Here are the recent cool things in science I’ve been reading about.
Firstly
By a round-about process I found myself reading about the concept of stellar engines. This involves harnessing the energy output of a star (ie, our sun) to do something. There were the predictable options of using megastructures (such as Dyson Spheres) to collect the solar energy output and use it to power industry or power a giant computer, but the really really cool option I had not run into before was a thing called a Shkadov thruster, which uses an enormous mirror to actually move the star (and it’s gravitationally associated solar system) in a chosen direction. Sure it would be slow, but the idea of moving a star around… now that would be cool!
Second
The previously mentioned “round-about process” actually began at an article by Freeman Dyson (who is himself a pretty interesting fellow) about his predictions for Our Biotech future. At one point he makes the following observation of the similarity between the current state of Biotech and the early days of computing:
The public distrusts Monsanto because Monsanto likes to put genes for poisonous pesticides into food crops, just as we distrusted von Neumann because he liked to use his computer for designing hydrogen bombs secretly at midnight.
With the unspoken assertion that as the Biotech technology improves and becomes more accessable to everyday people it too will loose the stigma it currently has and become an accepted everyday things like modern personal computing.
