PUBLIC MARKS from fredbird with tags science & lang:en

While people have talked about collective intelligence for decades, new communication technologies—especially the Internet—now allow huge numbers of people all over the planet to work together in new ways. The recent successes of systems like Google and Wikipedia suggest that the time is now ripe for many more such systems, and the goal of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence is to understand how to take advantage of these possibilities. Our basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that—collectively—they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before? With its combination of expertise in computer science, brain sciences, and management, MIT is uniquely suited to address this question. We hope this work will lead to new scientific understanding in a variety of disciplines and practical advances in many areas of business and society.

By mapping minerals on the surface of Mars using the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft, scientists have discovered the three ages of Martian geological history – as reported in today’s issue of Science - and found valuable clues as to where life might have developed.

ESA science & missions portal

Darwin will use a flotilla of three space telescopes, each at least 3 metres in diameter, and a fourth spacecraft to server as communications hub. The telescopes will operate together to scan the nearby Universe, looking for signs of life on Earth-like planets. This is a daunting challenge and will require a number of technological innovations before the mission launches in the middle of the next decade.

This is not a list of the “best” fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality—which though mostly good, is variable—but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists. Of course, other works—by the same or other writers—could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway.

Full text of the book, in html.

a tv show documentary sci-fi, exploring an alien planet

Forms allow you to select a pair of starting points from a set of both real stars and planets and those from Science Fiction. It is possible to design your own worlds. The Sun-Earth-Moon combination can always be chosen for comparison.