Mike Pilewski writes about life, politics and culture in the United States
Is time travel real? According to Hollywood, we’ll know nine months from now, when a young Michael J. Fox steps out of a specially converted automobile and grabs a sports almanac and a hoverboard. According to Internet folklore, other time travelers have already lived through 2015. The best-known of them, John Titor, described this year as a turning point in … >>
Imagine that the basic needs of everyone on Earth were taken care of. What would society be like? American futurist Jacque Fresco, who turned 98 last week, has spent his life thinking about this. Needs are at the root of capitalism. You have something that somebody else needs; that person has something that you need; you trade these things directly … >>
Suppose you wanted to send a message to someone living thousands of years in the future. How would you do it? We can forget about trying to express it in electronic form. Personal computers have been around for only 30 years, but already quite a number of file formats have become obsolete — and replaced by others that are much … >>
This column was meant for September, but as fate would have it, a few other things got in the way — the presidential election, various school shootings, the demise of Twinkies — that deserved some commentary. However, the start of a new year is just as good a time to talk about this subject: the future. What was special about … >>
There’s a problem to be solved, and we keep putting off a solution. Let me tell you: life is just going to get more complicated if we don’t do anything. I’m not talking about climate change or peak oil or teenage alcoholism. There’s something else that really affects every one of us. We need to decide how to refer to … >>
I grew up during the golden age of science fiction. Every day, my friends and I would turn on the TV and see what the world would look like in the far-off 21st century, when we’d be in the prime of our lives. There would be colonies in space, encounters with aliens (both friendly and unfriendly), robots either doing our … >>