Looks like little Timmy is pretty screwed now! Source is Rob Sheridan.
Unity
This was my first desktop after becoming a self-identified transhumanist in 2001, after reading Max More’s Extropian Principles. The image is “Unity” by Anders Sandberg. See more images on Anders’ raytracing page.
The caption says, “Information wants to be one.”
Dawkins and Hermione
One of the more mesmerizing things I’ve seen in the last week.
Via MCS.
Gif version via Rüdiger Koch:
10 Interesting Futuristic Materials
1. Aerogel
Aerogel holds 15 entries in the Guinness Book of Records, including “best insulator”, and “lowest-density solid”. Sometimes called “frozen smoke”, aerogel is made by the supercritical drying of liquid gels of alumina, chromia, tin oxide, or carbon. It’s 99.8% empty space, which makes it look semi-transparent. Aerogel is a fantastic insulator — if you had a shield of aerogel, you could easily defend yourself from a flamethrower. It stops cold, it stops heat. You could build a warm dome on the Moon. Aerogels have unbelievable surface area in their internal fractal structures — cubes of aerogel just an inch on a side may have an internal surface area equivalent to a football field. Despite its low density, aerogel has been looked into as a component of military armor because of its insulating properties.
2. Carbon nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes are chains of carbon held together by the strongest bond in all chemistry, the sacred sp2 bond, even stronger than the sp3 bonds that hold together diamond. Carbon nanotubes have numerous remarkable physical …
A Brighter, Cleaner Future
“Arizona Bay” by Stefan Morrell
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“A Brighter, Cleaner Future” by Stefan Morrell
“Beach Themed Sketch” by Robert Maschke
H/t Extropia.
Airship & Chocobo War
While we’re on the topic of artists, another of my favorites is Yoshitaka Amano. Many of you will remember him as the concept artist behind Final Fantasy.
Dreaminism
One of my favorite contemporary artists is Vitaly Alexius. Check out the gallery if you haven’t seen it yet.
High Cost of Force Protection
From My Confined Space. This post was just supposed to be for fun, but it inspired Brian Wang, and now me, to think about futuristic warfare a little more seriously.
I don’t think the future of warfare (if there is one — world peace is possible) lies in mechs either, unless they are extremely fast (supersonic). I would favor a mix of 1) distributed fairyfly bots and 2) massive force projection, 3) the ability for the entire army to run away very quickly when threatened.
Flying machines inspired by insect biomechanics could be very small — fairyflies are 140 microns across. A microgram of botulinum is enough to kill ten people. If you could manufacture trillions of these, your army would be extremely hard to stop. You can’t seal every soldier in a completely airtight container. Advanced (5-10+ years after MNT, if MNT is possible) bloodborne nanomachines could theoretically combat this, but they’d have to respond very quickly. A fairyfly bot could merely fire …