Ein letztes Album der Die Toten Hosen, ein Bonusalbum mit allen, die damit irgendwas zu tun haben könnten. Und dann ausgerechnet ein Song mit Farin Urlaub von Die Ärzte, der vielleicht der beste des ganzen Bonusalbums ist. Wer von euch mindestens so alt wie ich ist, versteht das „ausgerechnet“. Opel Gang. Für die Ewigkeit.

(Direktlink)

„Inferno“ ist eines dieser Alben von denen ich nicht wusste, wie sehr ich es erwartet habe, bis ich vor Wochen hörte, dass es erscheinen wird. Boards of Canada machen Boards-of-Canada-Sachen und genau dafür liebe nicht nur ich die beiden Schotten hart. Eine Platte, die am besten dann klingt, wenn man ihr einen angemessenen Raum zu Zuhören schafft. Gerne ganz alleine. Alles daran ist großartig!

Ich schrieb neulich am Rande darüber, dass ich dabei wäre, einen Team-Tag vorzubereiten, was durchaus mit Stress verbunden war, mit dem einherging, dass hier weniger los war. Der Team-Tag fand nun am Freitag statt und lief so wie geplant und auch gut. Nach dem Feierabend wollte ich dann mit dem Rad sehr fix nach Hause, da hier Besuch von Lieblingsmenschen aus Wien auf mich wartete und die will man ja nicht lange warten lassen. Also Kette rechts und ab nach Hause. Das auf einer Fahrradstraße, die ich zwar kenne, aber leider nicht so gut wie meine Westentasche. Solche Wege verändern sich von Jahr zu Jahr und eigentlich weiß ich auch, dass man die erstmal eher entspannt fahren und checken sollte, was ich in diesem Jahr auf dieser Strecke noch nicht getan hatte.

Ich behaupte gerne, dass ein einziger Grund für den Kauf eines SUV die Radwege sind. Aber dann war es schon zu spät, ich habe einen sehr hohen Asphaltbruch erst bemerkt, als mein Vorderrad mit gut 30 km/h auf diesen traf, was für mich zur Folge hatte, über den Lenker absteigen und mit dem Kopf auf der Straße einschlagen zu müssen. Überall Blut, Schmerzen aus der Hölle und glücklicherweise sehr kompetenten Ersthelfer:innen, die mir einen guten Druckverband verpassten. Dann RTW, Notaufnahme, CT, Röntgen, Platzwunde über der linken Augenbraue geklebt und sehr viel Zeit im Krankenhaus verbracht.

Glücklicherweise ist mehr als die Platzwunde nebst blauem und angeschwollenem Auge, Schürfwunden, drölfhundert anderen blauen bis schwarzen Flecken und einer erst neuen kaputten Brille nichts geblieben, aber das alles in Summe tut doch ordentlich weh. Jedenfalls bin ich ob dessen jetzt erstmal eine Woche krank zu Hause. Dass es ein Wegeunfall war macht das alles nicht besser, ich hätte auf diese schmerzliche Erfahrung einfach ganz gerne verzichtet.

Notiz am Rande: die Ersthelferin, die dort wohnt, meinte zu mir, dass ich in den letzten vier Wochen jetzt schon der fünfte sei, den es an dieser Stelle vom Rad geholt hätte, was zeigt, welche Prioritäten diese Stadt für ihre Radwege pflegt.

(This blog essay is overdue because I'm still waiting for new prescription glasses and writing while cross-eyed with text zoomed to 250% is tedious. They should be here later this week. Meanwhile ...)

Back in January 2022 I wrote an essay revisiting my predictions for 2017. My review of 2017's stab in the dark began, "it spanned three blog posts and ended happily in a nuclear barbecue to put us all out of our misery: start here, continue with this, and finale: and the Rabid Nazi Raccoons shall inherit the Earth."

I'll actually stand by those 2017 predictions, which were weirdly not that far off the mark although Queen Elizabeth II outlasted my prediction by several years.

But my 2022 predictions?

Oh boy.

