The Hype About Aliens, UAPs, And ‘Disclosure’ Isn’t What It Appears To Be
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An American company is pushing science fiction to its limits by introducing a mind-reading product, backed by a controversial investor from India.
The product falls under the new category called brain-computer interface technology, with the investor saying he sees his product as the best path to push people into using the brain-tapping gadgets.
'Securely and wirelessly, understands your thoughts and what you attempt to speak.'
The Silicon Valley startup is backed by venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, an AI and software investor from Bombay State, India. The new company is called Sabi, and it is developing the Sabi Cap, a beanie that reads the wearer's thoughts and puts them into text on a connected device.
In remarks to Wired, Khosla said that a noninvasive wearable device was the only way to get a lot of people to use the BCI technology.
"The biggest and baddest application of BCI is if you can talk to your computer by thinking about it," Khosla explained. "If you're going to have a billion people use BCI for access to their computers every day, it can't be invasive."
The technology works by using metal disks placed on the wearer's scalp that can record their brain's electrical activity through a technology called electroencephalography. The process is called decoding "imagined speech."
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- YouTube
Given that the sensors on the beanie (or a planned baseball cap product) would have to work through hair, skin, and bone, the company plans on increasing the amount of sensors to piece together the required data; 70,000 to 100,000 miniature sensors per beanie have been suggested.
"Given that high-density sensing, it pinpoints exactly what and where neural activity is happening. We use that information to get much more reliable data to decode what a person is thinking," said CEO Rahul Chhabra.
Sabi's website describes the "brain reading" process as starting with "brain imaging" with "neuroimaging sensors."
The company notes that it collects "a lot of brain imaging data" and maps signals into thoughts.
"Securely and wirelessly, understands your thoughts and what you attempt to speak," the website boasts, touting how one could connect his or her brain to AI.
"AI agents do whatever you can think of. Literally."
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Investor Khosla has been vocally opposed to President Trump on his X page while having a public feud with Elon Musk, who is in the same field with his product Neuralink.
Khosla claimed that Musk wanted to make "white America great again" while saying Musk finds racism "desirable."
This was in response to Musk stating that white people are a diminishing population.
"Vinod, you're not just such a pompous asshole that you tried to stop the public from using a public beach near your house, you've also gone full retard," Musk replied.
At the same time, entrepreneur Palmer Luckey mocked Khosla for saying that "decent whites should quit" Tesla and SpaceX and join his own company.
Khosla has also called Trump "not fit to be President" and advocated against his anti-DEI positions by championing a "dire US need" to bring in international students.
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'Project Hail Mary' offers old-fashioned sci-fi wonder
There is a particular pleasure in watching a film that understands its own premise so completely that it never needs to raise its voice.
“Project Hail Mary” is that kind of film. It is about the end of the world, or rather the quiet prevention of it, and it proceeds not with spectacle but with curiosity. You lean in. It also shows that Hollywood can still make films that put storytelling first.
Clarity is one of the rarest virtues in modern filmmaking, too often filled with giant robot explosions and woke speechifying.
The story, based on Andy Weir's novel, follows Ryland Grace, played with a careful, disarming humanity by Ryan Gosling. He wakes alone on a spacecraft, far from Earth, with no memory of who he is or why he is there. The film reveals its answers slowly, trusting the audience to keep up. It is a confidence rarely seen in big studio science fiction, which tends to mistake noise for intelligence.
Quiet wonder
Grace is not a hero in the usual sense. He is a schoolteacher, a man more comfortable explaining than commanding. The film is built on problem-solving, on the steady accumulation of knowledge, on the small victories of understanding how things work. It recalls the best passages of Weir's “The Martian,” where survival depends on smart people overcoming impossible odds.
What distinguishes “Project Hail Mary” from “The Martian” is companionship. Without giving too much away, Grace does not remain alone. The relationship that develops is one of the most unusual and affecting in recent science fiction.
It is built not on corny sentiment but on shared necessity. Two radically different minds find a way to communicate. The scenes have a kind of quiet wonder that science fiction used to trade in more often, before it became preoccupied with destruction. It’s not really a spoiler because it’s in the trailer, but Grace befriends a spider-like rock alien who is also trying to save his planet. They must learn to communicate and work together.
Hail competence
Gosling understands the tone. He avoids the temptation to play the material for easy laughs or grand emotion. Instead, he lets the humor arise from confusion and discovery. There are moments of genuine comedy, but they grow out of character rather than being cheap jokes. You believe him as a man who is scared, then curious, then determined.
The direction, handled with precision and restraint by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, resists the urge to turn every crisis into a set piece. Space here is not a battlefield; it’s a problem to be solved. The visuals are clean and intelligible. You always know where you are, what is happening, and why it matters. This may sound like faint praise, but it is not. Clarity is one of the rarest virtues in modern filmmaking, too often filled with giant robot explosions and woke speechifying.
