Category Archives: Futurism

While exaggerated, the movie wasn't that far from the truth.Roland Knew

A recently published study found that the Atlantic Oceans Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC),which creates the Gulf Stream, is edging closer to a tipping point, with climate change causing it to weaken over time. If it were to ever shut off completely, much of North America and Europe could be plunged into freezing temperatures for hundreds if not thousands of years.

And as it turns out, thats more or less the plot of the 2004 apocalypse flick The Day After Tomorrow, as Insider points out. While Hollywood did decide to exaggerate the outcome for dramatic effect, its a warning call that the environment is very much headed in the wrong direction meaning were potentially already living inside a disaster movie.

In a recently published paper, climate scientist Niklas Boers found that its becoming more and more likely that the AMOC will shut off abruptly.

The system is responsible for circulating warm surface flow from the tropical regions to Europe and Greenland via the Atlantic, where it cools down and sinks to the ocean floor. Without this conveyor belt-like system in action, much of North Americas East Coast and Europe would be plunged into a not-quite ice age of freezing temperatures.

The last time the AMOC was shut down, in fact, was during the most recent ice age, caused by a massive ice lake bursting, with a flood of freshwater spilling into the Atlantic.

In The Day After Tomorrow, climatologist Jack Hall, played by Dennis Quad, warns that climate change could trigger a similar ice age. Oceanographers then notice an abrupt cooling in the Atlantic Ocean, triggering superstorms and the flash-freezing of New York City.

Fortunately, its an over-dramatization. Boers told Insider that the effect would take a few decades and that North America wont get as cold as the movie suggests.

But its still a very worrying trend. According to Boers, if the AMOC were to collapse, it would indeed be very hard to bring it back, he told Insider.

READ MORE: The Day After Tomorrow film foretold a real and troubling trend: The Atlantic oceans circulation system is weakening [Insider]

More on the study: Scientists Warn Gulf Stream May Collapse, Freezing North America

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Uh, Uh... The Plot to "The Day After Tomorrow" May Actually Be Happening - Futurism

NASA is trying to figure out how to dispose of the International Space Station,in the eventual and fiery conclusion to decades of invaluable research in microgravity, United Press International (UPI) reports.

Nobody knows precisely when exactly the aging orbital outposts end will come. A NASA safety panel did approve a plan back in 2019, according NASASpaceflight,to have at least two Russian-made Progress spacecraft drag the 450-ton structure into the Earths atmosphere, where it will turn into a giant flaming ball of molten metal and other materials.

The only problem? Russia recently confirmed that its planning to abandon the ISS by 2025. And despite the safety panels approval, NASA and its international partners have yet to fully commit to a specific plan.

NASA is continuing to work with its international partners to ensure a safe deorbit plan of the station and is considering a number of options, NASA spokeswoman Leah Cheshier told UPI, noting that such the stations death is negotiation-sensitive at this time.

In other words, NASA hasnt made up its mind as to how to kill the ISS.

The station, launched over a series of missions carried out by NASA and Russia beginning in 1998, was supposed to have a lifespan of 30 years meaning that its time will be up in about seven years.

The plan involving the Russian-made Progress spacecraft was first suggested all the way back in 2010 during a safety board briefing, with NASA asking Russias space program officials to assess how feasible it is to make modifications to Progress, as Space.com reported at the time.

According to the assessment, the re-entry would require about nine tons of propellant. NASA even included early termination plans if, for instance, the station would have to be evacuated during a catastrophic event and the ISS was no longer able to maintain control.

Speaking of catastrophic events, whether Russia will be able to pull off such a stunt is anything but certain. The agencys brand-new Nauka module uncontrollably fired its thrusters during docking maneuvers earlier this month causing the entire station to spin one-and-a-half revolutions.

Regardless, settling on a disposal plan for the aging station will likely take time.

The Russians have agreed in principle to provide the Progress capsule, but there is work that they would have to do, also, NASA safety panel chairwoman Patricia Sanderstold UPI. Planning like this is never easy with the space station because we have an international community, so you cant unilaterally decide what to do there.

And for the time being, the ISS will stay in orbit.

While ISS is currently approved to operate through at least December 2024 by the international partner governments, from a technical standpoint, we have cleared ISS to fly until the end of 2028, NASA told Space.com in a statement in November.

But the fact that NASA doesnt have plans set in stone as to how to dispose of the giant and eventually useless scrap of space junk in half a decade from now isnt exactly confidence-inducing.

