I knew I would get some strong negative reactions to Tuesday's item about the negative campaign on behalf of intelligent design, titled "How Science Gets Swiftboated." But there was a political twist I didn't fully anticipate: that some folks might consider the kind of campaigning known as "swiftboating" to be a good thing.

Transterrestrial Musing's Rand Simberg stands up for the Swift Boat Veterans in a posting headlined "Et Tu, Alan?" I'll put the partisan politics aside, as is usually my preference, and concede his underlying point: that the issue of how evolutionary theory is presented should transcend the nitty-gritty of Republican vs. Democrat. After all, the judge who delivered the decisive decision against intelligent design was a Bush II appointee. If bringing in the Swift Boats turns off some folks who are on board with solid biology, that wasn't my intent.

At the same time, I'm not on board with negative campaigning, whether the targets are biologists or politicians. Unfortunately, such ads seem to work ... or do they really?

Speaking of politics, here's a pop quiz on science-related political issues:

• ScienceNOW: Has U.S. science lost its competitive edge?
• Wired: Is there a high-tech effort to suppress the black vote?
• Freakonomics: Is gas-tax holiday a good idea or just hot air?
• Christian Science Monitor: What are climate studies telling us? 

Update for 7:30 p.m. May 1: Rand sends along this follow-up on the Swift Boat Vets:

"I've updated my post to respond to your follow up, but I think you still missed my point. It's not that I think that "swiftboating" per se (as Democrats misleadingly define it - telling lies about their candidate) is a good thing. But I do think that what the Swift Boat Vets actually did (making the public aware of facts about John Kerry that they would have otherwise not known) was a good thing. There is nothing wrong with negative campaigning, per se, as long as it's honest. In fact, it's essential in a debate to provide people with all of the facts, both positive and 'negative.'"

Premise Media Actor Ben Stein, right, sits with a student outside a principal's office in a trailer publicizing the documentary "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed."

Ben Stein has done good things and funny things during his more than three decades as an actor, economist and writer (going back to his days as a Nixon speechwriter). His latest work, "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed," is not that good and not that funny. There's something creepy about the documentary, which blends a no-holds-barred assault on evolutionary theory with what sounds like a high-minded cry for academic freedom. It's a 90-minute campaign ad, aimed at swiftboating science.

Talk about negative campaigning: Stein and the "Expelled" filmmakers try to link Charles Darwin and "Big Science" to Nazism and Stalinism. Scenes of death camps, mad scientists, marching minions and the Berlin Wall are flashed on the screen when Darwinism is discussed.

Before I saw the movie, I wondered how wacky it might be. Now I don't think it's wacky. Instead, it's worrisome. The creepiest thing about "Expelled" is that the filmmakers' strategy of casting the scientific establishment as a big bad godless conspiracy just might work.

It won't work among those familiar with the current state of evolutionary science. And it certainly won't work among contemporary researchers who are showing where Darwin went wrong as well as where he went right.

"If you have a losing hand, you're going to use every amount of rhetoric you can to distract people from the fact that you don't have any facts," Sean B. Carroll, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me in his lab last week. "And that's what 'Expelled' is all about."

But "Expelled" is also about rallying people who are unfamiliar with the issues to take a stand against mainstream science. For many of the million or so people who have seen the film over the past couple of weeks, "Expelled" might be as close as they come to examining the arguments for and against current evolutionary theory.

All the sound and fury may well turn those filmgoers against not only evolutionary biology, but against supporting any kind of study that they're told runs counter to their world view - ranging from stem cell research to paleontology to particle physics. And then what? In the interest of equal time, would research money have to be reserved for divining the signature of the designer in nature, or even discerning which holy book reflects that design best? 

That's the bad news. The good news is that the controversy over "Expelled" could represent another teachable moment, analogous to 2005's federal court decision against intelligent design. Is it possible to turn a negative campaign into a positive win for science education?

Intelligent design and academic freedom
In the movie, Ben Stein takes on a quest to find out what's happening to teachers who promote the intelligent-design concept - that is, the idea that some complex things in nature, such as molecular machines or DNA code, are best explained by an intelligent cause.

"We are losing our freedom in one of the most important sectors of society: science," he tells listeners in a lecture hall at the start of the film.

Several cases are cited, starting with the case of Richard Sternberg, an evolutionary biologist who approved the publication of an intelligent-design paper during his stint as the editor of a scientific journal. Was he unjustly persecuted as a result? You can get Sternberg's perspective as well as the opposing view over the Web. The same goes for the other cases: the "Expelled" Web site goes into the claims of victimization, and the "Expelled Exposed" Web site (created in response to the film) presents the counterclaims.

Even at the time of 2005's Kitzmiller v. Dover court decision, it was clear that an argument based on academic freedom would be the next frontier for the intelligent-design debate. But the freedom to teach isn't absolute. It's subject to the usual checks and balances of academic institutions, plus the constitutional ban on state establishment of religion - and the idea that the content of a science class should be, well, based on science.

That doesn't mean science teachers can't have wacky ideas. Some of the wackiest ideas have been held by the world's greatest scientists - including Isaac Newton, a religious heretic who calculated that the world would end in the year 2060. To Newton's credit, he kept relatively quiet about the wackier claims and pushed ahead with better ideas like calculus, optics and universal gravitation.

Similarly, Carroll said teachers were free to hold onto unscientific ideas in their private life, but should stick to the science when teaching.  "Do you want your kids taught by people who are living in the 18th century? I don't think so," he said. "They have a right to think these things or believe these things, but they have an obligation to be technically competent."

The task has implications that go beyond the classroom, he said.

"The biology community will tell you that understanding genetics and evolution is fundamental to being a literate biologist, and you can say, to a literate citizen, too," he said. "But if we don't teach that stuff, and teach it properly, where are we going to be? This is an economic competitiveness issue, this is an innovation issue."

Good, evil and Darwin
If the movie were merely about academic policy, there wouldn't be much of a movie to "Expelled." The juicy stuff has to do with the Nazi concentration camps, Soviet crackdowns  and ranting atheists. Stein doesn't go so far as to say every evolutionary biologist is a Nazi, but the movie does say that Charles Darwin served as the inspiration for Adolf Hitler's Holocaust.

And in fact, a perverted view of Darwinism was one of the ingredients that produced the horrors of Nazism. But Hitler used plenty of other ingredients as well, including German victimhood, a perverted view of Christianity and plain old anti-Semitism. Books and movies could just as well be made (and in fact have been made) blaming Christianity for everything that ails the world.

"Expelled" portrays evolutionary theory as the first step down a road that leads to atheism, eugenics and Nazi-style human experimentation. That line of argument, borrowed from John West's book "Darwin Day in America," smacks of the same sort of distortion that has blamed Albert Einstein for promoting moral relativism along with relativity.

The movie also prods several interviewees who happen to be outspoken atheists - such as biologists Richard Dawkins and P.Z. Myers as well as philosopher Daniel Dennett - to indulge in some metaphysical speculation that goes beyond the biology (thus demonizing them for the movie's core audience). The perspective from respected scientists who happen to be religious (for example, Francis Collins and Ken Miller) is largely lacking, although physicist-turned-priest John Polkinghorne is a welcome exception to the rule.

The result is that the film casts the debate largely along the false battle lines of science vs. religion. That rhetorical approach ironically builds up the very wall Ben Stein says he wants to tear down.

What about the science?
Surprisingly for a movie focusing on science's role in society, "Expelled" breaks no new ground on the scientific front. Some of the arguments long advanced by intelligent design's proponents are hinted at - for example, the claim that no new genetic information can possibly be created, even though the insertion, duplication and beneficial revision of genetic code are well-established.

The most common theme is that the workings of biology are just so complex that it would be impossible for life to develop through "random and undirected" processes - even though genetics and computer simulations are telling a different story (and even though the workings of evolution are not always random or undirected).

"The doubters are writing the same stuff, as though not just evolutionary science has stood still, but as though genetics and geology have stood still," Carroll said. "I guess they have to pray that some level of uncertainty is still there, but the ballgame's over."

The branch of genetics that Carroll specializes in - evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo for short - has revolutionized the field over the past decade. Scientists are analyzing and comparing the genetic codes for hundreds of species, and the results are shedding new light on long-running posers such as the evolution of the eye or the cousinly relationship between elephants and manatees.

Despite what "Expelled" claims, modern-day biologists aren't afraid of pointing out where Darwin went wrong. As examples, Carroll cited the current understanding of genetic drift - a type of change over time that is not driven by natural selection - and the discovery that different species of bacteria are swapping genes all the time.

"The transference of genes between species is not Darwinian evolution," he said. "It's evolution. Not Darwinian evolution. ... Species aren't supposed to exchange genetic material, but bacteria do it."

Carroll said these new twists in evolutionary biology are not just matters of academic interest, but instead should be of concern even to the filmmakers behind "Expelled."

"In nature, viruses that infect bacteria are carting around cargoes full of genes and moving them around the whole microbial world," he said. "We better know about that - or we're gonna die. It's in our self-interest to understand this phenomenon. And that makes these people ... the kindest thing I could say is, it's irresponsible."

Carroll and many of his colleagues hope that the film will just fizzle out. "Do I think 'Expelled' matters? No, because it won't last," Carroll told me.

But like any other case of swiftboating, "Expelled" needs to be answered. Chris Mooney, the blogger who literally wrote the book on "The Republican War on Science," has been calling on readers to spread the word about "Flock of Dodos" as a DVD antidote. I'll put in a prescription for Carroll's latest book, "The Making of the Fittest," which serves as this month's selection for the Cosmic Log Used-Book Club. (Don't miss Chapter 9.)

