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"Pop Transhumanism"
Today starts the 520-day Mars mission simulation by the Russian State Scientific Center. This only makes me thing of two things. The first is the above image, which is one of many concept pictures for a potential Mars base. I wanted to be on Mars soooooo bad when I was 12.
The other [...]
Aaaaaaaaah! couldn’t resist the alliteration. Sorry.
Seriously, though, a dolphin named Merlin is learning to speak using the iPad, so says Michael Leddy of Orange Crate Art:
[Jack] Kassewitz [of SpeakDolphin.com] explained the requirements of the technology. “Waterproofing, processor speed, touch-sensitivity, anti-glare screens, and dolphin-friendly programs are essential. As this database of [...]
Robot’s the wrong word, but it makes a better headline. Tom Simonite with New Scientist writes about home-built 3D printers, aka “MakerBots” and “FabLabs,” that can manufacture their own replacement parts:
Still, ingenious as these machines are, they merely churn out piles of parts. What about assembly? A heap of plastic and metal is [...]
Xenolinguistics: why alien languages will almost certainly be incomprehensible. Cerebral Imperialism. The average person has a teleological view of major life events. Atheists have a teleological view that they reject. Aspies skip the teleological step. Q: “Why did you get sick before your big performance?” A: “Because I contracted a virus.” Patent [...]
Want to blow your brain today? Help Slate out with their historical retrospective here (it’s short and a cool way to remember bits of history you’d forgotten about). Then read Will Saletan’s outstanding and extensive discussion of the science of memory. I’m suddenly feeling very PKD.
A brutal exploration of what Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s dementia can wreak upon a person and the people trying to care for them:
“[Nancy, Andrea Gillies' mother-in-law] had one foot through the looking glass and she couldn’t make those two worlds – dementia reality, and normal life – gel at all,” [Andrea] Gillies says. “It [...]
If the little pink pill ever comes into existence (the latest version is flibanserin), I know a lot of women who both desperately want and desperately do not want to take it. Low libido is a very common side effect from the Pill. You take the Pill so you can have lots of sex, and [...]
Ron Bailey, my hero and yours, reminds people to CALM DOWN:
In any case, many lab-crafted creatures would likely be obliterated by competing organisms honed by billions of years of evolution in the wild. In the future, synthetic organisms could be equipped with suicide genes where their survival is dependent on some chemical [...]
J. Hughes tackled disability and enhancement over the weekend at a conference I wish I could have attended. Walking the dangerous line between medicalizing every disability and relativism, Hughes hits the sweet spot:
So one of the consequences of enabling technologies, I argued, will be to reveal that we are all “disabled” relative to [...]
Life has been ridiculous the past few months. Lay off, job hunt, scholarships, freelancing, huge apartment move, Krull the Volcano, family events, and a bevy of little hurdles and joys here and there has made things mind-fryingly difficult to process. To say I needed a week or two away from everything is a massive [...]
About
Pop Bioethics, written by Kyle Munkittrick, is an effort to study the ethics of the continuing evolution of the human species via the lens of pop culture and be somewhat entertaining in the process.
Kyle's writing can also be found at Discover's The Crux, Slate's Future Tense, and at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. For questions or comments: comments [at] popbioethics [dot] com
All opinions, ideas, and words either explicit or implicit found within this website are my own and represent no other person, organization, or group.Categories