READ MORE: NASA mulls how to dispose of International Space Station [UPI]

More on the ISS: Europe Just Launched Brainless Blobs of Slime Mold to Space

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NASA Is Trying to Figure Out How to Kill the International Space Station - Futurism

Opinion Editor's note: "We lose what we love, inevitably, and the only way to avoid loss is to love no one and nothing, a cure far worse than the disease."

So, in November 2018, in an essay on these pages entitled "The gift of loss," wrote Michael Nesset, a regular contributor here for decades. Remembering his painful childhood mourning for a beloved grandfather, Nesset added: "Grandparents give us, among many other gifts, an early experience of death and grief. Their loss prepares us for the inevitable losses of grown-up life, for the sympathy and the compensations that make these losses bearable, and, eventually, for the loss of our own lives."

That inevitable loss came to Mike Nesset late last month. Today we salute his many gifts to Star Tribune readers by publishing one more, submitted some months ago. One suspects the author might appreciate the irony, on such an occasion, of its subject matter humanity's immortal inability to foresee the future.

Nesset was not your standard-issue opinion page polemicist. More interested in exploring the meaning of life than the meaning of "critical race theory" or "high crimes and misdemeanors," he often had to be urged by his newspaper editors to include at least "a whiff of public affairs" in his memoirs of small town childhood, reflections on the pains and joys of parenthood and growing older, appreciations of literature and drama and recreational vehicle tourism, and much else he shared out of what his daughters say he confirmed as "a pretty good life."

What made his essays special was the craftsmanship of the longtime English professor's understated prose.

Whenever I hear some pundit predicting what the world will be like in the mid-21st century, I think of Stanley Kubrick's science-fiction classic, "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Released two years before Apollo 11 landed human beings on the moon, this greatest of all science-fiction movies foresaw a space station run by Hilton Hotels and serviced by Pan Am shuttles; regular passenger flights to the moon with uniformed attendants; elaborate American and Soviet bases on the lunar surface; manned missions to Jupiter all to be accomplished in the 30 years between the release of the movie and the end of the century.

To watch "2001" today is not only to be blown away by its visuals but also to be impressed by its many inaccurate predictions, to behold the vision of a future almost entirely misconceived.

There is no space hotel in orbit around the earth; the International Space Station is a hugely expensive, precarious scientific outpost manned by no more than a half-dozen highly trained men and women whose ascents and descents are anything but routine. The Space Shuttle was vastly more expensive, more dangerous and less reusable than anyone foresaw when it was being developed. There has been no human return to the moon, and is not likely to be for the next several years. There have not been human visits to planets or asteroids, nor are there likely to be any time soon.

The robotic explorations of the solar system and indeed of the entire universe by means of the Hubble Space Telescope, that greatest of all scientific instruments, and of the Voyager probes, both of which have passed the Heliopause and are now in interstellar space these are fruitful and beautiful and stirring endeavors initiated during the Apollo era. But back then they were entirely overshadowed by the race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union to land men on the moon; unmanned exploration was a sideshow that has become the main event.

So how did so many of the pundits and futurists of the Apollo era come to be so mistaken about the future of space exploration? They did what all futurists do: they discerned present trends and then projected them into the future in a straight line: the Saturn V booster, vastly larger than its predecessor V-2 and Redstone rockets, must lead to the even-vaster Nova rocket, to an elaborate spinning space station, to permanent manned bases on the moon.

Unfortunately, trends usually do not proceed in straight lines: they are bent every which way by unforeseen events, and come to unforeseen conclusions in a future that none of us can foresee more than partially, even dimly.

I don't remember anyone at the time of Apollo 11 saying that the space race was primarily a political competition with the Soviet Union and only secondarily a scientific endeavor. No one foresaw that, once the race was won, there would be no motive for further manned expeditions to the moon or to anywhere else in space, or that interest would only be revived when private companies began to see the possibility of profit in the mineral exploitation of the moon.

For that matter, no one at the time of the release of "2001" foresaw the bankruptcy of Pan Am, America's premier airline at the time, or the collapse of the superpower Soviet Union.