There will likely be other antidotes available at bookstores and on TV next year, to mark the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth as well as the 150th anniversary of the publication of "The Origin of Species."

In the meantime, please feel free to weigh in on "Expelled" and evolution in the comment section below. Intelligence is allowed, and even encouraged.

Corrections at 10:25 p.m. ET April 29: I originally attributed a quote used in the movie ("The battle over evolution is only one skirmish in a much larger war") to Ben Stein rather than to Richard Dawkins. Also, Daniel Dennett is a philosopher and a cognitive scientist (and an atheist), but not a biologist. I apologize for the errors, which have been fixed above, and thank my intelligent readers for pointing them out.

Update for 10:20 p.m. ET May 1: I've revised the definition of intelligent design to be more in tune with what intelligent design's proponents say (as noted waay down in the comment section). I've also corrected my transcription of Carroll's quotes to better reflect the flow of the conversation.

NBC Nightly News

Click for video: NBC's  Tom Costello reports  on the Soyuz landing.

Three spacefliers are still recuperating from this month's rough ride back down to Earth from the international space station aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, and the investigation into the glitches that caused the April 19 shake-up is just getting started. But a multiplayer blame game already has begun - with the potential targets ranging from shoddy Russian workmanship, to saboteurs of the space effort, to the entire female sex. The finger-pointing could have an effect on the way spaceflight is done for years to come.

The questions began soon after the Soyuz spacecraft's landing, which brought down NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson (the space station's first female commander), Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko (the first man to be married while in space) and South Korea's first astronaut, Yi So-Yeon.

On the way down, the three were subjected to G-forces well in excess of the usual, apparently the result of a ballistic landing trajectory that put them 260 miles off target.

Initially, Russian space agency chief Anatoly Perminov told reporters that the crew's bad luck was due to the fact that women were in the majority - and that "in the future, we will work somehow to ensure that the number of women will not surpass" the number of men.

The tale took a more serious turn a couple of days later, when rumors spread that the crew capsule had malfunctioned during its planned separation from the rest of the Soyuz craft, and that the crew was closer to catastrophe than originally thought. NBC News' space analyst, James Oberg, worried that the added pressure to produce spacecraft for servicing the space station was leading to quality-control problems.

NASA quickly downplayed the rumors about a serious malfunction, and the official line from Moscow was that such reports were nothing more than "nonsense" aimed at disrupting the U.S.-Russian space relationship. A spokesman for the Russian space agency, Alexander Vorobyov, called the rumors a "dirty trick."

"Publications of this kind are designed to disrupt a Russian-U.S. agreement on NASA's purchases of Progress and Soyuz spacecraft after shuttles stop flying" to the international space station in 2010, he said.

Perminov himself hinted darkly that the rumors were fueled by "people who are interested in destabilization of our relations with the American partners."

Oberg takes a closer look at the blame game this week in an in-depth analysis for NASASpaceflight.com. He says it's essential for NASA to become involved in Russia's investigaton of the landing, particularly because the U.S. space agency will become more reliant on Soyuz craft after the space shuttle fleet is retired:

"With future Soyuz flights becoming the sole crew access to the space station for many years, NASA needs to be an integral part of every incident investigation - not just be on the distribution list for executive summaries, whenever they are ultimately issued. There is a window of opportunity for NASA to press for this participation, due to the naming of an outside expert to head the investigation."

The obfuscation surrounding this month's incident could have an impact more jarring than the hard landing itself. Already, this month's incident has created a mini-backlash that highlights America's "spaceflight gap."

The Orlando Sentinel, for example, said in an editorial that the mishap provides "another reason for Congress to find the money to make the gap between the 2010 grounding of shuttles and the launch of NASA's next manned vehicle as short as possible." And just today, members of Congress said the Soyuz incident raised fresh concerns about the shuttle shutdown plan.

"We could have six astronauts up on the space station and literally no way to get them down, and all the people of the world will be in the sad prospect of watching them die as they run out of food and supplies," WFTV quoted Rep. Dave Weldon, R-Fla., as saying.

The controversy could lead NASA to give the existing shuttle fleet a reprieve, or accelerate the development of its own Orion next-generation spacecraft, or beef up private-sector efforts to build spaceships capable of resupplying the space station.

Come to think of it, maybe that last option isn't such a bad thing. What do you think? Feel free to add your opinion below.

• Science News: Down with carbon
• Discovery.com: Plane to stay aloft for five years
• Wired: Who stole the plans for iRobot's battle bots?
• ArXivblog: First superheavy element found in nature (via Slashdot)

NASA / JPL-Caltech / VLA /MPIA

Click for slide show:  See April's cosmic hits.

Pictures from outer space are among the biggest crowd-pleasers we have to offer here, and we're fortunate to have so many to choose from this week. Fifty-nine views of colliding galaxies were released to mark the 18th anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's launch, and we're also presenting a separate set of spectacular images in our "Month in Space Pictures" roundup.

You may be wondering where you can get bigger versions of all these beauties, as well as more information about the science behind them. If so, you've come to the right place.

First, about those Hubble images: The Baltimore-based Space Telescope Science Institute has larger versions of all 59 galactic crashes at its Hubblesite online portal. You could have a new desktop image every week for the next year and still not run out. But Hubblesite offers much more than just pretty pictures.

In a video clip, reporter Mary Estacion and Caltech astronomer Aaron Evans explain how the images hint at the fate that awaits our own galaxy billions of years from now. Other videos show you the galaxies one by one and demonstrate the dynamics of the collisions.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency's Hubble home page has its own take on the galaxies gone wild, including a nine-minute Hubblecast video from "Dr. J" (European Southern Observatory astronomer Joe Liske).

The "Month in Space" images are more of a mixed bag - and because of copyright considerations, not all of them are available in larger formats. But here are links to Web sources for the most photogenic views:

• A bigger space base: Check out NASA Human Spaceflight for a bigger view of the international space station.
• Super-size the Soyuz: Get higher-resolution versions of "Making History," "Russian Rocket Rises" and "Rough Landing" - plus the latest story about the Soyuz mission that ended with a bang.
• Alien dunes: The Web site for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, brings you weird Martian dunes and much, much more.
• X-wing freighter: I love this shot of Europe's Jules Verne ATV cargo ship, as seen on NASA Human Spaceflight.
• Like Martian water for chocolate: The Web site for the Thermal Emission Imaging System on NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter, known as THEMIS, give you the full story behind the Mars candy bar. 
• Stephen Hawking's space vision: Get our highest-resolution version of the Associated Press picture showing the world-famous physicist in Washington - and don't miss our story about what he said there.
• Saturn's spinning top: NASA's Cassini Web site and the online home of the Cassini imaging team, or CICLOPS, both offer up a top-down shot of the ringed planet, and loads of other great shots. If you're in New York, stop by the Cassini photo exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.
• Dusty view of Mars: Cape Verde looms even larger at Cornell University's Pancam Web site, which also provides the story behind the picture.
• Geysers in space: NASA's Planetary Photojournal has the big picture of Enceladus' geysers as well as a detailed analysis showing that they contain organic chemicals.
• Oceanside launch: Check out a higher-resolution version of the European Ariane 5 satellite launch and learn more about the mission from Arianespace.
• Martian moon: The HiRISE Web site provides the full story behind the flyby of Phobos, one of Mars' moons.
• A rare ring: Learn more about Italy's Nardo Ring from NASA's Earth Observatory.
• An Earth odyssey: Get a better look at the Soviet space shuttle's strange ride and read a story about the trip.
• Pinwheel in space: My favorite picture of the month comes from NASA's Galaxy Evolution Explorer.

For more beauties from beyond our planet, check out our Space Gallery. And if all these otherworldly wonders are whetting your appetite for more, you just might want to check out free planetarium programs such as Stellarium, Celestia and the venerable Google Sky.

I recently wrote about yet another such program, Microsoft's World Wide Telescope, which is still undergoing internal testing in preparation for the release of a public beta version. "The beta is not available yet, but soon," Curtis Wong of Microsoft Research told me in an e-mail update.

Do you have your own favorite windows for looking out at the universe's big pictures? Feel free to add them as comments below.

• 'Nova' on PBS: 'Sinking the Supership'
• The New Yorker: The anthropology of revenge
• Science @ NASA: The physics of whipped cream 
• The Onion: NASA intern has heart set on spacewalk

NHGRI

Your genetic code could help you relate to others - or it could be used against you.

It's been 55 years since the landmark paper on DNA's double helix was published, and five years since scientists revealed the complete genetic code for humans. To mark the anniversary, Friday has been set aside as National DNA Day - and it's a good time to reflect upon how genetics has transformed society.

Since 2003, genetic analysis has opened a new medical frontier. Now a new social frontier awaits as well: Several ventures have set up social networks based on genetic profiles. But there's also a potential dark side to the DNA revolution.

Socializing with DNA
The social trend is rooted in the search for family roots: For years, companies have been offering tests that analyze your DNA for genetic markers that are passed down from father to son, or from mother to children. But once your sample is analyzed, then what? The companies set up online forums that let the people who took the tests compare their results.

That's how I began determining lines of genetic relationships for my own family almost seven years ago - and how I was able to help match up Boyle relatives who didn't know they were related until they took the test.

That kind of genetic matchmaking led to searchable DNA databases ranging from Ybase to the Sorenson Database to the Genographic Project. (My markers are entered into all three of those sites, plus more.) And with the rise of Web sites such as MySpace and Facebook, it's not such a leap to mix genealogy with the social-networking angle.

