A website exploring the novel's themes of climate change and artificial intelligence
“Treating the world as if we intended to stay”, to quote Crispin Tickell, neatly summarises the growing recognition that we need to respond to the threats of climate change, over-population, and unsustainable exploitation of the planets resources. Can we, as the most advanced society ever to live on earth, manufacture a ‘soft […] Read More
On 12 September 1962, US President John F Kennedy famously announced “We choose to go the Moon in this decade…not because it is easy, but because it is hard.” Indeed the goal was achieved in July 1969, when the Apollo 11 crew successfully landed on the Moon. That audacious goal and the […] Read More
In simpler times we used have community dances. Boys would congregate along one wall of the dance hall, and the girls on the other. Those brave enough would approach the other side and a dance would ensue, while the more timid stayed within the comfort of their respective groups. The same dynamic […] Read More
What do you think of when someone mentions nitrogen? Maybe it would prompt the thought that it is fundamental to feeding the world’s eight million people. But it would come as no surprise if most of us would not know that for over a century, we have been “fixing” more and more […] Read More
Between 1766 and 1805, the Dublin Society made grants for planting a total of 55 million trees in Ireland. This was on the back of at least seven parliamentary acts dating back to 1698 which envisaged planting and preserving trees and woods, by encouraging tenant farmers to plant trees and to register […] Read More
“Machines have calculations. We have understanding. Machines have instructions. We have purpose. Machines have objectivity. We have passion.” So said former chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov speaking of artificial intelligence (AI). Kasparov sees an optimistic future for humans in their use of AI tools. He accepts that jobs will be lost to AI, but as a whole humans are in […] Read More
Husband and wife team Will and Ariel Durant spent forty years writing their celebrated eleven-volume history The Story of Civilization. In the process they made note of the recurring patterns of human behaviour so that they might illuminate “future probabilities, the nature of man and the conduct of states”. The result was […] Read More
When a company with an iconic brand like Rolls Royce claims to have the ‘answer’ to the clean energy future, you are inclined to give them a hearing. And so it was with the launch of Rolls Royce Small Modular Reactor (SMR) nuclear technology. In conjunction with partners including US-based Exelon (one […] Read More
The holy grail of 100% renewable electricity for Australia finally appears to be within reach after the premier of the Australian state of Queensland recently announced her government’s ambitious energy and jobs plan. Such an achievement would be a major milestone in reducing global emissions to levels agreed at the Paris Accord. […] Read More
Western urban dwellers like me take for granted that we can buy whatever food takes our fancy by just popping down to our local shopping strip. That’s because every day, like clockwork, around two thousand tonnes of food is transported into cities for each million of its residents. This ‘clockwork’ in the […] Read More