Rosie: Apologies for the erratic blogging at the moment but Jose’s in Spain and I’m buried under a mountain of reading for my course, as well as working on a lot of really exciting statistics concerning non tariff barriers and tariff equivalents in China for an EU trade delegation in about two weeks time (I think this probably makes me a capitalist running dog).

Today we tackle a tricky question: Do you think advances in technology may spell the end for asymmetric warfare? And if so is this necessarily a bad thing?
Asymmetric warfare as defined by Wikipedia:
Asymmetric warfare is a term that describes a military situation in which two belligerents of unequal strength interact and take advantage of their respective strengths and weaknesses. This interaction often involves strategies and tactics outside the bounds of conventional warfare.

Do you think it likely that the first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be made by a rover?

MT: I’m not properly qualified to answer this question but I will anyways: Yes. There at least I kept my uninformed opinion short.

There’s plenty of people who point to real world developments in technology, politics, science that were supposedly predicted by science fiction. I don’t put much stock in science fiction’s crystal ball myself. The genre has a lousy track record of predicting things, the ocassional sucess is usually vague and has a “even a broken clock is right twice a day” feel to it.

I think the idea of underwater cities is just plain impractical for anything other than highly specialized purposes. We seem to have no trouble doing deep sea research from boats and oceanic drilling from floating oil rigs. But the idea of floating cities or boat towns may not be too far fetched.

Every once in a while we run a Brain Parade on a question that we don’t really have an answer for ourselves. In a way these are my faves because these are often the Brain Parades I learn the most from and it also means that I don’t have to write any commentary of my own because I simply can’t answer the question.

I have to confess to having a crush on utopian visions. I suspect that’s a side effect of a happy childhood and reading too much science fiction growing up. On the flipside however whenever people get the idea in their heads that the world would be perfect if only we did X, Y and Z then they tend to be a bit ruthless in their pursuit of it.

I don’t pretend to have a crystal ball but I’m very optimistic about the effect of reputation systems will have in opening up new ways of doing business that sidestep Big Capital. Which isn’t to say that I think that market capitalism is somehow about to vanish but that we’re probably going to see more and more enterprises running on a different economic model.

Maybe this comes from four years of filling out hazardous waste pick-up labels when I was a grad student, but I’m inclined to think we might be better off working out energy technologies that don’t produce hazardous waste.

Oh, wow. This is an easy one. Easy and ubiquitous access to space, in all its forms. Great spinning Lagrangian colonies filled with bright white curving hallways. Moonbases with gritty miners and frontiersmen. Mars colonists, building the foundation a whole new world.

The 21st century has been hyped up to be the biotech century. Do you agree with this assessment? And if so what killer app do you think we might see (or would like to see) next?

The world’s commercial airline fleet vanishes overnight. What do you replace it with?

MT: And once again I’ve been beaten to the punch by the commentators (Tim Pratt is the guilty party this time). Without further adieu:

o me the answer is to the first part of the question is a hell ya. To a limited extent we’re already there. The CIA extraodinary rendition scandal was broken by a network of bloggers with digicams. Tracking the movements of a CIA black op qualifies as government level survaileance in my books.

We’re keeping it political today with a mini interview with Jamais Cascio who is the co-founder of Worldchanging (link), one of my favourite blogs. I got some commentary from Jamais for some of upcoming Brain Parades but I also took the oppurtunity to ask him some non-Brain Parade questions as well the answers to which I relate to you here:

‘ve interviewed a number of transhumanists here over the past few weeks. Today I bring you an interview with Paul Hughes (no related to Dr. J Hughes) the editor of Future Hi. Paul is a pscyhedelic transhumanist, part of a movement that combines elements of spirituality, pschedelic culture and transhumanist thought.

What new formats, subgenres or media would you like to see more science fiction in?

MT: My answer is customizable non-drmed ebooks. You all know what an ebook is so I won’t bore you with an exaplanation of what those are.

We’ve interviewed a number of transhumanists over the past month. This week we interview technoprogressive Dale Carrico, a lecturer with the Department of Rhetoric at the University of California. I’ve read some of his writing on the IEET (link) and am impressed by his point of view.

Today we talk about our aspirations of what we’ll be doing on the internet in five years time. Here’s today’s question:

What do you see yourself doing on the internet in five years that you aren’t doing now?

For my take I first have to state that I see the trend of increasingly autonomous weapons as nigh unstoppable. So I’m not going to whinge about should we or shouldn’t we as that is tantamount to pissing in the wind. However what does concern me is oversight.

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeller at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate and how changes related to varying forcings relate to variations due to intrinsic (unforced) climate variability, using general circulation models. He was kind enough to answer a few questions for us on the subject of climate change.

Nick Bostrom is the co-founder of the World Transhumanist Association. In 2004, along with James Hughes, Bostrom co-founded the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In 2005 he was appointed Director of the newly created Oxford Future of Humanity Institute.