Last year, Ancestry and GeneTree took that social leap - and more recently, a Canadian venture called Genebase has joined the social movement as well. They'll all sell you their own genetic tests, and right now Ancestry and GeneTree can work with DNA readings from other services - at least to a limited extent.

Too much information?
All these Web sites will surely become more socially adept as time goes - but is there such a thing as too much information? Could entering in your DNA test results lead to privacy problems? Could you be turned down for employment or medical insurance, based on a genetic predisposition to disease (or bad behavior)?

The limited number of markers that are used for genealogical purposes, and that are posted to these public Web sites, probably won't get you in trouble. But privacy policies have to be a concern anytime you send in a DNA test, as we discussed several years ago. That's something to keep in mind as we begin entering the era of whole-genome analysis for personalized medicine.

Right now, the going rate for having your genome fully decoded and handed to you is somewhere around $350,000 - but that rate could quickly fall to the $1,000 price point. But companies such as 23andMe are already offering less ambitious (and less expensive) tests that contain medically significant markers. The ventures are attracting big investments, even as experts debate the obvious ethical issues raised by personalized genetic testing.

To address those issues, Congress is considering a ban on genetic discrimination, and just today the measure won Senate approval. The bill could be signed into law next week.

Will passing a law be enough? Or will we have to guard our DNA as closely as we guard our credit-card numbers and Social Security numbers? Ten years from now, will we be worrying about genome theft as much as we worry about identity theft today? Feel free to weigh in with your comments about the dark side - and the bright side - of DNA Day.

• FAS Strategic Security Blog: Chinese sub secrets revealed
• Scientific American: 150-year-old computer brought to life
• New Scientist: Does Earth's magnetic field cause suicides?
• National Geographic: Alexander's shield and 'crown' found?

Presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton reaped a windfall of political contributions today in the wake of her victory in the Pennsylvania primary - and if her candidacy actually pays off, investors in Clinton's political fortunes could reap a windfall as well. That's the bottom line from today's prediction markets, where most of the money is betting that her Democratic rival, Barack Obama, will still prevail despite Tuesday's setback.

Economists have been watching the political markets for months now, to find out whether they do a better job than traditional polling when it comes to predicting the eventual course of a campaign. In the Iowa Electronic Markets, for example, online users can "invest" up to $500 in shares that are tied to the outcome of the Democratic (or Republican) primary season.

Today, you could have bought into Clinton's chances at around 18 cents a share. If she ends up winning the Democratic nomination, you can redeem your shares at $1 each. That would be better than a 400 percent rate of return. But if she loses out to Obama (or a dark-horse candidate), you lose all of your investment.

You might think that Clinton's stock would have risen (and Obama's stock would have fallen) after Tuesday's win, but the market was relatively unchanged. "In fact, Obama has moved up a point and a half," said University of Iowa spokesman Tom Snee.

Snee said Obama's slight strengthening may be due to the perception that he still has the nomination locked up, and that Clinton is running out of time and money. But last week, the online magazine Slate - which has been closely following the prediction markets - wondered why the markets have been wrong so often this year.

To be fair, I should note that a lot of pundits have made wrong predictions about the course of this year's campaign. Lately, the prediction markets seem to be distilling the wisdom of crowds of pundits rather than making markedly different prognostications. So there may be more uncertainty to the political futures of the candidates than the current market prices would indicate.

For an economist's take on the Pennsylvania primary, check out today's assessment in The Wall Street Journal from David Rothschild and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. Wolfers also handicaps the uncertain race ahead in a posting to the Freakonomics blog.

Speaking of uncertainty, I also checked in today with Shawn Lawrence Otto, the chief executive officer of Science Debate Inc. Otto and his colleagues are still trying to organize a campaign debate centering on science and technology issues, to be presented in cooperation with public-TV broadcasters next month in Oregon. So far, the outlook is hazy at best.

"Who knows how the campaigns will judge how the landscape may or may not have changed after what happened yesterday," Otto told me.

He said last week's debate in Philadelphia demonstrated how much the nation needed to focus on such issues as dealing with climate change and energy needs, fostering medical advances and technological innovation, and generally presenting a positive vision for America's future.

"The ABC debate was roundly criticized for its lack of substance," Otto said. "That should be a wakeup call to the candidates, that Americans are hungering for a higher-level dialogue."

Even if the candidates pass up the May opportunity, as it appears they will, the ScienceDebate 2008 effort will continue. "It's still valuable to build momentum looking toward the general election," Otto said.

• Lemelson-MIT: Irrigation-pump inventor wins $100,000 prize
• Tech Review: Crossover camera wows photographers
• Science @ NASA: Duct tape vs. moondust 
• The Onion: 'Ennui gas' hailed as new chemical weapon

Aptera / Auto X Prize

Click for slide show: Nine ideas for future cars.

The "Car Talk" radio guys go on a joke-filled quest to find the perfect car of the future in a TV show premiering on Earth Day. And the punch line is that the technology they're looking for is already available - for a price, that is.

"Car of the Future," airing Tuesday as part of PBS' "Nova" documentary series, marks the prime-time television debut of Tom and Ray Magliozzi, a.k.a. Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers.

The brothers have made a name for themselves with a newspaper column and call-in radio show that blends folksy advice on auto maintenance with even folksier repartee and punnery. (For example, their credits list the accounts payable administrator as "Imelda Czechs" ... get it?)

That mix of the serious and the silly carries over to the TV show. Tom and Ray set the scene in their garage in Cambridge, Mass., where Tom's 1952 MG roadster just refuses to turn over.

"It sounds like a sick cow," Ray says.

Joe Seamans / WGBH Science Unit

A Mazda concept car goes on display at the Detroit Auto Show, in a scene from "Car of the Future."

So the brothers hit the road, looking for an up-to-date replacement. And we're not talking about just going down the street to the local car dealership: Tom and Ray check out the glitzy cars on display (and the glitzy showgirls displaying them) at the Detroit Auto Show.

"I thought you were interested in these models," Ray says.

"I am," Tom answers.

"I meant the cars," Ray quips.

They're less impressed by some of the high-powered, gas-gobbling vehicles at the show. "Who the hell needs 500 horsepower!?" Tom exclaims.

That sparks a tale that highlights past, present and future automotive technologies:

• Is there a better way? Although federal regulations led to an increase in average gas mileage from 1975 to 1987, the average actually slipped downward after that time, due to the popularity of bigger, more powerful cars. Today, high gas prices, concerns about carbon emissions and the need for greater energy independence are generating fresh interest in more efficient vehicles (and a fresh upturn in mileage averages).
• Is hydrogen the answer? The Magliozzi brothers travel to Iceland, where geothermal and hydro power are harnessed to produce electricity, which in turn is used to produce hydrogen for a fleet of experimental buses. The geopower/electricity/hydrogen scheme could eventually fuel all of Iceland's cars - but experts figure it will take 50 years to make the transition. Will hydrogen ever work for the United States and China? We'll see. 
• What about ethanol? Yes, some of our energy needs can be met by ethanol, an alcohol replacement for gasoline. Currently, corn provides most of the raw material for U.S. producers, but that sets up a food-vs.-fuel problem. Tom and Ray gab with researcher Lee Lynd at Mascoma Corp., which is genetically engineering microbes to produce ethanol efficiently from cellulose rather than corn sugar. 
• How about lighter, more efficient cars? Less than 1 percent of the energy contained in a car's gas tank actually goes to move the driver down the road. The other 99 percent is either lost through inefficiencies or ends up moving the car surrounding the driver. Tom and Ray learn about efforts to make internal combustion more efficient (at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, their alma mater) and to make ultralight, ultrastrong car bodies out of carbon composites (for the Rocky Mountain Institute's Hypercar project in Colorado).
• Will electric hybrids save the day? Gas-electric hybrids like the Toyota Prius are already making a difference: Although they're more expensive to produce, they consume 30 percent less energy than gasoline-only cars and emit 30 percent less carbon. Tom and Ray take a test drive with Andy Frank, a researcher at the University of California at Davis who has pioneered plug-in electric hybrids.

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles have large banks of batteries that can be charged up overnight, meaning that the cars can go 40 to 60 miles before the gas-fueled engine kicks in. Frank figures that range would account for 90 percent of a typical driver's mileage. Some hybrids already have been converted to plug-in power, and Chevrolet's Volt plug-in should be ready for prime time by the end of 2010.

At America's current energy rates, running a plug-in hybrid is only one-fourth as costly as running a gasoline-only car, Frank says. He adds that the full benefit of plug-ins will be felt when the electricity comes from renewable sources such as wind turbines or roof-mounted solar cells.

"I think one of the things that this kind of car motivates is the possibility of personal wind and personal solar," Frank tells the "Car Talk" duo.

"My brother's been responsible for a lot of personal wind," Ray Magliozzi jokes.

By the end of the program, Tom is clearly sold. (On plug-ins, that is, not on making wind.) He's back at the garage, contemplating the next step.

"I've seen a lot of very interesting technology, and I know what I want," he says as he looks at his beloved MG. "I want to turn that into a plug-in hybrid."

And now ... the rest of the story
That may be the end of the documentary, but it's not necessarily the end for Tom's MG. In an interview last week, Frank told me it's technically possible to make Tom's dream come true.

"My message, fundamentally, is that the plug-in hybrid is something you can build right now," he said.

As an experiment, he has already taken a GM EV1 all-electric car (the car that was supposedly "killed" on the commercial market a decade ago) and converted it to a plug-in hybrid with a smaller electric motor and a 2-cylinder gasoline engine - all in the same space.

"The hybrid weighed 200 pounds less than the electric vehicle," Frank said. He said the juiced-up EV1 was so efficient that even when the car was running on gasoline power, it got 80 miles per gallon.

