Crazy Ideas Archive

I hope you’re reading this on some obscure history blog sometime in t he  22 nd Century, smiling wryly at my lack of foresight as you Hyperloop across Mars,  past Calrketown, Saganville and New Bezos on your way to Muskbury. I really hope you   are because I’d like nothing better than to be proved conclusively wrong with this crazy idea – maybe Space X won’t get us to Mars. If they don’t, it wouldn’t be the first time the space dream has come crashing to earth. This article –  ‘Paper Rockets’  and the one that follows –  ‘The Interplanetary Marshmallow Test’  – were published in the British and US Mensa magazines to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon landing. Though different, they have some overlapping themes and language so I hope you’ll forgive any similarities. A giant, 50 metre tall rocket with the lifting power of four Saturn V’s, fully reusable and capable of putting 500 tons into orbit every flight. B...

Somewhere in my house, quietly turning to coal under a pile of papers, is a ‘planetary calculator’ (astronomy stats on two sliding pieces of cardboard), a free gift with the second issue of Star Lord comic in May 1978. Shifting the display to Pluto confidently declares that world to be moonless – as well established a fact as nearly 50 years of observations with the world’s biggest telescopes could make it. Since then, the Hubble telescope as well as the New Horizons probe fly-by has produced terabytes of data on the size, composition, orbits, shape, appearance etc of Pluto’s five moons. A torrent of brand new information that nobody in that May of 1978 had any reason to expect even existed. In Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal words, Pluto’s moons were an unknown unknown. How much has yet to be discovered? What unknown unknowns lie before us? Just how high does Mount Rumsfeld go? It’s those unknown unknowns that trip us up. We are in the position of a mountain climber who can only look down....

Nothing much has changed technologically in the last 50 years. You’re probably thinking that’s a preposterous statement! We daily marvel at face transplants, genome decoding, pictures from Pluto and other scientific miracles while the ‘accelerating rate of progress’ has become a truism. Well, maybe not so much. I’d like to propose that, apart from the computer in your pocket, technological change has effectively stalled for the average person during the last half century. The time traveling ‘fish-out-of-water’ has been a science fiction trope for 100 years so let’s take a time traveler and see how they might view a century of changes. I’ve appropriated Henry Ford’s ‘history is bunk’ quote for the title so why not appropriate the man himself? Let’s scoop him up just before he introduced the Model T in 1908 and deposit him, as a start, halfway to today. A half century of change Dropped into a busy downtown in 1962 the first thing Ford might notice is that most of the young men have inexp...

“It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses… more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.”              Carl Sagan. ‘Pale Blue Dot’ This was going to be a crazy idea article about increasing human intelligence then Elon Musk launched Neuralink to do just that and the idea went from ‘crazy’ to ‘mainstream’ overnight. The questions now are: how do we do it and should we do it at all? I mage: Gerd Altman / Pixabay Building a Better Brain ‘Smart drugs’ or Nootropics have been around a while. Unfortunately there’s no Limitless-style pill to increase your brain power as yet though there is plenty of information of varying provenance available on-line and a large sub-culture of self-experimenters. Results appear modest and mixed. We could always try adding in intelligence genes with gene editing tools like CRISPR but the problem there i...

This is a bonus article from before I started the ‘Crazy Idea’ series. Written to coincide with the 30th anniversary of ‘Back to the Future’, it never saw publication but many of the ideas were developed into the ‘Progress is Bunk’ article. Not the fictional Biff of course. In the film Marty got the bright future and Biff got … well, you’ve seen the movies. No, I’m talking about the real Biff Tannens – the teenagers of 1955 compared to the teenagers of McFlys era, from 1985 to now. Of course, the actual 2015 hasn’t turned out like the one Marty visited. Nobody every really expected the flying cars, hoverboards or instant pizza but 1985’s Marty McFlys did expect their future to be full of wonders. The ‘accelerating rate of technological change’ was already a truism that pretty much guaranteed it. Photo: Dave Tavres, Pixabay. Except it didn’t. Everywhere we’re told that things are changing faster and faster driven by ever accelerating technology. Moore’s Law and exponential curves are mo...