There is also an undercurrent in the film that feels old-fashioned. It takes seriously the idea that competence is a moral good. That cooperation, even across impossible boundaries, is preferable to conflict. These are not fashionable ideas, but the film does not argue for them. It simply demonstrates them.
If the film has a weakness, it lies in its structure. The gradual revelation of Grace’s past, while effective, occasionally interrupts the forward motion of the central story. Some of the Earthbound sequences feel less vivid than the material in space. They serve the plot, but they lack the same sense of discovery.
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Rare success
Still, the film succeeds where it matters most. It creates a world, poses a question, and then answers it honestly. It respects its audience. It believes that people will follow an idea if it is presented clearly enough.
I left the theater thinking not about explosions or villains, but about communication. About the fragile, stubborn act of trying to understand something that does not speak your language. That is a rare thing for a film to leave you with. It is rarer still for a film of this scale to have a competent, straight white male who is the hero and isn’t lectured about leftist ideology. What a novel idea. And the fact that this movie has been a runaway success at the box office and with audiences proves there’s been a longing for movies like this.
“Project Hail Mary” is not loud. It does not need to be. It knows what it is about, and it trusts that to be enough. In the end, saving the world with heroism and smarts will resonate more than bloated CGI.
Science fiction must return to the three Rs: Rockets, robots, and ray guns
Once upon a time, science fiction was a brand-new, chrome-shiny phenomenon rocketing across the sky of the American pulp fiction scene.
As the borderlines of the Industrial Age were just beginning to blur against those of the incoming Information Age, early sci-fi envisioned societies, worlds, and even whole universes filled with possibilities. Action and adventure, intrigue and mystery, horror, romance, humor … you could get it all within the pages of the latest edition of your favorite science fiction magazine.
The science fiction I read today — and I do read a ton of it — is mostly bleak and drab and too often just really sad.
Rockets, robots, ray guns
The magazine titles themselves – Amazing Stories, Fantastic Mysteries, Astounding Stories, If: Worlds of Science Fiction — were a good clue. And if ever there was a time to judge a book by its cover, you could feast your eyes on plenty of rockets, ray-gun-wielding cheesecake girls, and delightfully clunky robots (pronounced ROW-BUTTS, for you science fiction radio neophytes out there).
Fantastical machines driven by atomics and imagination whirred and ground within the frameworks of massive Earth-built spaceships — said ships filled with men bent on surviving each harrowing encounter with alien monsters so as to be there for the next one. Often as not, there’d be one woman aboard, as well, to be the love interest for the main character (she was usually the captain’s daughter, too, and thus forbidden fruit).
But hey, maybe early military sci-fi wasn’t your thing. That was okay, because you could flip through a few pages, pass an ad telling you why your doctor probably recommended Camel cigarettes above all others, and step into some post-atomic-war scenario where the mutants are on our hero’s tail. Or perhaps you’d seek out the story where a band of intrepid big-game hunters time-travel back to go on a dinosaur safari.
This was the golden age of science fiction, and depending on who you ask, it lasted until maybe the 1980s, when it began to be subsumed in popular media by new forms such as the techno thriller (con grazie, Michael Crichton) and when most of the remaining energy from this multimedia juggernaut filtered upward into giant television and movie vehicles — most notably "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "Star Wars."
Stardate: 1966
Now, if you’ve read this far, you’re clearly just fine with a gross amount of oversimplification. That’s good — I like you. So let’s keep it going as we round the third corner into my actual point.
Somewhere along the line, things in science fiction started getting sociopolitical. And at first, that wasn’t so bad. "Star Trek: The Original Series" (the 60s-era "Trek" upon which later installments of the franchise was based) tackled issues like racism, sexism, and the futility of war. By the time its successor show came around, writers and producers were tackling sticky issues of the day like racism, sexism, the futility of war, and (kind of) the then-nascent sociopolitical honey trap of transsexualism.
Meet the future
Centuries changed.
In the wake of Y2K’s sputtering burp of a soliloquy on mankind’s technological Tower of Babel not coming down after all — and, of course, a couple of real towers coming down in horrifying and history-altering fashion — Americans moved into a new age without really realizing it. It was (and still is) an age of realized technology, where internet reached far more functional speeds, supercomputers began fitting in our pockets, electric cars became a real thing, rockets started going into space for fun again, and social media introduced a whole new way for humanity to wage war against itself.
In short, we finally had almost everything the golden age of science fiction dared us to dream about.
Planet Pronoun
And then, along came wokeness.