He told me he has converted nine cars to plug-in power in the course of his quarter-century of automotive research: Rather than being more complex, the plug-ins are simpler, in part because of UC-Davis' patented transmission system. "All of our cars have far fewer parts than a conventional car," Frank said.

Frank said he enjoyed hanging out with the Magliozzi brothers while "Car of the Future" was being shot - and so he's willing to offer Tom a dream of a plug-in deal for the mere sum of, say, $40,000 to $50,000.

"We'll be happy to convert that MG for them," he told me. "It'd be fun."

If you miss Tuesday's show, or if you don't get PBS in your corner of planet Earth, you can watch "Car of the Future" online starting Wednesday. For more about Click and Clack and future cars, check out Newsweek's Q&A with the Magliozzi brothers. And in case you missed it, here a report on the Progressive Automotive X Prize, which is offering $10 million in prizes for super-efficient, eco-friendly vehicles.

I'm at the University of Wisconsin at Madison this week to serve as science writer in residence, and that means I'm getting a lot of exposure to academia. (That's not contagious, is it?) It also means postings to the Log won't be as regular as usual this week, although I'll try to pass along links to other scientific destinations on the Web. Here's today's selection, with an Earth Day theme:

• Discovery.com: What's the best way to eat green?
• Nature: Phytoplankton respond to climate change
• Green Daily: NASA going green for Earth Day
• CNET Green Tech: Clean-tech companies looking for talent 

Masumi Yajima / Univ. of Calgary / AFP file A researcher checks a 3-D model of the human body, projected from the walls and floor of a virtual-reality room at the University of Calgary. Such blends of medical and cybernetic innovation are likely to become more widespread in the next 50 years. Click on the image for a larger version.

How will the world look in the year 2058? Sixty thinkers from around the world rise to that challenge in "The Way We Will Be 50 Years From Today," a collection of essays edited by longtime journalist Mike Wallace.

The consensus view is that we'll muddle through many of the issues that vex us today - including climate change and terror threats. And we'll hit upon so many medical and technological wonders that today's 50-year-olds will have a fair chance of finding out firsthand how the world will look in 2058.

The problem with having so many predictions of the future is that they can look like a collection of to-do lists: The most popular item on the checklist would be getting your complete genetic code analyzed, so that the doctors can give you custom-made medications for what ails you (or what might have ailed you without the drugs). And don't forget the cyber-implants: Several essayists, including inventor-futurist Ray Kurzweil, heralded the day when nanomachines would merge with our own bodies.

In addition to those well-traveled themes, "50 Years From Today" is jam-packed with nuggets of less conventional wisdom from experts in fields ranging from bioethics to counterterrorism. Here are a few examples:

• Diseases ranging from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder will be shown to be caused by infectious agents that take advantage of genetic predisposition, says psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, president of the Treatment Advocacy Center. Researchers will be surprised to find that many of those infectious agents are being transmitted from animals to humans. As a result, it will be uncommon to keep cats, birds or hamsters as pets - but we'll still have dogs around, because they've been "man's best friend" for so long that we've already adjusted to their infectious agents.
• International terrorism will be brought under control because governments will realize counterterrorism is primarily a police function rather than a job for the military, says Ronald Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol. Passports and IDs will be linked to a global monitoring system, much as credit cards are today. "People will no longer be able to travel and engage in transactions with anonymity," thanks to surveillance and biometrics, he says. All this will pose "thorny issues" for a post-privacy era.
• Several essayists said water will become as big a resource issue as petroleum is today. "We cannot go green without thinking blue," former White House chief of staff Leon Panetta and former Energy Secretary James Watkins say. Norman Borlaug, father of the "Green Revolution" in agriculture, says there will have to be a "Blue Revolution" to provide enough water for the planet's burgeoning population. Thus, cleaning up the oceans and providing fresh water should rank right up there with controlling greenhouse gases.
• The outlook for longer life spans is a mixed bag: Kurzweil says the pace of life extension will outrun the passage of years, offering at least the possibility of an indeterminate life span 50 years from now. But trends also point to a decline in average life expectancy, due to the increased incidence of obesity among today's young people, says Wanda Jones, director of the Office on Women's Health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Pros and cons for longer life
Arthur Caplan, a columnist for msnbc.com and director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics, takes something of a middle road: In his essay, written from the point of view of his grandchild, he foresees a world where people can look forward to 140 years of high-quality life. (In a comic twist, the essay also bemoans Caplan's death, "frail and decrepit," at the young age of 80.) 

Caplan, who is 58, told me he bases his prediction on the promise of regenerative medicine, as well as a better understanding of how lifestyle and genetics affect health. All these new technologies will raise new ethical issues, he acknowledged - for example, whether future generations will be genetically modified to fix defects and even introduce enhancements.

"People will have to think harder about whether they want to have kids the old-fashioned way," he said. "Why would you choose to take a random chance, knowing that your child would have a chance of having a defect but going ahead anyway? You start to get into blame and guilt about disability in a way that we don't really do now."

Greater longevity will also have social implications, he said. "You're not going to just have people living till 140 without changing your ideas about retirement, career, education, leisure, marriage, childrearing - also, even eligibility for social benefits. My hunch is that you're going to have to tack on a few more years before you get that senior discount card."

We should all have such problems, right?

The bad, the good and the ugly
In his essay, theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss sorts through the "bad, the good and the ugly." For Krauss, the "bad" issues that have to be dealt with focus on climate change, energy shortages and nuclear weapons - and the "good" technologies ahead include medical breakthroughs, computer intelligence and virtual reality.

Dealing with the bad and taking advantage of the good will depend on whether society can bring an end to today's "ugly" struggle between science and religion, Krauss said. That observation is particularly apt for a week in which this year's presidential candidates passed up an opportunity to attend Science Debate 2008 - and in which a new movie titled "Expelled" renews the creationism-vs.-evolution argument.

"If we allow nonsense to be purveyed with impunity, then I think it feeds down - it's a slippery slope," Krauss told me. "We can't honestly address the serious problems we're going to face in the next 50 years until we're willing to accept the world the way it really is, without fear."

The next-to-the-last word
In "50 Years From Now," the first essayist to have his say is Vint Cerf, who was one of the founding fathers of the Internet almost 40 years ago. Today, he's vice president and chief Internet evangelist at Google, and one of the world's most widely consulted technological seers. He'll get the next-to-the-last word here.

Cerf foresees a world in which the infrastructure used today for transporting oil has been replaced by water tankers and water pipelines. The energy for a global electrical grid is provided by solar, wind and nuclear plants. Outposts are taking root on Mars and Titan, knit together by an Interplanetary Internet. And discoveries about the Higgs field and the nature of mass, pioneered by the Large Hadron Collider, are raising the possibility of inertialess travel at the speed of light.

Here's the e-mail exchange I had with Cerf this week, while he was traveling in Spain:

Q: A lot of the essays in the book, yours included, refer to the global warming / energy issue but imply that the problems have been overcome without putting a crimp in technological development. Why is your projection of life 50 years from now so optimistic on the rising technological trend line?

Vinton Cerf: I am an optimist by nature and believe strongly that technology can be brought to bear to create alternatives, even in crisis situations.

I just spent a half-day at the Bletchley Park museum near London. As you will recall, it was at Bletchley Park that a remarkable and diverse group of Britons produced some of the most critical intelligence of World War II through the use of the Bombe and Colossus special-purpose computers. They created alternatives where there were none before, as did the Americans with the Manhattan Project. I believe that the problem of global climate change will ultimately spur our global society to respond and while the condition does not appear to be reversible, we will find ways to adapt to it.

That there will be many negative side effects is not in dispute. Ways of life will change and in some cases degrade, but I believe that we will find ways to adapt. We may find that we have to move into underwater habitats. We will need to invest massively in more environmentally responsible energy production. And the world's ecological and economic systems will almost certainly change, too. But we will survive.

Q: I'm interested in your reference to the Higgs field and potential implications for new technologies, obviously because of the imminent startup of the Large Hadron Collider. You mention the E.E. Smith inertialess drive, which is really quite intriguing - that's something I hadn't heard before in reference to the LHC. Could you expand a bit on how understanding the theoretical underpinnings of inertial mass might lead to propulsion technologies (even in hand-waving terms)?

A: I am only a layman in this area, but it is my understanding that the Higgs field is what imbues other atomic particles with mass and that the Higgs boson is the particle that delivers the force of the field. If we had a way to manipulate the Higgs field, we might be able to establish inertialess conditions that could overcome Einstein's fundamental speed limitations.

Q: Could you provide a brief update on the Interplanetary Internet project?

A: The project is in its 10th year and it is now planned to carry out tests of the Interplanetary Protocols using the Deep Impact spacecraft that launched a probe into Comet Tempel 1 in October 2006. The spacecraft is still operational, and the plan is to upload the Delay Tolerant Networking protocols onto the onboard computer. NASA has given the project permission to test these protocols from Earth. A successful test will qualify the protocol for future deployments on production space missions. We also hope to carry out demonstrations and tests on board the international space station.

Q: Any thoughts on Ray Kurzweil's singularity? I'm not sure if you've seen his essay in the book, but it makes clear he thinks that the machines we build 50 years from now will be ... us. In your estimation, will artificial implants and enhancements have a significant impact on how we think of ourselves in 2058, or will it not be that big of a deal?

A: I continue to worry about the potential to upload ourselves into a silicon analog. I think Kurzweil could be right about the relative intelligence of the computers of the distant future, but a machine intelligence may not be commensurate with instantiation of a biological intelligence within the silicon version. However, I do agree that artificial implants will provide us with supranormal capabilities that are presently inaccessible to most humans today.