Look, for an amateur futurologist writing in January of 2022 it was arguably forgivable to miss the US electorate being so boneheadedly stupid that they'd re-elect the most corrupt president in their nation's history, at the head of a Gish gallop of barkingly ignorant and destructive cranks and conspiracy theorists determined to tear down the republic and destroy its vital institutions, all in the name of returning the social order (per the Project 2025 plan) to the 50s--the 1850s, that is, not the 1950s. With 20/20 hindsight, what I missed was the now-obvious wave of media ownership consolidation, including corporate social media such as X, Meta, and Google, in the hands of a narrow class of billionaire oligarchs. I also missed the complacent incompetence of the Biden administration with respect to organizing their succession plans--it was obvious that by 2024 he'd be vulnerable to campaign ratfucking on grounds of his age, and his anointed successor was guilty of being (a) too female and (b) non-white, rendering her unacceptable to a large chunk of the voters.

But, even if you forgive my failure to recognize the catastrophic collapse of the US as a credible hegemonic superpower over the past 3-4 years, I can only hang my head in shame over my failure to anticipate the Ukraine war, which broke out six weeks after that blog essay. Let alone to anticipate a revolution in military affairs as profound as that brought about of the first world war.

Similiarly, I have no excuse for not recognizing that an Israel with politics dominated by Benjamin Netanyahu would go Full Nazi sooner rather than later, as the genocide in Gaza and the program to build a Greater Israel in Lebanon demonstrate. I mean, I grew up going to synagogue and have visited Israel more than once! I should have seen the signs, they were all there as far back as the 1980s. Mea culpa. (And fuck those guys.)

While I correctly recognized the EV transport revolution, I missed the concurrent solar power and grid-scale battery revolution, now very visibly in train and arguably more important than the arrival of cheap electric cars and cheaper e-bikes. I didn't notice the global supply chain crisis of 2021-2023, even then gathering pace, although it didn't impact consumer prices for a few more months.

Possibly my worst miss is that I completely discounted the profound social impact of LLMs (or so-called "AI"), not simply as a massive technology sector investment bubble and happy hunting ground for snake oil salesmen and grifters, but as a corrosive influence on population-level critical thinking. I should have seen it coming--I read Joseph Weizenbaum's Computer Power and Human Reason back in the 1980s--but I didn't recognize just how unable to see past the ELIZA illusion most people would prove to be.

Nor did I expect the transhumanists, extropians, and the rest of the hairball of beliefs now congealing into the syncretistic techno-religion of TESCREAL to have seized control of trillions of dollars of private equity and not only be arguing about the Singularity but to be squabbling over who gets to run it (with a side-order of racism and eugenics on top, because every flavour of crank batshittery is so much better with a side-order of fascism and concentration camps).

So I'm sticking a flag in the ground here and admitting: I am officially a shit futurologist.

Back in 2022, and before that, in 2017 and even in 2007, I espoused a general rule of thumb about predicting the future, that:

Looking 10 years ahead, about 70% of the people, buildings, cars, and culture is already here today. Another 20-25% is not present yet but is predictable -- buildings under construction, software and hardware and drugs in development, children today who will be adults in a decade. And finally, there's about a 5-10% element that comes from the "who ordered that" dimension

2022 forced me to update the ratio to:

20% of 10-year-hence developments utterly unpredictable, leaving us with 55-60% in the "here today" and 20-25% in the "not here yet, but clearly on the horizon" baskets

Anyway, it's now 2026, and I officially give up.

The Stross Ratio for predicting events ten years hence is now 60/10/30. That is: 60% of the people, buildings, and culture are here today. 10% is predictably on the drawing boards, and a whopping 30% is utterly unpredictable.

Airborne Hantavirus pandemic or global Measles pandemic, who the fuck knows what we're going to get--given that the US FDA is run by a crank who doesn't believe in the germ theory of disease and seems to be trying to spike vaccine development globally?

A shutdown of global semiconductor fabrication caused by a worldwide helium shortage, and a global fertilizer shortage causing famine and food price spikes, due to a senile sundowning autocrat starting a war with Iran without any clear exit strategy?