History is full of cautionary tales about the hazards of futurism. Back in the 1950s, when the new jet engine technology was doubling the speed of airplanes every five years or so, futurists saw no limits to the future speed of airplanes. Jet airliners having cut coast-to-coast and trans-Atlantic flying time in half, the future would bring supersonic airliners that would cut subsonic times in half. According to some predictions, suborbital air/space liners would, by the turn of the century, travel from New York to Tokyo in under 90 minutes as though jet lag weren't enough of a problem already.

Then came revised upward estimates of development and operating costs, the sonic boom problem that led to a ban on overland flights of supersonic aircraft, cancellation of the American SST and the development of the heavily subsidized Concorde. Only a few Concordes were built; none was ever close to turning a profit; all were retired in 2003.

Contemporary airliners are refined versions of the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8: quieter, more economical, safer, carrying more passengers, but flying no faster.

The really revolutionary airliner after the 707 was not the Concorde but the subsonic Boeing 747, the first of the wide-bodied airliners that, with a capacity of up to 500 passengers, opened air travel to the masses. But who in the early years of the jet age foresaw the 747? And as for the suborbital airliner, I'll book my flight right after I take delivery of my atomic-powered blender.

Speaking of atomic power, all through the 1950s, an atom-power future was taken for granted by those in the know. Cheap, clean, inexhaustible atomic power would drive our cars, our trains, even our household appliances Isaac Asimov foresaw a future of atomic home appliances that would run virtually forever without ever having to be plugged in. Most of our electric power would be generated by "the atom" by the end of the 20th century.

Then came the discovery of the dangers of radiation, which required safety precautions that made nuclear power plants so expensive that today only 20% of this country's electricity is generated by atomic power, while atomic locomotives and cars and kitchen appliances are impractical. And nobody foresaw the problem of the disposal of deadly nuclear waste, with its half-life of thousands of years.

Nuclear fusion reactors, which may be safer than fission reactors, are a distant prospect.

In 1967, Herman Kahn and Anthony Wiener, two of the leading members of the Hudson Institute, a futurist think tank, published "The Year 2000." In this widely read book, which established Kahn as the leading futurist of his day, the authors listed 100 technological advances that would be accomplished by the end of the 20th century. Some of Kahn and Wiener's predictions were accurate: the widespread use of computers in business, extensive organ transplants, inexpensive and widespread home video recording. Others were way off the mark: practical large-scale desalinization of ocean water, inexpensive road-free transportation (air cars?), artificial moons and other methods for lighting large areas at night, widespread use of nuclear power.

In an article on the evaluation of technology predictions, Richard E. Albright determined that Kahn and Wiener were accurate in less than 50% of their predictions, though Kahn and Wiener declared at the publication of "The Year 2000" that they were confident that 95% of their forecasts would be realized by the end of the 20th century.

Any knowledge of the hits and misses of past futurist prognostications should lead us to a well-informed, intelligent, even sensible skepticism about the futurist predictions of the present day. For example, Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, wants to establish a permanent human colony on Mars, making the human race an "interplanetary species." He believes that the future survival of the race depends upon the establishment of a self-sustaining, permanent colony on Mars, giving us another home in case asteroid or pandemic or climate catastrophe render the earth uninhabitable.

Musk's optimism about the Mars colonization project seems to be based partly on his company's success in resupplying the ISS with the reusable Falcon 9 booster and the Dragon spacecraft; these admirable accomplishments must lead in a straight line to the establishment and resupply of a colony on Mars, right?

Yet Mars is 40 million miles from the earth at its closest approach, 160,000 times further away than the ISS. Any journey to Mars would be conducted through an environment totally hostile to life and ending on a nearly airless planet almost as inhospitable as outer space itself, rather far from any help if anything goes wrong as anything is bound to do.

Not many straight lines in this scenario.

What's still more, the colonization of Mars would require the development of giant spacecraft that would be a major diversion of money and effort from what may be the most important innovation of SpaceX, the amazing reusability of its rocket boosters, which promises to make the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy the DC-3 and 747, respectively, of the Space Age another sideshow that may become the main event.

And it's hard to see any financial profit in a Mars colony that promises to be a huge money pit, while mining the moon could actually be a big moneymaker. And might this "interplanetary species" effort be a major diversion from the more realistic and sensible goal of making our present home planet a more sustainable and comfortable and equitable environment for all its people?

Speaking of sustainable environments, most of the predicted reversals of human-induced global warming, a well-substantiated condition, involve cutting back and eventually eliminating the use of fossil fuels. Well and good; yet should we Westerners, with our high standard of living, ask people in emerging countries to cut back on fossil-fueled enterprises that are raising their standard of living beyond a bare subsistence level after millennia of poverty? Might it not be better to subsidize development of really efficient and inexpensive batteries?

