;dr Not terrible, and definitely not as bad as Prometheus, with good acting and better-developed and organized themes but still with some ...

It is usually assumed that a superintelligent AI would maniacally focus on improving computation. Just to highlight the centrality of compu...

It's easy to despair at the gulf between stars and the millennia of time it would take to get a ship there. The fastest spacecraft huma...

This is cross-posted at the Late Enlightenment . I'd had William Sanders's Journey to Fusang on my to-read list for years, and I...

"Syzygy," Lina Iris Viktor

Here's an idea for a movie: a Lakota boy is adopted and raised by Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. He is thus mostly ignorant of Christianit...

If such a powerful technology as time travel is possible, it would have implications for reality itself, and could change everything; or, ...