Far be it from me to lay before you here a comprehensive history of what that has meant for society so far. I am unqualified to do so, and my guess is you’re aware of most of it. But perhaps one of the lesser-known zones of infection for the aptly named woke mind virus is almost the entire world of science fiction.
Woke got "Star Wars." Woke got "Star Trek." Woke got other movies and television series. And hey, remember all those words ago when we were talking about science fiction magazines? Many of them are still around … and woke got them too. If you check out Asimov’s, or Clarkesworld, or Escape Pod, or any of the dozens of sci-fi magazines still extant out in the pulp literary world, I’m going to give you about an 85%-90% chance of primarily encountering tales tied directly to identity politics. It has very nearly completely captured the industry.
RELATED: All good sci-fi is religious
And let me be clear: It’s not my intention to suggest that the pronoun folk shouldn’t have a seat at the sci-fi table — if anything, many of the things they have to say in their stories probably belong in that genre more than just about any other.
But I also think that — particularly on the conservative end of the sociopolitical spectrum and increasingly on the liberal end — we have to face the fact that "intersectional" thinking at large and wokeism in particular are breeding grounds for many of the darker things humanity is capable of creating. The science fiction I read today — and I do read a ton of it — is mostly bleak and drab and too often just really sad. This is not to say there aren’t some phenomenal woke writers — I encounter them frequently. But you can be a great writer and still depress your reader to no end. Just ask John Steinbeck.
'Tractor' beam
A few years ago I found — at random — a science fiction masterpiece called "The Lost Sci-Fi Podcast." It’s a professional recapturing of the golden age of science fiction, and it’s been delighting me ever since by taking me back to when science fiction wasn’t just well written; it was well intentioned, in most cases. As a reader and listener, I can feel it feeding the fertile ground of my imagination, while also often inspiring me to have hope for the future of humanity … and spurring me to do my part in creating that future.
As a writer, I am inspired to make sure that we Americans can experience a new golden age of science fiction. To that end, I’ve made a modest contribution in the form of my new book: "Space Tractor and Other Science Fiction Short Stories." It came out October 16, on my birthday. If you’re like me and you miss that bygone era — but you’d also like something with modern flavor to it — well … I would humbly submit that my book might be just what you’re looking for.
From space battles to alien abductions, from blasted post-apocalyptic wastelands to colonized asteroids with farmers running drugs (as in the title story), from alien villagers’ concept of the afterlife coming true to planets that can fit inside your pocket … this book truly has something for everyone.
Except maybe the pronoun people — although I hope you can find something you like, too.
Read an excerpt of "Space Tractor" here.
All good sci-fi is religious
Atheism is a really boring ideology for storytelling.
There’s no God, no morality, and no meaning. Everything is an accident, and we can take only the most superficial material interpretations possible. This kills all storytelling except the most nihilistic genres.
And this presents a problem because nihilism is well ... boring. It can’t sustain a narrative. People seek meaning. People seek purpose. It’s not just instinctual. It’s necessary. So what do atheists do? They take old religious meanings and filter them through an atheist lens.
We can talk about humanity’s grand destiny all day, but the future of humanity is not something particularly inspiring to the guy working nine to five.
So what are we going to do? Look at Ridley Scott's 2012 "Alien" prequel, "Prometheus." God is real but he’s an alien. Creation has a purpose, but it’s evolution.
The redemption of mankind is through our IQ and eventual ascension into godhood. It’s all the same beats except through atheistic and materialistic virtues (or subversions). The story is just as religious, but it’s now bent for a really shallow religion.
No atheists on starships
These tropes are so ubiquitous that we take them as given assumptions for the sci-fi genre, but they’re just recycled ideas (mostly from Christianity). And so atheists steal their depth from truth that rightfully belongs to religion. They just pretend it’s more “scientific.”
Deliberate design is a completely pseudo-scientific concept (according to atheists). There’s no evidence for it, and the mainstream consensus is that life was a cosmic accident. But you can’t say anything about a cosmic accident. You can only shrug your shoulders at it.
Nearly every sci-fi story has some form of deliberate design, they just replace the Christian God with aliens or whatever. Even though it is often atheists writing the stories, they reinsert this completely pseudo-scientific concept. Why? Because atheism is really boring.
Here’s a fun drinking game: Take a shot whenever you see a story treating evolution as a series of progressing stages. This is a completely nonsense read of evolution. There’s no moral component to evolution. It’s just adaption to environment. There’s no end goal.
But nearly every sci-fi story treats it as such. It gets to the point where it’s straight disinformation. Every time the story is about mankind’s rise from apes to the stars when that’s utterly irrelevant from an atheist perspective. Why? Because atheism is really boring.
Mankind's end goal is something like "Star Trek’s" Federation. But why is that a good thing? Why is space liberalism the default? What is morality based on? Where are we going? Who’s to say the Klingons don’t have it right? Why are there good guys and bad guys?
