How would a plane or an automobile look to a Neanderthal, whose kind had not even invented the wheel? In 1962, British writer Arthur Clarke wrote in Profiles of the Future, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

This quote inspired the term Clarketech, a qualifier for technology so powerful and miraculous that it would allow a civilization to achieve prodigies beyond imagination.

Whenever we discuss alien civilizations capable of reaching Earth, or future spacefaring utopian societies, we assume that some degree of Clarketech is necessary.

According to British writer Arthur Clarke, “Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.”

Back in the fifties, physicist Enrico Fermi estimated that it would take a technologically advanced civilization a pinch of cosmic time to colonize the entire Milky Way, even without faster-than-light travel capability. Then, during lunch at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Fermi brought this idea to some of his colleagues. According to them, the conversation ended with the famous question that would haunt scientists for years to come: “But where is everybody?”

Unfortunately, Fermi died of cancer…

As our population continues to rise, life on Earth grows increasingly complicated. If human civilization isn’t brought to its knees by a global pandemic or a war, climate change lurks on the horizon — challenging our long-term ability to survive on this little blue marble.

Even discounting gravity, Earth’s environmental conditions appear to be exceptionally rare. If we could replenish Mars’ atmosphere, trying to colonize it will require severe adaptations to the human body — possibly causing the settlers to branch into a different species within generations.

In the early 70s, American physicist Gerard O’Neill asked his students at Princeton…

Agriculture was the most transformative invention in human history. It allowed our ancestors to trade hunting and gathering for a more stable lifestyle. It ensured a better quality of life for larger numbers of the population.

Although the agricultural age also brought undesirable foes like disease and war, it left us free to invent and create — paving the way for our current technologically advanced civilization.

A huge portion of the world’s total wealth derives from Earth’s limited resources, but humanity’s extraction of those resources greatly contributes to the destruction of our habitat. With a global population already close to…

Every newly discovered exoplanet makes our imagination run wild, and hopes of finding a second home for the human species get higher. However, the conditions that fostered our evolution on Earth appear particularly rare, and might not be replicated anywhere else in our entire galaxy. Here’s why.

Plant and animal life on our planet evolved adjusted to 1g gravity for 600 million years. That’s what makes microgravity environments, such as the International Space Station, a most enduring challenge. It’s also one of the reasons that chances of being accepted by the NASA astronaut program are in the order of 0.065…

Stephen Hawking once warned, “We must become an interplanetary species within 100 years or we’ll all die.”

Indeed, life on Earth poses its share of challenges. If human civilization isn’t wiped out by a global pandemic or war, climate change lurks on the horizon, posing a threat to our ability to survive long-term on this planet.

“I’m beginning to find life on Earth…burdensome. Pandemics, air pollution, groundwater contamination…Did you know that caffeine, antibiotics, and even birth-control hormones are finding their way into our drinking water? And now there’s circumstantial evidence that CO2 could be making our food less nutritious! As…

Most people imagine the distant future of humanity like an episode of Star Trek. Queue the cheesy music and hip-hugging space suits. The starship Enterprise is blasting bad guys with its photon torpedoes and settling space colonies that further expand the borders of a thriving United Federation of Planets, teeming with alien civilizations.

But the reality is that our future may not be tied to planets.

Because all of us were born on a planet, we suffer from a deeply ingrained “planetary bias.” Earth has been humanity’s womb, so we naturally expect to settle another spherical body. We think that…