As a part of the lovely system of things that underlies and ultimately controls this holographic illusion we call reality, the Quantum Mechanics, Many Worlds theory is plum and ripe with delicious Sci-Fi goodness.

You knew it had to happen. The essential component has been missing. Sure, we are well on our way in creating and building giant, speedy and hungry, spine chewing, skull stomping, gear stuffed agents of Armageddon. The problem has been, once we give them autonomy, they’ll still be singular soldered soldiers of human hunting doom. To really exterminate properly you need an all knowing, all evil, silicon Uber mind to really get us fleshy types on the screaming run.

As the day approaches when you are forced to live in your boarded up basement, clinging to your last can of cat food while reliving the bittersweet memory of having to pummel Uncle Stan to death after he tried to gnaw off your foot, you might be considering a little high end, nerd style computation to help improve the odds of making it at least as far as starvation.

In the science guys ever vigilant search for new and interesting ways to kill their neighbors, comes this most recent and terrifying addition to our future killer robots arsenal of destruction. Once satisfied to just mow us down with heavy weaponry, swiss cheesing us in a massive hail of depleted uranium, robots now have the luxury of impossible to follow except on slo-mo cameras, hummingbird like, manual dexterity.

Recently, I wrote a little post about a DARPA funded robot project that featured some Sci-Fi drama queen embellishment. One of the principal propeller-heads behind the project has written us to set the record straight. EATR does not in fact hunt and eat humans. EATR is a peaceful, grazing kind of robot, quietly treading the fields and green of our beautiful planet, munching happily on the occasional dead twig, soft and fuzzy moss or recently raked pile of leaves. EATR is nothing to fear. If you see EATR in your neighbourhood, do not be afraid. Give it your compost and let’s all be friends.

Once again, just because we have the money to build these things and the dark and evil inner thoughts to conceive them, doesn’t mean we should be building them. Science Fiction writers have for years been telling horrific tales of our machines deciding that mankind is no longer needed thank you.

A new study called, get ready Nerds, “A thermodynamic basis for prebiotic amino acid synthesis and the nature of the first genetic code,” compiled by Ralph Pudritz and Paul Higgs at McMaster University in Canada is claiming that life in the Universe may be inevitable where there are the basic chemical building blocks and that the code for life, D.N.A. is built into the very basic physical laws of the universe. I wrote that sentence before coffee!

Intellectual curiosity is a wonderful thing. It has brought us happily out of the caves. The problem with scientists and their curiousity is that there is no off switch. No one has the power to impose wisdom. If an experiment is illegal or unpopular in one place, scientists just do it someplace else. As we get more advanced, the Sci-Fi concept of “The Big Mistake” gets more and more likely. The issue is this. Scientists make predictions about the outcomes of experiments that they haven’t attempted yet and use their predictions as their understanding of the experimental dangers. Of course, the reason we do scientific experiments is the discovery of the unknown. I would imagine that the large majority of experiments result in unanticipated results.