Q: I like the idea that trying to explain the new jobs of the future would be as difficult as trying to explain what a Webmaster does to the man in the 1950s gray flannel suit. Nevertheless, do you have any thoughts on what any of those jobs might be, even in very general terms? (E.g., virtual-worldmaster...)

A: I can imagine people actually working in virtual environments where productive, cooperative work is undertaken, and I think we will find people helping others to take advantage of masses of information that are inaccessible or too vast to process in real time today. With billions of Internet-enabled devices or at least programmable devices on the network, there seems to be ample room for new services that manage these devices to be developed. "Hi, I'm your virtual entertainment manager! What movies would you like to watch next week?"

Q: Do you think imagining the future, as you and your colleagues have done in this book, will help shape that future - or do you see this exercise as merely a fun, readable exercise of the imagination?

A: I think imaginative exercises can have a profound impact on the future - what you can imagine can sometimes turn into something you can figure out how to build. I hope that reading these essays, there will be a few young people who will realize some of the speculative ideas or discover more interesting ones of their own.

I said that Cerf would have the next-to-the-last word - and that's because, as always, it's you who have the last word. Feel free to pass along your predictions about the world in 2058 as comments below. If we can carry these electronic bits from one generation of the Internet to the next, there's a good chance we'll be able to find out who came closest to the truth.

The film "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" gives the impression that "Big Science" is suppressing "smart new ideas" in America's classrooms - that is, ideas claiming that features of the natural world are so complex they had to be the work of an intelligent designer. The movie also reportedly follows up on efforts to blame evolutionary theory for much of what has ailed the world since Darwin, including Hitler and the Holocaust.

I haven't seen "Expelled" yet, so it's hard for me to judge how wacky the movie really is, but plenty of other folks are already weighing in. Here are a few Web links:

• Scientific American's take on 'Expelled'
• National Center for Science Education: 'Expelled' Exposed
• Panda's Thumb: Flying Spaghetti Monster 'Expelled' (and more)
• Orlando Sentinel via Chi. Trib.: Ben Stein monkeys with evolution
• Cosmic Log archives: Intelligent redesign

Update for 2:50 p.m. ET April 21: Arthur Caplan, bioethics columnist for msnbc.com, weighs in with his opinion of "Expelled," saying that "there is not a shred of intelligence on display" in the movie.

Mario Anzuoni / Reuters file

Guests mingle at a party for "American Idol" finalists in Los Angeles.

If you're a big fan of the reality-TV celebrities on shows such as "American Idol," "Dancing With the Stars," "Survivor" and "The Biggest Loser," you're more likely to pursue a kind of celebrity for yourself as well, by building up virtual fan clubs on social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. At least that's the major finding from a survey of students conducted at two U.S. universities.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo and the University of Hawaii report a statistical correlation between heavy reality-TV watching and several metrics of social network usage, ranging from time spent per session to the prevalence of "promiscuous friending." Are you on your way to becoming an online "Idol"? Find out how you compare with the average 20-year-old.

We'll begin by setting the context: The communication scientists behind the study - Michael Stefanone and Derek Lackaff of the University at Buffalo and the University of Hawaii's Devan Rosen - started out with the proposition that online media, and especially social networking sites, gave regular people the opportunity to craft an identity and an audience for themselves just like celebrities do.

They thought reality TV, which has been turning regular people into celebrities for years, might provide a media model for savvy social networkers.

"Andy Warhol predicted in 1968 that everyone would receive 15 minutes of fame, and contemporary observers such as David Weinberger suggest that Internet technologies such as Web logs will make everyone famous to 15 people," the researchers wrote. "Reality television, however, demonstrates to viewers that anyone can become famous to an audience of millions, and Web 2.0 tools and applications put that potential within reach."

To find out whether there was a correlation between reality TV and social networking, the researchers surveyed 452 students at their two universities. The average age of those surveyed was 20, and about 58 percent of the students were female. The participants were asked to fill out online questionnaires about their TV-watching and Internet-using habits as part of a class assignment.

"I'm the first to admit this is a difficult thing to measure, when you have people self-report on this," Stefanone told me, "but this is acceptable practice in the field."

Running the numbers
The survey results indicated that the average student watched 30 hours of television per week, which is roughly equal to the U.S. average. The students detailed what they watched by category: On average, six hours went to reality TV (such as "The Real World" or "American Idol"), six hours went to news programming, nine hours went to fiction TV (such as "The Simpsons" or "CSI"), five hours went to educational TV (such as the Discovery Channel or the History Channel), and the other three hours or so went into the miscellaneous category.

The social networking figures broke down this way: The average student spent about 50 minutes per session on their networking account, shared about 70 photos on the network and had 282 friends in his or her online circle. Fourteen percent of those friends were known only through the social network, with no external relationship. That's what the researchers called "promiscuous friending."

"Promiscuous frienders may be reproducing the fame-seeking behavior that is modeled by reality-TV characters," the researchers wrote. "Having a large social network ... can be construed as a sign of popularity (being at the center of a large social network) and conversely as a sign of superficiality (e.g., 'whores' who are blatant status-seekers). In either case, a large 'friends' list implies a large number of social connections, even if many of those connections have little social value in the traditional sense of friendship."

The researchers matched up the statistics for TV-watching and social networking to check for correlations. They looked at overall TV viewing first, and found a mild correlation with some categories of social networking behavior.

Then they ran the numbers separately for the five categories of TV programming. That's when they hit the jackpot. Four of the categories showed no significant statistical linkage, but there was a strong correlation between watching reality TV and engaging in intense social networking.

"The more time you spend watching reality television, the more likely you are to engage in these behaviors," Stefanone said.

How much is too much?
So are you a social-networking whore? It's impossible for Stefanone or his colleagues to say how much is too much. What's more, the study itself can't determine whether watching reality TV causes celebrity-style behavior on the Web, or vice versa.

All the researchers can say is that they found a linkage between the two behaviors - which is just the kind of linkage they expected to find, based on their ideas about reality TV and social networking. Above-average numbers on one side of the equation are likely to translate into above-average numbers on the other side.

"If you're watching several of those [reality-TV] shows a week, then you can look on your social network profile and see just how many photos you're sharing," Stefanone said.

If you have more than 70 photos online, and if you have more than 300 friends in your network - at least 50 of whom you've never met offline - you would rank above average on the researchers' social networking scale. And if your stats are dramatically higher than that, you may be well on your way to online celebrity status.

Defending the data
Stefanone said the study has come under some criticism because it focused on a relatively narrow age range - that is, college kids. "But these are the early adopters in terms of networking sites," he said. "They've got the tools at their disposal to model their behaviors."

He said much more research could be done on the cultural and gender-related factors behind social-network usage. For example, women tended to share more pictures online than men.

Also, the researchers didn't ask their experimental subjects to reflect on their online behavior - which raises questions about the nature of the linkage to the reality-TV habit. Stefanone suggested that heavy social networkers may not even be conscious that they're patterning their behavior after "American Idol."

"The real question is, what is the effect of media? As another illustration, you can look at the application and enrollment rates - and then the subsequent dropout rates - for forensic-science programs after the rise of shows like 'CSI.,'" Stefanone said.

That "CSI Effect" has been well-documented, as has the potentially embarrassing effect of online disclosure.

Social-network "Idols," just like TV "Idols," sometimes get tripped up by the tangled information trail they've left behind. Facebook has already tried once, unsuccessfully, to capitalize on that data trail - and Stefanone said it's just a matter of time before someone hits upon the right formula.

"The smart money would be betting on people starting to mine this data and use it for commercial purposes," he said. "If you're just talking about yourself, that's really rich data for someone like TRW to add to the information they already have about you."

Is the idea that anybody could become an online "Idol" liberating ... or downright scary? Feel free to share your opinion in the comment section below.

"We're All Stars Now: Reality Television, Web 2.0, and Mediated Identities" will be presented in June at the Association for Computing Machinery's Hypertext 2008 conference.

• New Scientist: Did teen find NASA asteroid error? Umm, no
• YouTube: An engineer's guide to cats (via GeekPress)
• Cracked: Six kick-ass creatures ruined by evolution
• The Onion: Oprah launches her own reality

Dan Gill / AP file

Megan Verbeck checks her cell phone for a new text message while working on projects at Ellis Library at the University of Missouri at Columbia.

One year ago, the Virginia Tech shootings served as a wake-up call for campus security experts. Today, colleges and universities are wide-awake - and plugged in to the possibilities afforded by Web-capable, GPS-aware cell phones and other gizmos.

High-tech alert systems have been used so much over the past year that young lives have surely been saved. So what's the next step? The experts say some campuses have to work on their low-tech alert methods, such as sirens and updated versions of the good old public address system.

Last year, gunman Seung-Hui Cho roamed over the Virginia Tech campus for two hours before an e-mail notification about the shootings went out to students. Cho began by killing two students in a dormitory, and then moved on to a classroom building where he killed 30 more and took his own life. The initial communications snags spurred sharp questions about the university's security system - and sparked a nationwide re-examination of campus security measures.

Hundreds of schools have upgraded their security alert networks, often turning to electronic systems that can send out text alerts to thousands of students' cell phones. The schools pay $1 to $4 per enrolled student to have the systems hooked up, and students generally have to pay a small cost per message.

Before Virginia Tech, colleges and universities were reluctant to broadcast word of "any kind of negative activity," said Bryan Crum, spokesman for Omnilert, a Virginia-based company that provides alert systems for more than 500 campuses through its e2Campus service. 

