Richard Dawkins wants to eat human flesh.
No, really. It’s no secret: he tweeted about it last year. ‘I’ve long been looking forward to this’, he wrote, ‘Could we overcome our taboo against cannibalism?’ Don’t worry, though. He wasn’t talking about eating people — just eating human meat grown from someone’s stem cells in a lab. Nobody gets hurt, so it’s fine and not weird at all. Right?
Dawkins was commenting on an article that predicted lab-grown meat would hit the supermarket shelves in 2018. Lab grown animal meat, by the way, not human meat — Dawkins was just taking it a bit too far, as he tends to do. …
Can a new, human-created landscape ever be as valuable as the original?
Your heart sinks when you see the plaque, half-hidden under a pile of dead leaves. You wish you hadn’t noticed it, that you’d just walked past the unassuming bump in the ground.
But now you have, and it’s changed everything.
It’s hours since you stepped off the train into the cold morning mist, your rucksack heavy with supplies for a day’s hike. Soon the tarmac underfoot turned to soft leaf litter and you’d felt relaxed almost immediately. …
How a story about the end of the world can reveal our true feelings about nature.
You step into the rocket, wave goodbye, and leave Earth for what will be the final time.
Not that you realise. It’s just a few months, say mission control, you’ll be back before you know it.
You like being in space. It’s peaceful, just you and the gently humming engines orbiting the sun-speckled planet below. Besides, your mission is easy: on receiving a message from mission control you’re to float over to the computer and enter the emergency code. The missiles nestled in the space station’s hull will jolt to life and- Well, you don’t like to think about that. …
About