Going out on a futurist limb here, a really efficient battery would change everything: electric vehicles that could travel 500 miles between charges and be recharged in minutes; solar and wind power that would be primary rather than supplemental sources of electricity. Our super-battery's capacity to store electricity for when the sun doesn't shine or the wind doesn't blow could make fossil-fueled "baseline" capacity unnecessary. Fossil fuel use would wither away, both here in the West and in the emerging world, as the State was supposed to do in the future envisioned by Karl Marx.

Hey, futurism is kind of fun. I can see why Kahn and Wiener were so fond of predicting the future, and why so many people were eager to read their predictions. My crystal ball is as clear as my hindsight, at the moment anyway, and like Kahn and Wiener and Marx himself I won't be around in the unlikely event that my prognostications prove to be as inaccurate as theirs.

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OPINION EXCHANGE | Our clouded crystal ball (some thoughts on futurism) - Minneapolis Star Tribune

Watch it automatically change color as it wriggles across different surfaces.Active Camo

A team of Korean researchers seems to have cracked the code for rudimentary cloaking, or active camouflage tech that can automatically blend into its surroundings in real-time.

The flexible, color-mimicking technology is durable and sensitive enough to help a soft robot blend into its surroundings, much like a real-world chameleon, according to research published in the journal Nature Communications on Tuesday. To prove that the system works, the researchers published a video ofthe chameleon-like bot, complete with cute googly eyes, that changes color from red to blue to green as it waddles across different monochrome surfaces.

Its a significant step forward for camouflage research, Inverse reports, even though the tech is still in preliminary, proof-of-concept stages today.

This isnt the first attempt to develop active camouflage by a long shot. But this experiment does take a different approach from other systems that often try to jam-pack as many colorful pixels as possible onto a surface something that the researchers describe as exceptionally challenging from a technological standpoint in their paper.

Instead, the color-changing material and the little chameleon-bot is made of several stacked layers of color-changing displays, Inverse notes, which use nanotech sensors to detect and display the colors of the surroundings.

The camouflage is already being considered for military applications, which perhaps shouldnt come across as the biggest surprise given how long active camouflage has been a stable of militaristic science fiction media and a pipe dream for real-world military research.

The first application will be military, [such as] covert intel robots [or] actively camouflaging military uniforms, senior study author and Seoul National University Seung Hwan Ko told Inverse.

But down the road, Ko envisions a world where we could buy color-changing clothing that changes its color and patterns according to your taste or environment.

READ MORE: MIND-BENDING JAMES BOND TECHNOLOGY BROUGHT TO LIFE STUDY [Inverse]

More on active camouflage: Super-Flexible Display Could Enable Real-Life Active Camouflage

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Scientists Create Chameleon Robot That Can Blend in With Its Surroundings - Futurism

AM-III is "superior to other known strongest materials."Reinforced Glass

Researchers have created a new kind of glass that, thanks to an intense manufacturing process and a bizarre chemical structure, they say is just about as hard as natural diamonds.

An international team of scientists led by researchers from Chinas Yanshan University found that their creation, which theyve named AM-III, is about as hard as diamonds and sturdier than most other materials. Aside from being an impressive engineering feat on its own, the ultra-hard glass has the right properties to make sturdier solar panels and other semiconductors, The Independent notes potentially adding a new tool in the push to clean up our energy infrastructure.

Consequently, our measurements demonstrate that the AM-III material is comparable in strength to diamond and superior to the other known strongest materials, the team wrote in their study, which was published last week in the journal National Science Review.

Compared to a diamonds crystal lattice, AM-IIIs unusual hardiness comes from a pinch of disorder at the molecular level, The Independent notes. The scientists started with hollow, ovoidal carbon molecules called fullerenes and then heated and crushed them for hours under intense pressure. But if they took the process too far and pushed the carbon into too organized of an arrangement, the glass would actually weaken and lose its semiconducting properties.

The end result, according to the study, was a glass that actually scored higher than natural diamonds on a test of hardiness and could readily scratch a diamonds surface an incredible achievement for a material that we typically associated with shattering.