Who ordered any of this?

I'm reasonably confident that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will be over by this time in 2030--quite likely by this time in 2027, due to the collapse of the Russian domestic economy. I'm also reasonably confident that the US war on Iran will be over by this time in 2030, if only because Trump will most likely be dead or in palliative care (possibly following his removal in a soft coup via Article 25 of the US constitution, due to his very obvious current illness and decline). (Note that Trump's insistence on "running for a third term" is very probably a serious sign that the electoral process in the USA is no longer fully functional, under the aegis of the supreme court he appointed, as long as he survives. His successor may not be able to sustain his ability to ignore the law: if they can, then, well, the US Republic is over: it had a good run, from 1776 to 2026.) The AI bubble will have burst long before May 2027--the semiconductor pinch caused by the aforementioned helium supply crisis will cripple Nvidia's ability to manufacture chipsets for data centers, and the US DCs are all being built to run on diesel/kerosene burning gas turbine power plants anyway, the price of which has skyrocketed due to the gulf war.

I expect us to be well into Great Depression 2.0 by this time in 2030.

There will be some grounds for hope. The global energy transition to renewables will, by that point, be a done deal. It also means China will have replaced the USA as the global energy superpower--not because they dominate the transport routes for energy but because they manufacture 80% of the planet's EVs and PV panels and batteries. But that's a tenuous hold on superpowerdom. If the Chinese government throws its weight around in the 21st century the way the USA did in the 20th, it will rapidly find first-tier rivals building up their own manufacturing capability: meanwhile, PV/battery is inherently easier to distribute that large, centralized grid based power supplies, and the dronification of warfare means (at least in the near term) that rapid mechanized wars of maneuver are a non-starter: the "fog of war" is on the way out, replaced by highly precise targeting of advancing assets and the robotization of the front line.

In space, I'm pretty sure we will see a Kessler Syndrome event if the idiotic rush towards putting data centers in orbit goes anywhere. But I think it's not going to happen--SpaceX is inextricably tied to the current tech bubble, and when it pops Elon Musk is going to wish he had a bunker to hide in.

The main casualty of this decade is the ideological credibility of capitalism as a social organizational principle.

Enshittification, also known as platform decay, per wiki, is "a process in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to both users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders." Systematic capture of the US government and the global system of trade by capitalists has resulted in the creation of a framework optimized for enshittification all round, and the result is the enshittification of everything--all the infrastructure of the capitalist world is decaying and on fire as the post-privatization owners loot it.

This is the Marx-predicted crisis of capitalism, and it's been in progress since the collapse of the USSR in 1991 removed the main ideological standard-bearer for opposition. It accelerated in 2008 with the global financial crisis, and again in 2020 when the pandemic provided top cover for the hyaenas to go on a looting spree. They've stripped the corpse of actually-existing social democracies everywhere to the bone, and now they're cannibalizing their own body politic. Disaster capitalism has finally come home to roost, and it won't end until the global financial system collapses. Meanwhile, the generation born in the 21st century has no time for their shit. We are moving into a political state weirdly reminiscent of the period between 1905 and the 1930s. If we're lucky we're going to get New Deal 2.0 and a brisk round of socialism: if we're unlucky, it's going to be guillotine time all over again.

PS: do not expect to see me visiting the USA any time soon. Millions of people applying for a US visa are now required to make all of their social media accounts publicly visible -- or risk having their applications delayed or denied outright. The directive, which covers more than a dozen nonimmigrant visa categories, has been rolling out in phases since June 2025 and expanded significantly as of 30 March 2026. This policy is impossible to implement without feeding all those social media profiles to an LLM in search of a verdict, and they'll obviously be screening applicants for ideological compatibility. And if it's rolling out to visa applicants now, the automated program will inevitably be applied to I-94W (visa waiver) travelers shortly thereafter. My social media profile is that of a pro-LGBT pro-Green hard left troublemaker, so ... nope, not going there: I am absolutely not interested in touring the concentration camps of El Salvador!

Welcome back to the Abstract! Here are the stories this week that spread life across space, went stir crazy for science, held the colony together, and peacefully sat it out.