"Now it's a complete 180-degree change, where people are immediately sending out these kinds of alerts," Crum told me. "The schools are using it for everything from bomb threats to chemical spills, for on-campus shootings and off-campus shootings. They are not afraid to use it."

Not every campus crisis ends happily, as the tale of February's shooting spree at Northern Illinois University illustrates. But other case studies show how mass-notification systems can quickly alert students to stay out of harm's way:

• Last September, St. John's University in New York put out mass e-mails and text messages to warn students about a masked freshman who brought a rifle on campus, just three weeks after the notification system was installed. The system "worked like a charm," New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said afterward.
• In February, Ferrum College in Virginia activated its alert system after a member of the housekeeping staff reported seeing a man walk into a residence hall with a gun. The campus went into a lockdown and police conducted searches, but no gunman was found.
• This month, lockdown notices were issued via text and e-mail alerts at Millersville University in Pennsylvania. "They basically sent out an APB [all-points bulletin] for a wanted individual," said Omnilert's co-founder and president, Ara Bagdasarian. "Students got the text message and called police with the location of the person, and they were able to get the guy right away."
• Last week, Montclair State University in New Jersey issued text and e-mail alerts after finding a handwritten note that threatened on-campus shootings. No trouble erupted - but Karen Pennington, the university's vice president for student development and campus life, told me the incident demonstrated that the system worked "very, very well."

Even before Virginia Tech, Montclair State was phasing in a program to give all incoming students a Rave cellular phone that's hooked up to receive instant alerts and provide GPS tracking. So far, 6,000 of the university's 17,000 students are on the system, and in a couple of years every student will have a Web-capable GPS phone, Pennington said.

"We never had any idea that we would be using campus notification in this way," she said. "We were thinking more about weather emergencies and that sort of thing."

The GPS feature, however, is aimed directly at campus safety. With Rave's "Mobile Guardian" system, students can turn on passive tracking for specified time periods ranging from 15 minutes to two hours. At the end of that period, they'll be prompted to turn off the location-tracker, or extend their time. If a student fail to take either action, or hits a panic button, the police are notified immediately - and a patrol could be sent to the GPS location.

Pennington said the high-tech phones are working great, but now she's looking into how to beef up low-tech methods of campuswide communication. Some of the newer campus buildings have a fire-alarm system that allows for voice announcements, but she said the university may have to put in sirens or loudspeakers to reach students and staffers who don't get emergency messages by phone.

"We continue to look at additional ways to get notifications out, because not everybody is doing the same thing at the same time. ... Do we completely revamp our system? Do we put in some other kind of system? Those are the discussions we're having," she said.

What about low-tech alerts?
Those are the kinds of discussions every school should have, said Chris Blake, associate director and campus preparedness project director for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. This week, the association will unveil its blueprint for safer campuses in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

"Colleges and universities should have an array of means and methods to disseminate emergency alerts," he told me. "If they're going to purchase a mass-notification system, they should have multiple means of dissemination - high-tech means as well as low-tech means, like loudspeakers and public-address systems. It's best not to put all your eggs in one basket."

More than 100 schools have signed on for campuswide speaker and siren systems since the Virginia Tech shootings, USA Today reported this week.

There's another low-tech issue that colleges and universities are facing, Blake said: "They're really facing a challenge getting the students to opt in to a mass-notification system."

In February, The Associated Press reported that Omnilert's average text-alert signup rate for students, faculty and staff was just 39 percent - and that four in 10 students at Virginia Tech had not signed up for text alerts.

Omnilert's Crum pointed out that those figures don't account for other notification methods, such as e-mail and Web alerts. He also noted that newly signed-up schools would bring down the average, since they're starting from zero. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that getting signed up for alerts isn't as easy as it could be - and that's by design.

Crum noted that the cell-phone industry requires users to "double opt-in" when they sign up for computer-issued alerts. "The cellular telephone industry doesn't want what happened to e-mail to happen to texting," he explained. "They don't want spam. ... We are trying to follow the best practice of those rules."

What's a parent to do?
One of the bits of advice that Blake would give to students (and, by the way, to their concerned parents) is to make sure they're fully signed up to receive school alerts. Students can usually take care of that task from their password-protected campus Web pages.

Some parents and prospective students just might start judging campuses based on their approach to campus safety. For years, federal law has required colleges and universities to disclose information about campus crime (which is available in a searchable database), and this year Reader's Digest ranked 135 schools on campus safety and security. The 30 top-ranked schools all had mass-notification systems.

"The big thing is that having an emergency notification system has become the standard, and is expected," Omnilert's Bagdasarian said. "A year ago, that was not the case."

Even if you're not a college student anymore, mass notifications may be coming to a cell phone near you - if you want them to. Just last week, federal regulators approved a plan to create a nationwide, voluntary emergency alert system, and the service could be in place by 2010.

What about troubled students?
So far we've just been talking about getting alerts when an emergency has already begun - but what can campus authorities do to head off the violence before they start? This report rounds up what colleges and universities are doing to deal with troubled students, based on the lessons learned from the Virginia Tech.

At this week's National Campus Security Summit, Princeton campus police chief Steven Healy said it was "absolutely essential" for schools to develop plans for assessing potential threats. And Jerald Block, a psychiatrist who teaches at Oregon Health and Science University, agreed that it's important to recognize the warning signs of campus violence.

Block, who stirred up some controversy last month for suggesting that Internet addiction should be classified as a form of mental illness, is chairing a symposium on campus violence at the American Psychiatric Association's annual meeting next month - and he pointed out that colleges and universities are already moving toward wider sharing of students' mental-health records.

"In terms of psychiatry, that's very dramatic," he told me.

Block has one more suggestion for assessing students who may be suspected of planning future violence: Regard their computers as "significant others" - hard-wired witnesses who could be just as valuable as flesh-and-blood friends. He said the computer files are likely to provide insights into a potential shooter's plans and motives.

Block noted that the gunmen in the Virginia Tech case and the Northern Illinois case both removed the hard drives from their computers before their rampages.

"What that means to me is that the computer is extremely important to these shooters - why, we don't know," Block said. "Effectively, it's like a significant other to them, and they want to destroy that along with themselves when they die."

Update for 10:15 a.m. April 17: You'll find some great comments below, including some thoughts from Tom Carter at Northern Illinois University about how the mass alerts might not be as useful as you'd like to think, and from Valcom's Dennis Causey about how his company's speaker systems are not as "low-tech" as I implied.

Brett Sokolow, president of the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management, also got back to me and noted that colleges and universities are having to deal with mass-alert fatigue. He recalled the case of one university that sent out a tornado alert at 2 a.m., and then found that 1,700 students who enrolled in the alert system "disenrolled" because of the middle-of-the-night disturbance.

"So actually we're finding something of a backlash to how often these systems are used," he said.

Sokolow also saw a lot of value in higher-tech speaker systems - where an amplified voice message can be passed along. A plain old siren is less useful, he said: "Nobody has any idea what the sound is for a tornado vs. a shooter."

• Washington Post: The Future is Now
• Salon: The technology that will save humanity
• Technology Review: Toward a quantum Internet
• Archaeology: Legend of the crystal skulls | Indy Spirit

New twists in technology and public policy could streamline the process of filing your tax return - but there's usually a cost, and we're not just talking about dollars and cents. One suggestion comes from Barack Obama's presidential campaign: Let the IRS figure your taxes, and then you can check their figures.

By the time the income-tax filing deadline rolls around on April 15, millions of Americans are no doubt asking themselves whether there's an easier way to take care of the yearly financial chore. There are several ways, in fact - but they usually involve eliminating tax loopholes or letting the government process more of your financial information.

Getty Images file

Frustrated by your tax return? What if the folks at the Internal Revenue Service filled it out for you?

"The idea of simplifying the tax system is tremendously appealing," Leonard Burman, director of the Tax Policy Center and a fellow at The Urban Institute, told me on Monday. "The biggest problem is that politicians in both parties have increasingly seen the tax system as a way of giving away goodies to different constituencies."

Over the years, dizzying assortments of tax credits and deductions have sprung up, reined back by an equally dizzying array of limitations. To cite just one example, the tax code allows for a tuition tax deduction as well as two different types of education tax credits - known as the Hope credit Lifetime Learning credit.

"The only thing the politicians left out is the 'Hope to Learn How to Do Your Taxes' credit," Burman quipped. 

Let the IRS figure it out?
Eliminating those givebacks would make things simpler, to be sure - but would taxpayers stand for that? One way to keep the deductions in force, but make it easier for filing, would be to put the government rather than the individual taxpayer in charge of managing the books.

That's the way it works for charitable deductions in Britain, where the government basically works with the charities to keep track of the money and supplement a taxpayer's donation with "gift aid." To put it simply: Instead of sending the charity $50 and deducting $10 from your taxes, you would send the charity $40, and the government would kick in the extra $10 from the payroll taxes you've already paid.

"There are a lot of things like that you could do if you really wanted to simplify the tax system in the U.S.," Burman said. "You could go to a system where you actually wouldn't have to file a tax return."

The Internal Revenue Service already knows a fair amount about what you owe, based on your payroll records (Form W-2) as well as your investments (Form 1099). That's what gives rise to Democratic hopeful Barack Obama's proposal that the IRS could send you a filled-in tax return after the end of the year. You could use those figures to prepare your own custom-made return - or just go with the government's figures if you had no quibbles with the accounting.

Such a system could point out tax breaks that people didn't know they had coming, such as the mortgage-interest deduction, said Bob Sullivan, the author of msnbc.com's "Red Tape Chronicles" and the book "Gotcha Capitalism."

