Crazy Ideas Archive

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....

In a previous life I designed newspaper adverts for living. A local golf club asked me to make up an advert for their new special offers. They had reduced rates for young players and senior players. So far so normal perhaps – until I saw that the ‘seniors’ category started at 50 years of age. Senior citizen. At 50. Well, short-Anglo-Saxon-word that I thought. Boomers, Millennials and youth culture in general have had their day. Now it’s the M/ACs turn to drive the economy   and define the culture. You could call this ageist but I think it’s really just a category error – where things from one category are presented as though they belong in a different category. The golf club is placing 50 year olds in a senior citizen category because 50 year olds don’t have a category of their own. Frankly, I blame young people. Well, actually I blame our youth oriented society. There is a tacit understanding fostered by advertising and media – and through their influence, society at large – that ...

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...

If you think you’ve had a bad day at work spare a thought for 14 year old Ahad Israfil. In 1987 his boss knocked a gun to the ground, shooting Ahad in the head and blowing his brains out. A bad day at work certainly, but remarkably, not a terminal day at work. Though he lost the entire right hemisphere of his brain, Ahad survived and recovered well enough to earn an honours degree at his local college not to mention appearing in several TV documentaries. Photo: Meo / Pexels Ahad was the unwitting recipient of an instant hemispherectomy. A surgical procedure where one hemisphere of the brain is surgically removed and the resulting space filled with silicone. This is not to be confused with a callosotomy. That slightly less drastic procedure just cuts the corpus callossum – the bundle of nerve fibers that connect the two hemispheres of the brain. This results in both halves of the brain perceiving, thinking and sometimes acting independently as they respond differently to information rec...

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...