READ MORE: Chinese scientists develop worlds strongest glass thats as hard as diamond [The Independent]

More on bizarre materials research: MIT Unveils New Material Thats Strongest and Lightest On Earth

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Scientists Create Glass That's as Strong as a Diamond - Futurism

Oregon State University biologist Francis Chans scientific career began when he was a postdoctoral researcher preparing for his first research cruise off the coast of Oregon and he got a call that sent him on an entirely different journey.

Fishers had started to report strange occurrences nearby. They were pulling up pot after pot of dead crabs, and an octopus climbed up the fishers ropes to escape something that they couldnt see. Because hed already reserved the boat, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife asked Chan to go look for obvious culprits like an oil spill or red tide.

It wasnt until he dropped underwater sensors in the area that he realized what was wrong: the levels of dissolved oxygen in the area had plummeted so dangerously low that sea creatures had started to flee any way that they could. Those that couldnt died, leaving a mass graveyard all along the ocean floor.

Chan went back to the archives to check whether this had ever happened before and learned that no, these low oxygen zones that have now come to be known as hypoxic zones didnt used to happen so close to the shore.

And then it came back again the next year, and again the year after that, and then the year after, Chan said.

Now, a hypoxic zone forms off the coast of Oregon every summer like clockwork. Its there right now, in fact. The Washington Post reported last month that the deadly waters are now stretched across 7,700 square miles and actually started to form early this year a clear sign of how worsening climate change has drastically altered the ocean and are now rendering parts of it completely hostile to life.

Chan describes the root causes of hypoxic zones as two levers.

One is dictated by basic chemistry. Warm water cant store as much dissolved gas as cold water. Water that eventually arrives at the west coast of the United States begins its journey around Japan, where it sinks and flows across the ocean, he explains. And thanks to rising global temperatures, Chan has found that the water has been losing oxygen for five decades.

The other lever has to do with currents and wind patterns, which have also been altered by a changing global environment. When an upwelling wind a gust that blows water away from the shore hits a pocket of low-oxygen water, it creates a well-defined hypoxic zone. This tends to happen around discernable geographic features, like areas with wide, flat continental shelves of shallower water. But hypoxic conditions can still occur regardless of geography, and will likely become more widespread along the coast as temperatures continue to rise.

We know that climate change is pulling these two levers, and were just seeing the consequences of that, Chan told Futursim. I think I say with some reticence that, when I think about what the future of the oceans looks like, along not only Oregon but the west coast, I think the science is really pointing us to an ocean that is much more prone to episodes of hypoxia.

When a hypoxic event sets in, crabs in the area may crawl into a fishers pot like normal and then Chan made a wooshing noise on our Zoom interview get overtaken by a current of dangerously hypoxic water, suffocating where they stand. One of his colleagues has caught flounder and other seafloor-dwelling fish up near the surface, where they were attempting to flee to more oxygen-rich conditions.

Anecdotally, fishers have told Chan that they rush to the bay whenever he starts talking about a new hypoxic zone in order to catch crabs fleeing to an oxygen refuge. In South Africa, he added, a hypoxic zone frequently gets so bad that suffocating lobsters actually crawl out of the water and die on the beach.

As climate change progresses and temperatures rise, we can expect more of these hypoxic zones colloquially referred to as dead zones to emerge off the coastline of the Pacific.When they do, Chan says theyll be bigger, longer-lasting, and more severe. Chan explained that scientists have already detected regions of abnormally low oxygen off the coast of California that look alarmingly similar to readings from Portland from years ago.

There are there are just a few reports of hypoxic events in California now, Chan said. And looking at the data, it looks like what Oregon used to where [oxygen levels are] low but not crazy low. So its really poised for it. The question is, what happens if you were to supercharge those levers that drive hypoxia in California? Is there a risk of more hypoxic zones and more intense hypoxic zones? I think it would be hard to argue that thats not a likely scenario.

Tracking these events, even though scientists like Chan have a strong sense of where theyll appear year after year, is difficult. Though sensors have improved drastically over the course of Chans career, theyre still extremely expensive and require technical training to operate. Also, they need to be placed one at a time in the ocean, so researchers depend heavily on partnerships with government agencies and commercial fishers.

The challenge facing researchers now, Chan says, is that he and his colleagues have a solid understanding of how and why hypoxic zones form, where to expect them, and how to record exact oxygen solubility levels. But they dont fully understand what being in a hypoxic zone means for the aquatic life that finds themselves stuck in them.

