People imagine starships the way ancient people imagined gods: oversized, elegant, and conveniently shaped like their own fantasies. We draw them as cathedrals with engines, as naval cruisers with better lighting, as steel empires sailing a cleaner ocean. We put a bridge at the top, windows at the front, and enough smooth armor on the hull to make an admiral feel important. Then physics walks in, looks around the room, … Read the rest
Death used to be simple. Your heart stopped, you stopped breathing, the doctor sighed, closed your eyes with two fingers, and that was it. Now we have ventilators, defibrillators, ECMO machines, organ transplantation laws, fMRI scanners and ethics committees. The border between life and death did not move; we just started to see how fuzzy it always was.
Underneath the drama there are very boring facts: cells need oxygen, neurons … Read the rest