“But it’s all just fiction!” I hear you say. “It doesn’t matter.” But fiction isn’t nonsense. It’s an outlining of ideals, principles. Writers don’t just write random chaos. They write an extension of their worldview. Why then don’t we have properly atheist stories?
A properly atheist story would be completely materialistic, accidental, with absolutely no meaning or morality that has whatever intrigue being completely incidental to the plot. Now I have to ask: Doesn’t that sound like a really boring story?
How, then, did professed atheists like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Gene Roddenberry create the the archetypal myths that define the modern world?
The mystics of progressivism
By the 1960s, progressivism had reached a new ascendancy. Fueled by the unparalleled wealth that came with a modern economy, millions were lifted into new, luxurious lifestyles. Now was the time to put aside the ignorance of religion and finally embrace the freedoms offered by a world liberated from Christianity.
It isn’t hard to understand how so many fell for the deception. Things were getting better and better. Technology was improving, and more importantly, accelerating. The Soviet Union was an existential threat, yes. However, too many had already seen the miracle of science, and it seemed a better horse to back than spiritually weakened priests who were quickly conceding to the liberalism’s demands.
But with any new religion, there has to be a story, and the story science told wasn’t so flattering. Men had gone from sons of God to sons of apes. Salvation was a lie, and death was the end. There was no justice in the world, and mercy was just the delusion of fools. Man was a small being in a cold universe. The only thing modern men could be comforted by was his own increasing material comfort.
That’s not a story anyone wants to hear. And it’s certainly not a story anyone wants to tell. While abject nihilism has always had its place in literature, it rightfully has a small audience. Nihilism has nothing that could sustain a city, much less a nation.
Reason and science needed romance. It needed adventure and a destiny. Without these things, it was a boring, uninspiring philosophy. Writers (good ones anyway) instinctively shy away from boring. Better to be dead than boring. If there is a victory, it has to be a glorious triumph. If it is a defeat, it has to be a last stand. And if it is banal, then it has to be the most shuddering and teeth-clenching banality of all.
But the sci-fi writers of the 1960s and later were capable of far more than banality. They knew how to tell stories, and they (unconsciously or otherwise) slipped that dreaded irrationality and religious ignorance back into their fiction.
'2001: A Space Odyssey'
We’ll start with what I consider to be the quintessential story of progressivism. "2001: A Space Odyssey" was written in 1968 by Arthur C. Clarke (one of the Big Three sci-fi authors).
The original novel frames evolution not as random mutation guided by arbitrary natural selection but rather as a series of stages, with each improving and progressing from the last. Guided by the hands of an intelligence, men are the products of a consciousness far beyond our comprehension.
From a purely scientific standpoint, this is complete hogwash. But from a storyteller’s perspective, this is gold. Men are no longer an accident of cosmic forces. Suddenly, we have a destiny again.
There’s a conflict of tug and pull. We are going somewhere and we (at least to this incomprehensible intelligence) matter. We may be apes, but we have the potential to be something more. Can we realize this destiny?
You’ll notice that God is back in the equation. Except this god is a surprisingly hollow one compared to the Christian God. This one makes no demands or moral rules upon humanity. This one does not care about the suffering of the life it created. This one wants little to do with humanity except when it achieves a sufficient stage of intelligence.
Make no mistake, this is a despotic and cruel god. But, it is also a god fit for rationalism. Could we be the products of unimaginable forces? Maybe. Nobody wants to believe this was all an accident. And while this god is empty, it is sufficient food for the poets and artists. So long as nobody makes any moral demands beyond the current zeitgeist, it is a harmless idea for scholars to speculate and pine about.
This idea of incorporating evolution into the narrative of progress and a distant, indistinct entity in God’s place is a common thread throughout all of sci-fi. And it doesn’t even have to be an indistinct entity.
In the movie "Contact," this role is occupied by a galactic community that judges humanity worthy to join them after a set time has passed. But do you know the kicker? Humanity is considered at all because we sent out some radio signals. That’s ... depressing.
But there is another problem. What of the individual’s place in all of this? We can talk about humanity’s grand destiny all day, but the future of humanity is not something particularly inspiring to the guy working nine to five. Yay, we’re in the transitionary period where everything is still kinda awful, but our descendants will get to enjoy space utopia.
Flawed 'Foundation'
This question is not answered but sidestepped paradoxically. Another of the Big Three, Isaac Asimov, showcases this bait and switch quite well in his magnum opus, "Foundation." This epic spans the collapse of a galactic empire. Hari Seldon has devised a new science called psychohistory, which charts the course of societies. He goes to set up Foundation, which will be a light of science and knowledge in the coming Dark Ages and eventually bring back the empire.
