Every indexed document

or would like to suggest an article for inclusion

legal and ethical conundrums faced by LGBTQ minors and the

and it must be our fault if they do not make a tuneful and melodious sound.”

even if a mere instant in the history of our planet. And that’s something that universities can do -– not least because they’re full of young people who will live to the end of the century. We should use their expertise to address the extre...

as well as into the past -- this century may be a defining era. The century when humans jump-start the transition to electronic (and potentially immortal) entities

we may only ever recognise a small and atypical fraction of it. Moreover

but SETI programmes are a worthwhile gamble - because success in the search would carry the momentous message that concepts of logic and physics aren't limited to the hardware in human skulls.

we’d be most unlikely to ‘catch’ alien intelligence in the brief sliver of time when it was still in organic form.

depending on whether the Pacific ocean or the Eurasian land mass was facing them. The alien astronomers could infer the length of our 'day'

suppose an alien astronomer with a powerful telescope was viewing the Earth from (say) 30 light years away -- the distance of a nearby star. Our planet would seem

the others would loom larger than our moon does to us – swinging past fast across the sky.

on orbits with temperatures such that water neither boils nor stays frozen.

like the Sun is . But the evidence is mainly indirect; we don’t observe the planet

we could be of special cosmic significance for jump-starting the transition to inorganic (and potentially immortal) entities

not the direction of travel. The cautious amongst us envisage timescales of centuries rather than decades before humans are overtaken or transcended by electronic intelligence – far transcending the chemical and metabolic limits of ‘wet’ or...

who broke the sound barrier in free fall from a high-altitude balloon -- may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth – on Mars

and thereby cut costs compared to NASA or ESA. But they should be promoted as adventures or extreme sports -- the phrase ‘space tourism’ should be avoided. It lulls people into unrealistic confidence.

for instance) – using raw materials mined from the Moon or asteroids.

or NASA’s ‘New Horizons’ probe that transmitted amazing pictures from Pluto

the world chess champion. But Deep Blue was programmed in detail by expert players. In contrast