"It's demonishly unfair that people who make $40,000 a year don't declare their mortgage interest when people with second homes and vacation homes do," Sullivan told me.

Potential downsides
But the system could have a downside as well, depending on how it's structured.

"There are concerns among privacy advocates about having all that information going back and forth electronically," Burman said. Just last week, Treasury Department inspectors reported that disgruntled insiders or a malicious outsider could break into IRS computers and steal taxpayers' confidential information.

And if the front-end reporting requirements become more complex, "you'd have to give a lot more information to your employer than you do now," Burman said.

Burman also wonders whether the IRS could handle the increased computational load. "It's possible, but it requires a level of technical skill that we've never seen at the IRS," he said.

A lot of taxpayers might have qualms about having the IRS gather up all the figures in its computers and do the math. But if human nature is any guide, most people would probably go along with the filled-in tax return, just as they go along with their bank statements.

Millions of Americans already rely on other people - or even software programs - to take care of the tax-preparation details. In fact, Burman noted that there's a "large and growing part of our economy that depends on tax complexity" - and that trend could well end up working against tax reform.

He recalled one dust-up over proposed tax reform that occurred during his time as a Treasury official in the Clinton administration. "The people from the major tax-software companies came in to lobby us, and they were just outraged that we were messing around with the market," he said.

Sharper debates lie ahead
But Burman said some kind of tax shake-up will have to take place, due to a combination of factors: The Bush administration's tax cuts are due to expire at the end of 2010 - and while all the presidential candidates say they'll seek an extension of at least some of those cuts, Congress and the next administration will have to decide which ones make sense and which ones (if any) will have to expire.

Congress has already been patching up tax policy on a year-by-year basis to cushion the blow of the alternative minimum tax - but the annual angst over the AMT will eventually have to be resolved for good. Policymakers will also have to deal with the health-care crunch and the baby-boom retirement issue.

"The best option would be to take a whole new look at the entire tax system," Burman said. "It's not easy. Replacing an irrational tax system with a rational one inevitably means that some people are going to be paying higher taxes."

Burman has his own ideas for shaking things up in the tax department. A couple of months ago, he suggested in The New York Times that the Bush administration's tax cuts should be repealed next year, in order to stimulate a burst of economic activity this year.

The European model
Now Burman is working on a proposal to institute a value-added tax, or VAT, that would go toward funding universal health care. Value-added taxes are usually looked upon as regressive, but that could be balanced out by the progressive effect of offering health-care vouchers for all. In the process, it might turn America's tax system and social safety net into something that looks more like Europe's.

"I can't figure out whether it's brilliant or lunatic," he said.

Daniel Feenberg, a research associate at the National Bureau for Economic Research, has a different vision of the future - not the future as in Election Day, but decades down the line. Feenberg said all the trends indicate that more tax money will be needed to cover an aging population's pensions and medical care.

"One way to think about what's going to happen is to look at other countries," Feenberg told me. He sees European countries as good models for America's future, because they're already having to deal with older populations.

"The conventional answer is that they have a VAT, but in fact most of the money they raise comes from a payroll tax - not an income tax, and not a VAT," he said.

So Feenberg's prediction is that increased payroll taxes, such as the money taken out for Social Security and Medicare, will be the favored solution for America's revenue woes in the decades ahead. "If I had a dollar to bet on this, I would bet on the payroll tax," he said.

Where would you place your bets? Which of these proposals and predictions show some brilliance, and which are sheer lunacy? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

For more about tax topics, check out msnbc.com's Tax Tactics section as well as the Tax Policy Center's resource guide and the TaxVox blog. The center's Web site also offers an audio discussion of Republican John McCain's tax and economic plans. And for a detailed look at tax pronouncements from Democrat Hillary Clinton as well as Obama and McCain, check out this guide from On the Issues.

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Mike Massee / XCOR / Rocket Racing Inc.

Click for video: The XCOR Rocket Racer fires up for a test flight in November.

The Rocket Racing League says its rocket-powered race planes will take off for their first public exhibition races on Aug. 1 and 2 at the EAA AirVenture air show in Oshkosh, Wis. But that's just the start. The league's founders have also acquired an airframe-manufacturing company, taken on a new partner to build rocket engines and set up a string of subsidiaries.

All this is part of an effort to make high-performance aerial racing into a business on a par with high-performance auto racing.

"It's not just about racing rockets around a racetrack in the sky," said Granger Whitelaw, the league's co-founder and chief executive officer. In his view, it's also about building the future of aviation and aerospace.

For two and a half years, Whitelaw and his partners have been working to create a "NASCAR in the sky" - a series of aerial fly-offs that would draw in spectators and viewers the way auto races do today. Now Rocket Racing Inc. is aiming to take that auto-racing parallel several steps further.

Whitelaw outlined the plans during an interview late last week, in advance of today's formal announcement in New York:

• Two breeds of "Rocket Racer" planes would fly in public for the first time on Aug. 1 and 2 at the Oshkosh show, one of the year's biggest air exhibitions. Current plans call for additional exhibitions at the Reno Air Races in September, at the X Prize Cup in New Mexico (traditionally held in October) and at in Aviation Nation in Las Vegas in November.
• One kerosene-fueled Rocket Racer has been under development at California-based XCOR Aerospace for more than a year. But in a surprise move, the second Rocket Racer would use an alcohol-fueled engine built by Texas-based Armadillo Aerospace, under the leadership of millionaire video-game programmer John Carmack.
• The company that built the airframes for both racing planes, Florida-based Velocity Aircraft, has been acquired by Rocket Racing and will operate under the aegis of a new subsidiary called Rocket Racing Composites Corp. Velocity will build a new line of private planes as well as the airframes for future Rocket Racers.
• Other subsidiaries have been set up alongside the league to work on avionics and other electronics for the planes (Rocket Racing Technology Development) and to manage the venture's facilities in New Mexico (Rocket Racing Land).

Visions vs. realities
Whitelaw envisions a day when throngs will flock to watch rocket planes zoom through a "racetrack in the sky" at speeds in excess of 300 mph (480 kilometers per hour) and rising as high as a mile above the crowd. Video views of the race, including computer-generated 3-D graphics showing the course, would be flashed onto big screens and available via display devices, so that spectators could follow along even when the planes themselves are hard to spot.

This year's tamer exhibitions will incorporate big-screen views, but the more advanced features won't be ready right away, Whitelaw said.

The planes will be flown by the designated test pilots for the development effort: former astronaut Rick Searfoss for the XCOR Rocket Racer, and former Navy test pilot Len Fox for the Armadillo Rocket Racer. The planes are designed to zoom and glide for about 15 minutes, with the ability to be refueled rapidly between flights.

Six racing teams have signed up for the Rocket Racing League and intend to purchase rocket planes at an estimated cost of $1.2 million. Eventually, the teams plan to vie for millions of dollars in prizes. However, Whitelaw said those competitive races likely wouldn't begin until late 2009.

Between now and then, the league and the other Rocket Racing subsidiaries would have to firm up sponsorships and media deals, ramp up the production line for the planes and gain Federal Aviation Administration approval for the races. Whitelaw indicated that the FAA still had to give its final OK for this year's exhibition flights.

A tale of two engines
Armadillo's involvement could add an extra twist of competition to the preparations for those first flights. In the past, the league has worked exclusively with XCOR Aerospace on engine development and integration. Now XCOR, which recently advanced its plans for a much higher-flying suborbital rocket ship, will be vying with another fledgling rocket company for the league's business.

Last week, XCOR spokesman Doug Graham would say only that his company was continuing to work with the racing league. Over the past six months, the XCOR Rocket Racer has gone through a series of test flights at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California.

"We're making progress, and we're going to get it done," Graham told me.

Armadillo's Carmack, meanwhile, said the league approached him confidentially several months ago to work on a parallel engine development project. "I actually said 'no' a couple of times, because we're not airplane guys," Carmack told me.

However, Carmack eventually decided that the racing league's needs meshed with his own rocket development effort, which is aimed at building a "Six-Pack" vertical-takeoff craft that can rise up to the frontier of outer space.

This month, the film-cooled engine that would be used in the Armadillo Rocket Racer was fired up to push a heavy crane truck down a pavement. The engine has not yet been tested in an airframe, but Carmack said the plane still could be ready in time for August's exhibition flights. "It's a simple system," he said.

Carmack recently said he would make rocket engines available to customers at a cost of $500,000 apiece. He declined to say exactly how much the racing league was paying Armadillo for the current project - but he said the project had a higher priority than Armadillo's renewed push to win the NASA-funded Lunar Lander Challenge.

"Our deal is to make a bunch of these," he said. "If we wind up making a bunch, it's going to be a pretty good business."

He acknowledged that the venture was "still fairly speculative" but noted that "there's real work being done, and people are going to be racing rockets."

Looking ahead
Actually getting the races off the ground may seem like an ambitious enough goal - but most of the parties involved are looking past the races to bigger ventures. For XCOR as well as for Armadillo, the Rocket Racers are just an intermediate step toward higher-powered suborbital spacecraft.

"Two tanks with a rocket engine is essentially one-sixth of our notional suborbital vehicle," Carmack noted.

Whitelaw, a veteran of the professional auto-racing circuit, expects that the technologies developed by Rocket Racing's subsidiaries will feed into the wider aviation market. He drew an analogy to the way Ferrari applies the lessons learned in its race operations to the consumer automobile market.

"It's using the racing series as a test bed for technology," Whitelaw said. "Just like Formula One, we're going to be doing that for aviation and aerospace."

To that end, he said Velocity Aircraft would bring out a new line of six-seat and four-seat luxury airplanes, incorporating technologies developed for the Rocket Racers. The price tag for the six-seater would be $1 million.

