Speculative Nonfiction

Speculative Hard Science and Science Fiction. And Metal.

Friday, December 15, 2017

The Worst Argument Against Being Cautious About AI

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Note: throughout this article when I use the term "AI" I'm talking about superhuman artificial intelligence, and I'm assu...
Wednesday, December 13, 2017

San Diego from Space, By Balloon

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High altitude balloon launches are cool, especially when you can clearly see the San Diego coastline. It always amazes me that in the dista...
Friday, November 24, 2017

The Hidden, 1987

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I always thought The Hidden was an unjustifiably forgotten scifi action movie from the 80s, and this is reinforced by the positive reviews i...
Sunday, October 29, 2017

First Interstellar Asteroid? It's Interstellar, But Not the First We've Seen

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Information here and here . Based on the velocity and path, this asteroid originated from outside the solar system. This is a great addit...
Friday, October 27, 2017

If You Take Parfit Seriously, You Should Commit Yourself To Creating Superintelligence

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Cross posted at Cognition and Evolution and The Late Enlightenment . Derek Parfit makes the argument that if utilitarianism as it is comm...
Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Organics on Ceres Are From Ceres (not from other impacting bodies)

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The organic material on Ceres, while intriguing, appears to be native, rather than delivered from other impactors. So says data from the So...
Saturday, October 7, 2017

Review, Blade Runner 2049 (Containing Many Spoilers)

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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...
Friday, September 29, 2017

Life's Origins at Four Billion Years Ago; Implications for Our Future

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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...
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Tuesday, September 26, 2017

Vast, Cool and Unsympathetic: Other Worlds Detecting Earth

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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...
Friday, September 15, 2017

The Battle of Mohi

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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...

The Paradigm Shift Problem in Science Fiction Movies: How Will Blade Runner 2049 Solve It?

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A paradigm shift is a plot twist that changes the setting and therefore the whole meaning of what the characters are doing. Science fiction...
Sunday, September 10, 2017

Anticipation: Blade Runner 2049 - and Kubrick?

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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 ...
Friday, September 8, 2017

Review: Alien Covenant

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tl;dr Not terrible, and definitely not as bad as Prometheus, with good acting and better-developed and organized themes but still with some ...
Monday, September 4, 2017

General AI: Computation versus Survival, Superintelligent is Not Omniscient

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It is usually assumed that a superintelligent AI would maniacally focus on improving computation. Just to highlight the centrality of compu...
Sunday, September 3, 2017

Influence of Interstellar Proximity on Interstellar Exploration and Evidence of Extraterrestrial Visitation

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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...
Friday, February 3, 2017

Review of Journey to Fusang, and Some Problems with Alternate History

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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...
Tuesday, December 13, 2016

A Queen from the Urth of the New Sun Series (Or So She Seems)

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"Syzygy," Lina Iris Viktor
Saturday, November 26, 2016

Meliah Rage, Impaling Doom (Kill to Survive, 1988)

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Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Why Only Exotic Gods Coming to Life in Movies?

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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...
Thursday, September 15, 2016

What the Universe Would Look Like if Time Travel Were Possible: Different Regimes and Candidate Covert Travelers

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

Michael Caton
I am a physician, writer and trail runner. You can reach me at mdcblogs@gmail.com.
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