This is a story that spans centuries. Its whole premise is charting the course of history. And psychohistory is not a science that is kind to individuals. It says what determines the course of history are large-scale incentives and institutional rot. We are but numbers on a spreadsheet encompassing billions of worlds, and the greater part of humanity is accounted for in the margins.
But how did Isaac Asimov write this story? Well, he didn’t, at least not in the way he thought. A third of the first book follows a shrewd politician named Salvor Hardin as he outmaneuvers factions within Foundation. He eventually consolidates the society and neighboring kingdoms into a religious theocracy. Particularly, he accomplishes this through a clever ruse by outfitting enemy fleets with a kill-switch and faking it as divine power.
14-year-old me put down the book at the moment and asked, “OK, but what if there wasn’t Salvor Hardin?” There is some argument for the Second Foundation and Seldon predicting the rise of great men, but individuals are precisely the antithesis of psychohistory.
You’ll find in each section of Isaac Asimov’s magnum opus there are great men of history. There are people who rise above the paradigm and set the trends of the coming future. And it is not just captains of industry or conniving warlords. Even small people have a huge impact on galactic affairs. The Mule (a mutant with telepathic powers) lost because he fell in love with a normal woman.
Sci-fi is full of these characters. One moment they are but insignificant specks, the next they are upending everything. In this, you see a paradox which is played whenever the narrative is convenient for it. Humanity is vast and the individual has no power or the individual leads the revolution and remakes society.
I’m not saying this is done deliberately (though it probably certainly happened at some stage). However, progress needed a place for the individual, if only because storytellers demanded it so. You cannot tell a good story without people whose actions matter.
Stories need heroes and villains, otherwise, you have no story at all. It may go completely against the rational point of view, which says people are utterly insignificant, but can’t we just pretend that we are?
The final component of this narrative is a vision of what is trying to be achieved. The stage is set. We have our gods and demons, heroes and villains. For what shall be the contest? Well, the answer varies depending upon who you ask.
The final frontier?
Gene Roddenberry’s vision in "Star Trek" is of a space-traveling humanity for which all material wants were satisfied. Thankfully, the galaxy was filled with different peoples and aliens to meet. Otherwise, his stories would be fairly boring. Of course, that is the least of his world-building troubles. "Star Trek" does not stand up to even the most cursory scrutiny.
However, I don’t think progress was promising material utopia. At least, that wasn’t what people wanted. Utopia is a nice political aim, but I suspect what really captivated the audience was the prospect of an endless adventure.
What is mankind now fighting for? Ironically, the soldiers of progress want the world to go back as it once was, where the horizon was an unexplored frontier. In the 16th century, men put themselves on little boats and crossed oceans for adventure.
But space is too vast an ocean and our boats too tiny to cross. I have seen many futurists on the internet, and the dream of space travel is admittedly an intoxicating one. It tends to fill your thoughts as you work retail. I know it did for me.
In the imagination of many, humanity was just at its short adolescent stage. Once it stepped into the stars, the fun would begin again. Again, this goes against all science. The galaxy so far has been silent, and I think it’s time we begin to accept that alien life, if it does exist, is so far away as to be inaccessible.
Digital heaven
Space is out. But what about computers? "Neuromancer" by William Gibson was released in 1984. A little later than the 1960s, but it’s still a foundational text. Perhaps the future we’re fighting for is a simulation? Of course, I wouldn’t want to live in the world of "Neuromancer," but the dream of uploading your mind is an enticing one. What if your life could be a video game?
Suppose you could do it. Suppose I could turn you into a program and put you in a simulation. Would your life be better than what you have now? For those advocating for this future, most seem to skip that step.
Let’s take a look at the modern day. Are our lives really better with what digitization has already accomplished? Everyone agrees social media is a plague on humanity, yet why are so many pushing to trap themselves on what would be the ultimate social media platform?
You’ll again notice we’ve ditched reason yet again for a digital version of heaven. And our future is so much more enlightened than religious notions of an afterlife. We’ve taken salvation and commercialized it. Your eternal soul will be bought with the U.S. dollar.
But putting all that aside, why do these stories matter? These stories are all fiction. They are nothing to be taken seriously. I can already hear the cry that this all has nothing to do with the actual expectations people had for the future. Had I brought "2001: A Space Odyssey" into an academic debate on industrialization, I would’ve been laughed out of the room.
However, people do not tell stories just for mindless amusement. In them are the beliefs of a people. More than just hopes and dreams, stories are a reflection of the world as we see it. And in these stories I have listed, you see the beliefs of the people writing them.
You see their gods and devils, their heroes and villains, and the reality they want to make happen. Stories are a look at where we are and where we are going. And most importantly, stories are a confession of faith.
