Daniel Rourke /stream

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“I don’t care what people say,” asserts Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department and author of one of the most controversial articles in the realm of science last year…

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Donna Haraway famously pronounced, “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” in her influential A Cyborg Manifesto.

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Much of what archaeologists do is study how humans adapt to the environment. After Gordon Willey’s (1953) groundbreaking investigation into the entire history of occupation of a small valley in Peru,…

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On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch. Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told.

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The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I…

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‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in…

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There's no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there's one animal humans like to…

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A QUARTER-CENTURY has passed since the first global climate-change treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Humanity’s record of following through on its climate promises is dismal. The concentration of…

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My father’s family came to the US in the 1930s, a Jewish family fleeing Nazi Germany. My life has gone well, and I suppose I should be grateful for the way…

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The Manifesto of [the] Futurist Woman (Response to F. T. Marinetti) (1912) Humanity is mediocre. The majority of women are neither superior nor inferior to the majority of men. They are…

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In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief,…

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Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames,…

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It only took five minutes for Gavin Schmidt to out-speculate me. Schmidt is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (a.k.a. GISS) a world-class climate-science facility. One day last…

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Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering. There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human…

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Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use,…

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In 2003, a team of scientists in China managed to create embryos containing a mix of rabbit and human DNA. Most of the biological matter was human, while the rabbit DNA…

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The nature of machine learning operations mean they will actually deepen some humanitarian problematics and introduce new ones of their own. This banality of machine learning is also its power. Small…

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“I don’t care what people say,” asserts Avi Loeb, chairman of Harvard University’s astronomy department and author of one of the most controversial articles in the realm of science last year…

Bookmark

After we clambered down from the trees ourselves, people have kept (and sometimes bred) parrots as pets, for ceremonial purposes and to advertize their personal wealth or power to their fellow…

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Much of what archaeologists do is study how humans adapt to the environment. After Gordon Willey’s (1953) groundbreaking investigation into the entire history of occupation of a small valley in Peru,…

Bookmark

The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I…

Bookmark

There's no denying that keeping livestock has deeply benefited humanity over the millennia. But, while sheep and cows may have adapted well to farm life, there's one animal humans like to…

Bookmark

A QUARTER-CENTURY has passed since the first global climate-change treaty, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Humanity’s record of following through on its climate promises is dismal. The concentration of…

Bookmark

My father’s family came to the US in the 1930s, a Jewish family fleeing Nazi Germany. My life has gone well, and I suppose I should be grateful for the way…

Bookmark

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames,…

Bookmark

Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering. There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human…

Bookmark

Modern technology seems always to have been judged according to its utility for human beings. To the extent that technologies have been viewed as tools, instruments, or prostheses for human use,…

Bookmark

When modern humans left Africa for Europe tens of thousands of years ago, they met Neanderthals and had sex with them. The evidence of those encounters remains inside most of us…

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The nature of machine learning operations mean they will actually deepen some humanitarian problematics and introduce new ones of their own. This banality of machine learning is also its power. Small…