As unlikely as that sounds, I could easily see EU say: "Switch to the EURO to show you mean it."
That would switch Brexit from "bad idea" to "good idea", IMO.
]]>Depends on the myth, maybe. I'm reading the Iliad right now and they don't teleport at all. They fly around on chariots or winged sandals and such. Homer is very earthy and concrete about this. They appear/disappear to the perceptions of humans, but that's invisibility or clouds or shapechanging.
I'd note "Stargate" has an embarrassment of methods. There's the eponymous Stargates themselves, which scan you and squeeze you through a wormhole. But there's also two different 'transporter' techs: the transport rings the Goa'uld use, which look like something's physically scanning/rebuilding you in real time, and the more Star Trek like method of the Asgard, mechanism I don't know.
]]>The Price of the Phoenix, and the Fate of the Phoenix, by Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath, from 1977 and 1979. Two old ST novels, infamous for overtones of S&M slash as Omne beats up Kirk. But I remember them from my childhood because they're all about exploring the transporter to the hilt: Omnedon/Omne totally exploits the idea of the transporter scanning and replicating you, to duplicate living people, raise the dead, edit people in the buffers (IIRC one character is "James", a Vulcanized version of Kirk), with dead-man-switches to make himself unkillable. Also, IIRC, a ship that moves itself via long-range transporter.
I'm not sure if your list is supposed to be all teleportation technologies, or just scan-and-duplicate ones. I'm pretty sure Iain Banks's displacer is a little wormhole, precisely to avoid duplicator shenanigans. I don't think Niven ever described his Known Space teleportation techs, but I think of them as exploiting hyperspace a bit.
I forget what he calls it, but Vernor Vinge's "A Just Peace" has duplicator tech in the background; an agent from a post-Singularity culture is the second instance of himself to visit the setting of the story. Many awkward moments ensue.
]]>So there's no black comedy, just different tools.
And, of course, oil prices have plummeted in the past several months.
]]>Actually US politicians are fairly good at keeping their campaign promises. There's mental selection bias, we remember the cases where they don't, because those piss us off.
Well, is mostly about presidents, but I suspect the result generalizes.
]]>As for psi's decline, I think SF likes to pretend to be stories of possible futures. FTL partly gets a pass as "necessary for our stories", but also lots of people still think it might be possible, human ingenuity and all!1! (I see this a lot in some space discussions.) Lots of gushing over the "superluminal neutrinos" EM Drive, as opposed to skepticism. Psi, I'm guessing, was actually thought of as possible by more people. "Humans evolving to a higher state" and "humans use only 10% of their brains" and all; in screen fiction, I saw this as late as the WB's "Roswell" series around 2000.
But with more skepticism for whatever reason -- decades of James Randi, more knowledge of the brain and of how evolution actually works, fashion -- generic psi isn't 'possible' any more. Might as well have unabashed magic, as in the 'wizards' of the Liaden books (who are living in a post-Singularity basement universe, not ours)(and which started in 1988) or in the Saga comic gonzo space fantasy series, or the 'magic' of the Nanoha anime series (magical girl Starfleet.)
(Generic psi vs. something with detailed plausible mechanisms, like brain implants for radio 'telepathy'.)
]]>That's a large chunk of Greg Egan's output. Some of Ted Chiang's, too.
]]>The various life force stuff was annoying too, even more so was JMS's attempts to defend that as plausible, on the newsgroup.
]]>Now, it's possible you could get Soylent to actually taste good by that standard, adding some hot and sour or other flavors to what should already be a fat and sugar mix. But 2.5 liters of what's described here? http://gawker.com/we-drank-soylent-the-weird-food-of-the-future-510293401 Eww. It's not even that cheap, either.
AIUI, Diamond's claims about Greenland and Easter Island are considered to be pretty flawed, if not outright shoddy. Possibly the whole book of Collapse, for that matter.
]]>If you're willing to live on multiple pills a day, we call that "kibble", or "fortified cereal", and it's already here, at least for pets and lab animals. (I don't advise living on cereal.)
]]>Colonies are the opposite of low-hanging fruit, they're more like standing on top of the canopy reaching for the clouds. Especially as, to be real backup, they have to be self-sufficient, not dependent on trade to survive. Which makes it even harder. Especially as the people living there would probably like to trade, so the colony government would have to impose inefficiency to enforce autarky.
Granted, being located in the asteroid belt would help with that.
Still, if you're seriously worried about existential risks, many other things make far more sense to do before space colonies. Public granaries with multi-year supply; bomb/gas shelter for all citizens (Switzerland still mandates an ability to shelter its whole population); more effort in detecting and deflecting asteroids; experiments with lancing magma chambers to see if we can tame vulcanism; deliberate oversupply of hospital beds and medical personnel; hardening the grid against EMPs; underground or underwater "colonies", perhaps with people rotating through instead of a permanent population, so that no one has to permanently live in isolation but a population is in place in case of sudden gamma ray burster frying the surface.
All of those (a) are probably much cheaper and (b) potentially benefit the people making the decisions, not other hypothetical people. You'll note that despite that, we're not really doing any of them; markets naturally favor short-term efficiency over hard redundancy, and almost no government is making sure to counterbalance that. Funding colonies so that "if we die, someone else gets to live"? Yeah right.
]]>...or they used to. Wikipedia says the urban heat island effect means Phoenix now sees many nights with lows above 80 F.
Anyway, as deserts go, Phoenix was built at the confluence of two rivers, and was agricultural early on. So that's how it started. The massive growth is imported water + A/C.
]]>http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n13/james-meek/reasons-to-be-miserable
]]>"Russia sucks economically because of a very long tradition of bad government."
Yes, and one way that bad government could manifest is by subsidizing permanent cities on the permafrost in winters where machinery just breaks from the cold. The point wasn't just "it's cold", it was that the Soviet government made bad decisions that continue to be an albatross around Russia. A contrast was how North America approaches similar regions, which is with seasonal resource camps.
Though I've also been reading about Nunavut, which sounds like Canada's project for very expensively providing a fairly crappy modern life. No roads, so everything's flown in. Hard to keep nurses or doctors up there. But the population there is 1/1000 of Canada, vs. 17% of Russia's in the Siberian and Far East districts. (Though I can't say all of Siberia's population lives in "who thought that was a good idea?" cities.)
WP on the book: 'The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold is a book written by Fiona Hill and Clifford G. Gaddy, two political scientists and fellows of the Brookings Institution in 2003.
In the book they propose the thesis that Siberia, while one of the most resource-abundant regions in the world, is too big and harsh to be populated and industrialized on an economically rational basis. Consequently, since the collapse of the USSR, which planned and subsidized Siberian towns, a westward exodus to the urban European part of Russia is occurring. The large territory, they state, is not one of the greatest sources of strength of Russia, but one of its greatest weaknesses.'
Resource-abundant but too big and harsh for rational colonization. Sounds like... space.
]]>