Did Arthur C. Clarke believe in monoliths that uplifted humanity? No. But he certainly believed in the god that made them.
A version of this essay originally appeared on the "Trantor Publishing" Substack
CRAZY: Scientists invent 'anti-gravity' device that could revolutionize transportation
A scientist by the name of Charles Buhler claims that he and a group of scientists and engineers have developed a device that defies the laws of physics in that it can propel itself without a propellant.
Buhler, who’s the co-founder of Exodus Propulsion Technologies and a NASA electrostatics expert, says that his team has been exploring “propellantless propulsion” for many years.
Their work, which began in 2016, has now culminated with the development of a device that has the potential to revolutionize transportation as we know it.
Scientists Create 'Anti-Gravity' Device That Could Revolutionize Transportationyoutu.be
“You've found a way now to possibly put rockets into space without it really being a rocket? What is it that is the propellant?” asks Glenn Beck in shock.
“That’s the nice thing about it. It doesn't use propellant,” says Buhler, adding that the device does “violate a lot of old classical laws, like the rocket equation.”
Using “new physics,” specifically the “19th-century E&M physics — electricity and magnetism,” Buhler’s team invented a device that could in theory “replace rockets.”
“About 90% of the rocket by mass and volume is just fuel. … If you get rid of all that, then you could theoretically start from Earth and go straight into space and then back and forth all over,” he tells Glenn.
“That is crazy!” exclaims Glenn, noting that such a contraption will “change everything.”
To find out how such a miraculous device is even possible, watch the clip above.
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Can the right wing save sci-fi?
It’s an open secret that sci-fi is the genre of the left. Pick out any landmark title, and you’ll likely find the author fits into one or more of these three descriptors: progressivist, rationalist, and atheist. And while there are standout exceptions, for every Heinlein, there’s an Asimov and a Clarke. For every religious Walter M. Miller, there’s a dozen other sci-fi authors espousing various iterations of the revolution.
While I wouldn’t say science fiction is necessarily defined by this strain of leftist thought, it’s undeniable that the genre has served as a hotbed for progressive ideas since the early days of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne. Gene Roddenberry’s "Star Trek" wasn’t a step into a bold new frontier so much as it was advancing ideas that had long been coalescing among these writers. Ideas that, upon hitting the mainstream, calcified into the tropes that we now consider part and parcel of the genre. Uploading minds into computers, human evolution guided by a higher intelligence, the idea that the world can unify under a global government — they are all expressions of leftist ideas.
Are faster-than-light technologies truly a boon for humanity, or would their use unleash absolute chaos? What are the consequences of a genuinely abstracted consciousness? Is there a point where we say no to certain technologies because their costs are too great?
Take the first, for example: The left presumes that humans are nothing more than blank, abstract consciousnesses piloting meat sacks. Leftists see the mind as completely separate from the body and the body as irrelevant to the self-expression and identity of the mind. In today’s political terms, this is the “trans” movement. In sci-fi, this is taken to the nth degree, where the mind itself is often separated from the body into a computer to become an abstract self-identity.
But of course, this assumes the essence of a human mind is the electrical firing of neurons and not emergent in the physical reality of those neurons. The left believes the problem of sapience is one of sheer processing power, that self-awareness is merely translating neurons into ones and zeroes. But how many people would agree that a neuron and a computer program written to model a neuron are ontologically the same thing? Or to put it more simply, how many people would say Gary and the little black box running a computer model of Gary are indistinguishable in every way, shape, and form?
Science fiction is riddled with these often unquestioned assumptions. Or, when they are brought under scrutiny, they are shuffled off-camera to avoid the harder implications. As much as I love "Star Trek," I always groan in frustration when they bring up an interesting concept because I know it will only last as long as the episode. A duplicate of your entire crew created from a learning metallic liquid? A virus that rapidly ages its victims? A nonphysical entity mentally interrogating your officers? Welp, these things happen, I suppose. Nothing a vacation on the Holodeck wouldn’t fix.
It all raises the question of what, if so much of sci-fi is left-wing, might right-wing sci-fi look like? Anything more than a predictably ideological counter-spin on the conventions of the genre? Or might we find, somewhere, visionaries and luminaries capable of more? Might we create an artistic scene where new Frank Herberts are more a rule than an exception?
Well, the first problem we have before us is what even defines right-wing sci-fi. We need a definition or a set of criteria before we can say something is left-wing vs. right-wing. And I don’t mean right-wing in that cringe-inducing manner where conservatives are just dunking on the left. I mean genuine art that seeks after the true, the good, and the beautiful.