Were getting data back in real-time, but its challenging to understand biological thresholds, like how low is low?' Chan said. If the reading is 1.4 milliliters [of oxygen] per liter [of water] for the next 18 weeks, which it has been, its like How long can a fish hold its breath?'

Take another prominent form of ecological destruction currently harming the oceans: acidification. Scientists studying ocean acidification have a very tangible biomarker that helps them understand the impacts that the broader ecological phenomenon has on individual sea creatures in the form of dissolved crab shells or shark scales.

Theres no clear biological measurement that Chan or his colleagues can take to determine the biological thresholds of organisms under oxygen stress, he explained, but theyre working to track one down.

Right now, were looking at new assays to instead of saying, well, that fish doesnt look so healthy,' Chan said. Its like, well, is it because it was hypoxia? Is it because the fish had the wrong mother? Were looking at new targeted assays to determine, for example, whether there are certain oxygen stress compounds that accumulate in an organism that we can attribute to hypoxia.

Another issue, Chan says,is that scientists simply have no idea how many fish are in the ocean. And counting them will either take manual labor that he certainly doesnt want to do, or unproven technology like acoustic surveys, AI that analyzes video feeds, or gathering free-floating eDNA shed by animals that pass through an area that he says technically show promise but cant deliver remotely useful results yet.

Despite the dire reality of the situation, what Chan really wanted to get across was that he wants everyone to stop using the phrase dead zone.

A few weeks ago, years and years after that desperate octopus climbed out of the water to flee the deadly water below, Chan says he was on another expedition. Chans sensors were down near the seafloor, recording a deadly hypoxic event. Meanwhile, near the surface, the crew was busy watching a multitude of salmon swimming around and jumping into the air.

The captain saw a blue whale, for Gods sake, Chan told Futurism. You know, its a pretty vibrant ocean.

More on hypoxic zones: Scientists Horrified by Growing Dead Zone in Ocean

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The Ocean Is Losing Oxygen. This Scientist Says More "Dead Zones" Will Soon Follow. - Futurism

Heres a question you probably havent asked yourself: what would happen if you threw all 7.88 billion humans on Earth into one gigantic blender and extracted the resulting goo of viscera into the shape of a ball?

Fortunately, Redditor kiwi2703 took some valuable time out of their day to calculate the dimensions of said gore ball.

The result: a giant, nightmarish yet perfectly spherical clump of guts almost one kilometer in diameter. Kiki2703 helpfully put the size of the ball into perspective by rendering it hovering over Central Park in New York City.

Thats one big meatball, a different Redditor chimed in.

Did they get the math right? According to our back-of-the-envelope calculations, it just about checks out.

If the density of a human being is 985 kg/m humans are almost entirely water, which has a density of 1,000 kg/m and the average human weighs 62 kilograms, you could squeeze about 16 humans into a cubic meter.

So 7.88 billion people could therefore be squeezed into 496 million cubic meters. The volume of a sphere 1,000 meters across is 523 million cubic meters, so the resulting ball of human goo would indeed be slightly smaller than a sphere one kilometer in diameter.

Its a terrifying thought.

Im in this photo and I dont like it, another Redditor responded to the grizzly render.

More on gore: Two Exoplanets Collided, Leaving a Trail of Planetary Gore

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Disturbing Simulation Shows What Would Happen if You Blended Up Every Living Human - Futurism

Low pay and a horrific wildfire season aren't exactly attracting recruits.Workplace Hazards

This years wildfire season got off to a rough start, and the US may not have the army of firefighters that it needs to wrestle the dozens of active blazes back under control.

Wildfires around the country have already burned through 2.2 million acres this year, largely thanks to widespread drought. Thats a million more than they had by this time in 2020, and The Wall Street Journal reports that low pay for seasonal work has led to a shortage of federal firefighters at the US Forest Service. Thats bad news,and means that government agencies need to find new ways to attract firefighters to a dangerous profession that will only get more hazardous as climate change makes fires more frequent and intense.

Multiple former Forest Service firefighters told the WSJ that they were asked to come back into the fold this year. Several said they would consider doing so, but even those who have moved on to firefighting roles with state government agencies say that theyre now making much better money for more stable work.

We are struggling to find enough resources to deploy across the country, Center for Public Safety Management director Tom Wieczorek told the WSJ. He added that theres a shortage of both firefighters and first responders at every agency level, especially in the Forest Service.

