Lifeboat Foundation: Safeguarding Humanity
Toggle light / dark theme

Blog

Category: futurism – Page 1,156

‘Davos in the desert’ offers glimpse of how Saudi Arabia is changing

Women and men sat together Tuesday as some 3,000 business people, investors and officials from dozens of countries gathered in the capital of highly conservative Saudi Arabia.

Dubbed “Davos in the desert” — a reference to the annual World Economic Forum in Switzerland — the conference is the first of its kind.

IMF director Christine Lagarde (left) and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (center) attend the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Tuesday. Faisal Al Nasser / Reuters.

Blade Runner and the World of Tomorrow

Science fiction is plagued by the slow march of time. What might have looked sleek and futuristic ten or more years ago might today look fantastic-but-unrealistic at best, or silly and outdated at worst. But whatever the case may be, the bottom line is this: no speculative sci-fi, not even cyberpunk, survives contact with the time period it portrays.

Of course, the point of science fiction isn’t to make our best attempts at clairvoyance. In fact, one may argue that, since the genre’s birth, science fiction is more like a subgenre of fantasy; it draws upon concepts that are simply more plausible to modern sensibilities (and thereby more capable of suspending disbelief) than magic and sorcery. Early works within the genre depict grand feats of science unreachable by the technological constraints of the time period, (such as defeating death, traveling through time, or voyaging through space) and remain unfulfilled to this day. Even today, we make stories that stretch the truth of what humankind is capable of in our near future, enjoyable as they may be.

Circadian Rhythm

Throw out all your clocks and your body still has a rough idea of the time of day. That’s because it has it’s own clock – the body clock. It tells the cells in your body what time of day it is and so controls a whole bunch of different processes that need to be carefully timed and coordinated in order for your body to work properly.

Keeping your cells in sync creates a certain rhythm to what they do all day and night – a circadian rhythm. And it isn’t just us that have it but plants and animals too.

Circadian rhythms roughly follow a 24-hour cycle, so we feel sleepy at night and awake in the morning. It also affects our eating habits, digestion, body temperature and alertness. How? By controlling hormone production.