Live long and prosper
What I propose here is not the be-all and end-all. It’s more like the start of a conversation, a set of principles that can helpfully distinguish what is genuinely right-wing from what is subversive. I myself will probably modify these rules as time goes on. But definitionally speaking, I think these three criteria are essential. So, here are Isaac’s three laws of right-wing science fiction:
- Technology as a social force is viewed skeptically, not optimistically
- Human nature is unchangeable, not malleable
- The creation of utopia is not the purpose of mankind
Let’s break down what I mean with each point. The first rule speaks to the beating heart of sci-fi, which is man’s relationship with technology. The left sees progress as an inherently good thing. All problems of the human condition are of information processing. If there is a problem facing society, it is either that we lack the required knowledge to solve it or there are inefficiencies in our processing speed.
Progress and technology are increasing both, so they must be fundamentally good. We can solve the famines in the third world with advanced agriculture and infrastructure. We can fix our economy with sound policy decisions from think tanks and academic experts. We can end all human suffering if we just automate everything and turn existence over to machines to do everything for us.
It never occurs to the left that technology often creates as many problems as it solves. Advanced infrastructure in the third world brings questions of how to maintain such infrastructure. Complex systems require ever more complex maintenance. And if the will and human resources aren’t there to do it, then it won’t be done.
Sound economic policy decisions assume objective actors who will act for the ultimate good. But no one is outside the system. Bureaucracy inevitably breeds more bureaucracy because bureaucrats need to make a livelihood. And no matter how much you try to optimize self-interest for the better of all, corruption is always more profitable.
None of this is to say that technology or advanced systems are inherently bad. I mean that technology should be viewed as it actually is — a series of trade-offs. Modern plumbing is undoubtedly a godsend, but there are still costs that come with it. We don’t think of its maintenance as costs because we are so inundated with its use, but those costs remain. A significant amount of time, money, and investment from someone are required to keep your plumbing functional.
And if you try to automate those things, the automation itself will require even more maintenance. The best solution isn’t always to double down on ever more complex systems until you eventually run out of energy to maintain them all.
The first rule posits a very simple ask of sci-fi authors — that technology isn’t necessarily a force for good in and of itself. If science fiction explores the realities of mankind’s relationship with technology, and if it is to undertake this task honestly, it must understand that more is not always better. Right-wing sci-fi must take a fuller approach to technology, dissecting a given technology from all angles, understanding its full implications, and weighing its use. And, if necessary, to reject its use outright when the trade-offs are not worth it.
Frank Herbert’s "Dune" is a landmark title partly because the author posits a world where certain technologies have been considered seriously and rejected. And then it dares to imagine the consequences of such a world.
How many plots of "Star Trek" are the exact opposite? How many episodes are spent in which the solution is some clever use of technology or some new knowledge to solve the problem? How many of the problems facing the characters are the lack of information and not the harder choices men are often called to make?
Moving on, the second rule is an extension of the first. If technology is not to uplift humanity, then it is merely an additive to humanity — a humanity that remains constant in its condition.
There’s no one serious in the world who contests that technology changes human behavior and the human experience. It obviously does so. But does technology change what it is to be human itself? Has technology changed the overall nature of mankind? Are we fundamentally different as a species than where we were 2,000 years ago? If you were to compare the two, would you find something essential in modern man that is not present in his earlier incarnation?
And if you were to strip modern man of his creature comforts, would he be any different than what he was 2,000 years ago? Would his children be any different? Would their grandchildren? If the answer is no, then we must conclude that it is the environment that has changed in the modern world, not the man himself. In this case, if our impossibly sophisticated world has not already made a measurable impact on human nature, why do we expect it to do so in the future?
It is easy to dream of machine life integrating with the organic as it often does in sci-fi. But has anyone ever stopped and asked what would happen if such a future were impossible? We assume that science will progress forever and forever, but what happens if we were to come across hard limits to our reality that could not be overcome? What if — dare I say — that more knowledge was not the solution to our problems?
What if reality itself has its limitations? And what if one of those limitations was the human condition?
The left has placed its bets on AI and trans-humanism, the latter concept being an oxymoron. To transcend the human means no longer being human, which means we’re talking about something completely different than humanity. Trans-humanism means the rejection of humanity in favor of something else — which is assuredly not human. If we were to put it in actual, real terms, trans-humanism is the abolition — or outright extinction — of the human race.
So, we are effectively placing all our bets on some unproven, utterly unknown entity, and we’re hoping that this entity is magically better than humanity itself. And if we were to create a self-learning AI somehow, there is no guarantee that such an AI would somehow be superior to mankind. Mere intelligence does not equate to morality, and I hope that’s obvious to anyone who’s seen his fair share of cheesy machine uprisings.
To be right-wing in science fiction is to make the simple observation that human nature seems to be sticking around for the long haul, and tampering with it does not guarantee a better world. If there is one single thing that conservatives have succeeded in conserving, it is human nature. And given the absolute failure of conservatives against the left, I think this is direct evidence that human nature is the one thing the left cannot abolish.