If it wasnt for the lack of a living wage, I would still be working for the Forest Service, Joel Lucas, a former Forest Service firefighter who left to find better pay than the $45,000 he earned at the seasonal job, told the WSJ.

Its impossible to talk about American firefighting without mentioning the fact that the Forest Service and California, where many of the fires are currently raging, depends heavily on incarcerated inmates who are paid extremely little for the dangerous work and arent eligible to become firefighters once theyre released. Californias prison firefighting program is closing next year, and NBC reports that officials arent sure how theyll make up for the sudden drop in personnel.

If the WSJs reporting suggests any answers to the predicament, it might be to start paying firefighters a living wage for their extremely dangerous work.

READ MORE: As the Dixie Fire and Others Burn, the U.S. Struggles to Find Enough Firefighters [The Wall Street Journal]

More on wildfires: Leaked Memo: Trumps Chinese Drone Ban Made Wildfire Season Worse

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There Are So Many Wildfires That the US Can't Find Enough Firefighters - Futurism

"They want people to take them seriously."UFO Taboo

US Space Force leaders are worried that nobody will take them seriously if the branch were to take a bigger role in investigating reports, video and data about UFOs, according to Politico.

The internal hesitance to study reports of unidentified aerial phenomena, when even NASA says its now researching them, is a sign both of the taboo surrounding the topic and of the Trump-era Space Forces deep seated fear of being a laughingstock compared to more established parts of the military-industrial complex.

Some at Space Force argue that itd make perfect senseto study the phenomena, as one unnamed former intelligence official told Politico.

There is no limit to the Space Force mission, the Politico source said. It doesnt have a geographic boundary like the other services.

But Space Force has already struggled with its reputation, becoming the butt of many jokes and even the subject of an entire Netflix TV comedy series of the same name.

Becoming more tied to the subject of UFOs could make it even more difficult to maintain an air of authority, according to the former official.

They want people to take them seriously, the source told Politico. They dont want to do anything that is embarrassing. But this is national security. This is their job.

The news comes after the Pentagon released its long-awaited report on UFO sightings in June. The report was a bit of a letdown, failing to include much we didnt already know.

Many of the discussions by the Pentagons Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, which was set up last year to study sightings made by pilots over the last two decades, are still behind closed doors.

Whether the Space Force will play a more significant role in investigating the sightings is anybodys guess but it sounds like the branchs leaders will think twice before committing to a more substantial role.

READ MORE: They want people to take them seriously: Space Force wary of taking over UFO mission [Politico]

More on UFOs: New Harvard Project Will Investigate Alien Technology

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Space Force Leaders Are Too Embarrassed to Study UFOs - Futurism

The Poly Network hacker speaks out.Red-Handed

On Tuesday, a cryptocurrency brokerage called The Poly Network revealed that it had been hacked by someone who made off with over $600 million thats more than a half of a BILLION dollars in the form of hundreds of cryptocurrencies.

But now the hacker is in the process of returning the stolen crypto, according to The Verge. The Poly Network seems to have gotten through to whomever it was with a strongly-worded tweet, warning that they would be pursued by law enforcement and inviting them to work out a solution to rectify things for their tens of thousands of victims.

As of Wednesday morning, the hacker has returned about $258 million of the crypto that they had stolen, CNBC reports.

I think this demonstrates that even if you can steal cryptoassets, laundering them and cashing out is extremely difficult, due to the transparency of the blockchain and the use of blockchain analytics, blockchain analytics firm Elliptics chief scientist Tom Robinson told CNBC.

In this case, the hacker concluded that the safest option was just to return the stolen assets, he added.

As The Verge noticed, the hacker seemed to be returning less valuable cryptocurrencies first they embedded a message in one transaction that simply said dumping shitcoins first.

Later on Wednesday morning, Robinson tweeted a Q&A-style post from the hacker that answered the question on everyones minds: Why steal $600 million? Okay, maybe the real answer is obvious because its a crapton of money.

But the hacker did post some white hat logic, perhaps as a form of damage control, saying that they were merely hacking for fun 🙂 and trying to save the world.

Were not exactly sure how that one works, but for now, the drama in crypto-world continues.

READ MORE: A hacker stole over $600 million of crypto coins now they might be giving it back [The Verge]

More on crypto theft: Hackers Are Already Stealing NFTs

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Hacker Steals $600 Million in Crypto, Gets Scared and Returns It - Futurism