Well, if the current, ever-worsening COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the best time to talk about doomsday prepping, we don’t know what is. With markets crashing, jobs going up in smoke, borders slamming shut and hospitals being overwhelmed, it’s easy to catch yourself staring nervously out from behind the window blinds, scanning the street for looters, zombies,…
Author: Jesse Clark
Listen, fossil fuels have been great. They’ve provided such an abundance of cheap energy over the last century and change that we’ve ridden their wave from horses and muskets all the way to rocket ships and the internet. But there are costs to burning them (you know, like how you also burn the planet). As…
Obviously any article dealing with ‘future’ anything is largely speculation. This is doubly true in an industry that, despite seeing plenty of technological breakthroughs over the years, hasn’t really changed much in all that time because major overhauls are rarely worth the cost to implement. Regardless of what type of engine or propulsion system the…
Here’s a secret about architectural disasters: well-made structures don’t simply fall apart for no reason. So whenever you hear about bridges, factories, scaffolding, oil rigs or apartment complexes listing over and collapsing into dust and rubble, assume one of two things caused the incident: natural disasters (think earthquakes or hurricanes), or human error. More often…
Airplanes have only been around for a little over a century, but they have a history as storied as nearly any other invention in the history of the world. There’s a reason for that, too: their military value is hard to overestimate. Therefore, like other weapons systems, their advancement has been supercharged by the billions…
If you keep swapping out the old planks of a ship for newer ones, at which point do you have a new ship entirely? Maybe the Ship of Theseus can apply to cities as well. If a city’s been destroyed and rebuilt from ash and rubble, is it even the same place? Maybe there’s no…
Fashion fads are like any fad, really. Some of it works. Some of it doesn’t. And you don’t know which of those two categories the one you’re participating in now will end up falling into until enough time has passed for society to gain some perspective. Before you dive into the latest trend, though, keep…
Space, it turns out, is large. And until we humans figure out how to move faster than almost standing still, we won’t be going anywhere interesting in it any time soon. So we can count out exploring the cosmos on foot for the time being. But what we can do is observe. We do that…