The Future

On Universe, Claire L. Evans looks back on the starry-eyed futurism of the 1970's, when Gerard O'Neill envisioned "massive colonies of human habitation in space—self-sustaining environments capable of hosting hundreds of thousands of people." These colonies, housed in spinning cylinders, "would float in space at Lagrangian points, points of stable gravitational equilibrium located along the path of the moon's orbit." Today our ambitions are a bit less grand—and perhaps we should focus on taking care of the perennial spaceship Earth. But with unlimited room to grow and plenty of solar…
Jellyfish aren't reknowned for specialized organs; they lack brains, guts, hearts, and lungs. But some of them have eyes in spades. Mo writes on Neurophilosophy that box jellyfish have "24 eyes contained within a club-shaped sensory apparatus called a rhopalium, one of which is suspended from each side of the cube-shaped umbrella by a flexible, muscular stalk." A crystal called a stratolith weighs down each of the four rhopalia and ensures that the "upper lens eyes remain in a strictly upright position, regardless of body orientation." For the first time, researchers have shown that the…
It is tempting to despair of all action. And sometimes those who despair are right. But sometimes they aren't. And this, I think is an important and central point for everyone who hits those moments when they simply don't believe society will self-correct in any measure from its impending ecological disaster. I should be clear - I don't believe it will self-correct in every measure, or even as much as I wish desperately it would. But I also do not believe that what one does to mitigate suffering, soften impacts, make life livable or plan for a better outcome is wasted. I'd tell you why…