Crazy Ideas Archive

Like 'Goodbye Global Warming', 'Flying Starfish' didn't tickle the editorial fancy either. Not contentious but possibly a bit too similar in style the the previous Apollo anniversary articles perhaps. Again, I'm including it here so you can make up your own mind. Nearly 400 million years ago, a 3 foot long half-lizard, half-fish pulled itself out of the ocean and went for a walk on a muddy, equatorial shore. Lurching forward on limbs more fin than foot and dragging its tail along the ground it continued on for about 45 feet and then… And then we don’t know. That short, indistinct trail of prints and tail are all that we have, preserved now in rock at the edge of the island of Valentia off the East coast of Ireland. The creature was a tetrapod. Evolved during the Devonian period, it was one of the earliest known animals to leave behind the warmth and safety of the sea to brave the unknown danger of the harsh, dry land. These proto-amphibians became the ancestors ...

“Almost every sentient being who ever lived belonged to a society that doesn’t exist any more. Why should we be any different?”                                  Alastair Reynolds. The one thing history tells us about civilisations is that they fall. The bronze age collapse left centuries-old Egyptian, Babylonian, Hittite and Mycanean civilisations with their cities in ruins and their peoples scattered. The glory that was Rome was snuffed out by barbarian swords and even the original British Celtic culture was extinguished by those Johnny-come-lately Angle and Saxon immigrants. Babylon’s Ishtar Gate (Pergamon Museum, Berlin) was constructed 2,500 years ago. It’s builders probably   believed – much as we do – that such a rich and powerful civilisation could never vanish. Whether you call it archaeology or grave robbing, one of the few ways we have of discovering how those ancient peoples li...

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...

In a minute I’m going to tell you the only scientifically proven way to stay young (you’re not going to like it though) and I’ll use my magic pocket watch to explain how it works. The watch is indestructible and I always know what time it says no matter how far away it is. The singularity at the heart of Black Holes is where our understanding of physics breaks down, but what if they don’t exist? Say I leave my watch at my house by the sea and go live on a high mountain. After a little while I will notice that my magic watch (which I can magically still see) will be running ever so slightly slow compared to my wristwatch. The longer I stay up the mountain, the slower my magic watch will run. Slower by some millionths of a second only but slower. The reason is not the sea air but gravity. Living on a mountain, I am ever so slightly further away from the gravity created by the mass of the Earth while the magic watch – at sea level – is deeper in the Earth’s gravity field and runs slower b...