"I truly believe that with the excitement of rocket racing, there are always going to be Velocities there that people can buy," Whitelaw said.

Whitelaw even cast the XCOR-Armadillo engine competition in auto-racing terms. "It gives us more choices for teams," he explained, "just like Honda or Ford or Ferrari."

Whitelaw has repeatedly acknowledged that getting the Rocket Racing League started was taking longer than he originally thought, and he has declined to discuss in detail how much the venture has cost him and his partners so far. But he emphasized that the league's backers were in it for the long haul.

"It's millions of dollars of investment for us, and tens of millions of dollars we're allocating for growing the business over the next few years," he told me. "We are committed to do that."

Update for 11:30 a.m. ET: For additional information from today's news conference, check out Clark Lindsey's report at RLV and Space Transport News as well as this Marketwire news release. Lindsey also points to reports from The New York Times, New Scientist and Aero-News Network, as well as Rand Simberg's commentary at Transterrestrial Musings.

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Soviet archives via YurisNight.net

Click for video: Msnbc.com's Alan Boyle recounts Yuri Gagarin's historic 1961 spaceflight.

Saturday night is prime time for a party, and all the better if it's a party celebrating our past and future in outer space. This year, Saturday night is Yuri's Night, which marks the anniversary of humanity's first ride into space as well as the space shuttle's first flight.

The executive director of Yuri's Night, Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, says the event is particularly aimed at Generation Y, the young adults who will be building the spaceships of the future – and paying most of the bill. So it's a good time to remember why space exploration is worth having a party over.

Yuri's Night has been a holiday in Russia for decades, although it's called Cosmonautics Day there. The idea was to look back at the heroic achievements of Soviet space travelers - starting with Yuri Gagarin, who became the first human in space on April 12, 1961.

Hidalgo Whitesides and her husband, George Whitesides, put a different spin on the day when they planned their first space party in 2001: They were going for an event that looked toward the future rather than back at the past. Instead of a day of boring speeches, they laid plans for a night of rocking out ... geeking out ... spacing out. They also noticed that April 12 also marked the anniversary of the shuttle Columbia's first flight in 1981, which helped them get around that silly East vs. West thing.

The first Yuri's Night lit the fuse, with 64 parties in 29 countries on all seven continents (including a South Pole shindig). Seven years later, 178 parties are being planned in 50 countries on seven continents - plus a daylong celebration in the Second Life virtual world.

The same Generation Y energy is providing the propulsion for the party atmosphere, but Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides said an interesting thing has been happening over the past few years: The space establishment is getting into the swing as well.

NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley is expected to put on the biggest party this year, as they did last year, with musician Phil Lesh (of Grateful Dead fame), game designer Will Wright (known for SimCity, "The Sims" and Spore) and big-thinker Stewart Brand (famous for "The Whole Earth Catalog") among the headliners. Johnson Space Center in Texas and Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland are joining in on the fun this year, Hidalgo Whitesides said.

"We're really excited to have NASA get more involved," she told me. "NASA is recognizing the importance of reaching out to this demographic, the under-35 generation."

Why reach out to Gen-Y? Hidalgo Whitesides, who is also a blogger for Wired.com, laid it all out in a posting that includes a NASA slide presentation. The under-35 set will be in on building the Constellation spaceships that take the place of today's shuttle fleet. They'll likely be the ones riding those spaceships a decade from now to the moon, Mars and beyond.

"They're also going to be paying half the bill for the Constellation program," Hidalgo Whitesides said. "It's important to treat them as a customer."

The coolness factor plays a part in selling the next generation on the space effort - but other factors have to enter into the picture as well. Several months ago, I wrote that we could reap the benefits of outer space in five areas: entertainment, scientific exploration, new energy sources, empire-building and extinction avoidance.

The wonders of space and the thrills that come with extraterrestrial achievements fall under the entertainment category - as do earthly events that provide a taste of space, such as Yuri's Night. But that's not the end of the adventure. It's only the beginning.

To find out more about Yuri's Night events, and to learn how to get in on the action via Second Life or streaming video, check out the Yuri's Night Web site and Loretta's "Complete World Space Party Users Guide" on Wired Science. For more on the Gen-Y approach to NASA and space exploration, click on over to Open NASA and NASA CoLab. And feel free to pass along your announcements about Yuri's Night parties as well as your post-party reviews as comments below.

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Chicago Review Press

Nick Sagan, Mark Frary and Andy Walker size up high-tech visions in "You Call This the Future?"

The future just isn't what it used to be: We were supposed to be driving flying cars in the 1950s and settling down on the moon by 2001, right? Some of those old standbys of science fiction seem to be as far out of reach as ever - while in other areas, real-world developments have outpaced science fiction by a long shot. Why do visions of the future so often miss the mark?

In a new book, science-fiction author Nick Sagan delves into how we've changed the future - and how the future could change us.

"You Call This the Future?" - co-written with Mark Frary and Andy Walker - deals with many of the futures-gone-awry assessed in other books, such as Daniel Wilson's "Where's My Jetpack?"

Think of "You Call This the Future?" as a pocket guide to the best (and the worst) ideas about future tech, with quick bites tracing the sci-fi roots of those ideas and gauging how close they've come to reality. Yes, there's the jetpack and the flying car, along with warp drives, time travel and marauding cyborgs. Even virtual sex, a la Woody Allen's "Sleeper," comes in for a reality check.

"It's definitely fun to see how far away we are from the orgasmatron," Sagan joked.

On a more serious note, Sagan has devoted a lot of thought to science fiction and fact - not only because of his sci-fi novels and his work on two of the "Star Trek" TV series, but also because he's the son of the late astronomer Carl Sagan, who always had his eye focused on humanity's future.

At the age of 6, the younger Sagan was recorded speaking the words "Hello from the children of planet Earth" for the Golden Record included on the Voyager spacecraft, which is now speeding beyond the frontiers of our solar system. Thus, Nick Sagan could conceivably be the first earthling child heard by an extraterrestrial civilization.

Even today, at the age of 37, he remembers his dad as he reviews the sci-fi technologies of yesteryear.

"My pet favorite, I'd have to say, is the hypnopedia," he told me. "I'd love to be able to absorb knowledge while I sleep. I remember talking with my dad about how you could spend your entire life reading books. ... When it comes to the ability to get information into your head and, to a certain extent, into your soul - I'd be excited about any chance we'd have of doing that."

For what it's worth, the book concludes that "a good night's sleep followed by an hour's conscious learning is probably more effective" than having lessons piped into your ears overnight.

Why the future sometimes falls flat
That's just one illustration of why the future sometimes falls flat. When it comes to any futuristic technology, "it's a lot easier to imagine it than to make it," Sagan said.

To be fair, plenty of the technologies listed in "You Call This the Future" - ranging from eyephones to invisibility shields - are on their way to becoming real in one way or another. Even in those cases, however, the technologies tend to obey Hofstadter's Law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account."

In other cases, what we imagine never gets made. Sometimes the technology seems just plain impossible to realize (for examples of that, check out this interview with physicist Michio Kaku). Sometimes it's possible, but not feasible or affordable (these seven flights of fancy serve as examples). And sometimes safety issues get in the way. (The Federal Aviation Administration probably wouldn't be too crazy about flying cars, though that hasn't stopped some people from trying.)

In the wake of the 2001 terror attacks, bright visions of the future have fallen even more out of favor. As this Salon essay points out, futurology has had its ups and downs, depending on how confident people felt about the future. We seem to be in a down cycle right now, Sagan observed, stuck in an age where technology is often more of a worry than a wonder.

"The jetpack is basically a portable missile," he noted. "In a weird way, 9/11 may have made jetpacks and flying cars less likely than ever."

The down cycle extends to the current catastrophism over climate change - and even over the Large Hadron Collider (a far-fetched doomsday scenario that's perfect for a sci-fi novel).

"The dystopias are always going to grab more immediate attention than the utopias," Sagan said.

How near will the singularity get?
The one area where science fact has definitely outpaced science fiction would be information technology. The 23rd-century communicators carried in the classic "Star Trek" series seem almost laughable compared with today's smartphones. And the cathode-ray tubes and transistors that make up HAL 9000 in "2001: A Space Odyssey" are so last century.

Could HAL-like artificial intelligence be far behind? That's the scenario that worries Sagan most. "To the extent that we let machines do our work for us, and do our thinking for us, that's an area of potential concern," he said.

For years, the well-known futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil has been saying that the pace of A.I. would result in machines capable of matching human intelligence by 2029, leading in turn to a point around 2045 when unenhanced humans wouldn't be able to keep up with technological progress. Kurzweil said that would mark a "singularity" beyond which it becomes difficult to make further forecasts.

Sagan agreed that the singularity could come nearer and nearer - if we let it.

"It comes down to ethics," he said. "It's a question of whether we decide to police ourselves. If we don't, things might spiral out of hand very quickly. ... I suspect that things are not as dire as that. I think most of us understand the dangers to some degree."

As a human being, Sagan may counsel a go-slow approach to at least some of the technologies on the horizon. But as a writer, he said, "I love the idea that the world we know might start changing even more rapidly."

That sounds like a job for science fiction as well as science fact.

"In a way, science fiction is a genre that's in search of itself," Sagan said. "It needs a little push from science - but hopefully not a catastrophic, world-ending push."

What do you think? Is it possible to police progress? Are we already locked onto a course heading for the singularity? Is there any kind of future in futurology? Feel free to leave your comments below.

For more futurology from Sagan, check out his observations in the "Fast Forward" section of our presentation on the "Olympics of Tomorrow," as well as his prognostications about the future of football.