The third rule concludes the first two. If progress does not bring us to a better world and human nature is not malleable, then utopia is firmly out of our reach. So many of the left’s stories rely upon the implicit assumption that man is destined to achieve a perfect state of being in this universe, a post-scarcity society where all problems of existence are solved.
Spirituality and the stars
But what if mankind’s ultimate purpose is not to strive for infinite material gain? What is mankind if we are not a mere appetite that needs to be satiated, and what if existence entailed more than a constant string of dopamine hits?
This final point encapsulates a topic, the often-discussed but not properly explored religious aspect of sci-fi. In so many stories, the narrative’s true religion is some version of leftist progress, and all other faiths are an obstacle or interesting nuisance in the way of this goal. But imagine, for a moment, if another religion was true? What if different metaphysical claims underpinned a narrative?
This is a woefully unexplored part of sci-fi, and I think here is a fertile ground for new artists to break out of genre-defining clichés and exhausted plot lines. Warhammer 40k is interesting not because it reuses a bunch of sci-fi tropes but because it puts a new spin on them. In the setting, the dream of "Star Trek" is inverted. Instead of peace and prosperity, the galaxy is thrown into endless war and strife. Everything is collapsing, and the idea of a secular utopia has been thoroughly snuffed out.
The best parts of 40k are when the authors try to salvage meaning and hope out of this bleak situation. And what do those authors find themselves turning to time and again for new answers? Religion.
The message I want people to take away from this essay is not me crossing out tropes with a red marker and saying you cannot use them or else you are a leftist. But rather, questioning old tropes that seem exhausted and finding new spins or interpretations on them. Are faster-than-light technologies truly a boon for humanity, or would their use unleash absolute chaos? What are the consequences of a genuinely abstracted consciousness? Is there a point where we say no to certain technologies because their costs are too great?
This is not an exercise in condemning past authors or their works, only trying to understand the progression of ideas in the genre and where those ideas are leading. And finally, to leave it up for future artists to decide if they want to venture somewhere else in the bold new frontiers of their own sci-fi stories.
Are scientists harvesting human embryos to power supercomputers?!
The idea of harvesting anything from a human being to power technology might make for a great dystopian novel or a science-fiction television show, but to apply such a concept to reality is surely crazy, right?
Well, yes, it is undoubtedly crazy. But it is happening.
“This is actually in practice and being used by the University of Michigan right now,” says Glenn Beck. “Environmentalists are worried about how we make enough power to be able to power AI.”
Their answer has come in the form of what is called an “organoid” — a simplified organ that is artificially grown in vitro.
Blaze Media editor at large and host of “Zero Hour” James Poulos, who did a deep dive into this harrowing subject in his recent article “Brace yourself: Making computers from human brains is the new environmentalism,” joins Glenn to unpack the deranged concept of “offering up human brains to run energy-starved supercomputers.”
“AI consumes a ton of electricity,” and “environmentalists have always hated nuclear power,” so “they’re turning to us to be the batteries,” Poulos explains.
Scientists in the field are taking “stem cells out of embryos or out of the lab (sometimes even out of tumors)” and “[turning] them into brain cells basically and [using] those as batteries to power what they're calling bioprocessors.”
This method is considered superior because it apparently requires “about a million times less power than a typical digital processor.”
The hype surrounding this dark concept, Poulos says, originates from “the same folks who brought you the idea of going to Carbon Zero [or] Net Zero carbon use.”
“They look at human beings as a waste of space — a waste of energy — and they want to harness that to run AI,” he says.
The company behind the movement is called FinalSpark.
According to their website, the organoids that power AI “live for about 100 days.”
“So, are we harvesting embryos, using them to power a supercomputer for 100 days, and then killing them and looking for more embryo stem cells?” asks Glenn in shock.
The short answer is yes.
“What you do is you start the embryonic process, but you arrest it before it gets too far and then you harvest the stem cells out of this artificially induced embryonic organism ... and you just grow those cells sort of in the way they grow fake meat cells,” Poulos explains, adding that this process is “not one and done.”
“It's not like, well, maybe once upon a time there was an embryo who had to die for the greater good. No, this is like a perpetual-motion machine; you’ve got to keep harvesting,” he says.
“Lord, that’s terrifying,” says Glenn.
“If we were created in the image of God, how far can you stray from that before something really horrible happens?” Poulos asks rhetorically, pointing to Nikola Tesla’s prescient warning: “You may live to see manmade horrors beyond your comprehension.”
“You now have scientists who don't necessarily believe in God [and] think that they are creating a god in AI now harvesting God's creation to power their new god,” says Glenn.
To hear more of the conversation, watch the clip below.
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