First, what if we went all the way to Europa only to find that some earthly bacteria already set up shop there? Then: red rum on the Red Planet, the palace intrigue of tropical wasps, and an afterlife in full lotus.

As always, for more of my work, check out my book First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens, or subscribe to my personal newsletter the BeX Files. 

That’s one small step for a dust-borne bacterium…

Osmanov, Zaza. “Earth as a potential source of life for Europa’s subsurface ocean.” International Journal of Astrobiology.

Europa, the ice moon of Jupiter, is considered one of the most promising candidates in the search for extraterrestrial life due to its vast subsurface ocean. But imagine what a trip it would be to not just find aliens on this world, but to learn that they originally hailed from Earth.

That’s the premise of a new study that investigates “the possibility of dust particles containing living bacteria ejected from Earth reaching Europa and landing on its surface,” according to author Zaza Osmanov of the Free University of Tbilisi. 

“Life on Earth originated at least 3.55 billion years ago, which implies that for approximately that long, Earth has been shedding life-bearing particles into surrounding space,” Osmanov said in the study. “Hence, if favorable conditions exist elsewhere in the Solar System and can be accessed by dust particles, the transport of life from Earth appears plausible and may have been occurring over the course of several billion years.”

This idea that life might travel between planets, or even star systems, is called panspermia. In addition to Earth life potentially expanding beyond our planet, scientists have previously speculated that life on Earth was itself seeded by microbes from another world, such as Mars. 

To game out a scenario in which earthly bacteria might reach Europa, Osmanov estimated the rate at which dust-borne bacteria is dislodged from Earth by impacts and how it might then endure a long journey through space and survive a crash into the icescape of Europa.  

He concluded that many trillions of life-bearing dust grains from Earth could have reached the moon’s surface over tens of millions of years. From there, surviving microbes may have spent generations shimmying down through cracks in its ice shell, which is dozens of miles thick, into the dark waters of the ocean below. 

Though the deck would be stacked against these microbes, the high number of dust particles that Earth sloughs off into space “renders the existence of life on Europa highly plausible,” according to the study.

It’s worth noting that panspermia remains a topic of heated academic debate, in part because there are so many uncertainties about the process. For example, H. Jay Melosh, the late geophysicist and panspermia expert, also assessed the odds that Earth life could relocate to Europa and came to the opposite conclusion as Osmanov.

“If life should be found in the oceans of Europa or Enceladus, it is very likely that it’s indigenous rather than seeded from Earth, Mars or (especially) another solar system," Melosh said while presenting findings at the 2019 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, according to Space.com.

Ultimately, we won’t know until we go! NASA’s Europa Clipper is currently on its way to Jupiter to take a closer look at its namesake moon from orbit, and to scout out potential sites for surface exploration in the future. Perhaps decades from now we’ll finally be able to answer the tantalizing question of whether the seas of Europa are inhabited—and if so, if the aliens are homegrown or descended from spacefaring Earthlings. 

In other news…

The Overlook Hotel, but it’s in space

Cantisani, Andrea, Schmutz, Jan B., et al. “Social interactions in isolated, confined, and extreme environments: A study of Antarctic winter teams using wearable sensors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

It’s one thing for a bacterium to make an interplanetary voyage; sending humans across deep space is orders of magnitude harder—and not just because we are flimsy mortal fleshbags. There is also the psychological toll of spending months or years in a confined space on a long-duration mission, such a trip to Mars. 

To anticipate these challenges, scientists enlisted 12 crew members on a 10-month overwintering mission at Antarctica’s Concordia Station to self-report feelings of loneliness and paranoia, while wearing proximity sensors that allowed the team to monitor their movements. 

The results revealed “a progressive deterioration in both individual psychological outcome and team dynamics” in which “loneliness and paranoid thoughts increased over time,” according to researchers co-led by Andrea Cantisani of the University of Bern and Jan Schmutz of the University of Zurich.

The team even singled out one participant who “reported unusually high scores…corresponding to severe levels of paranoid ideation.” Reading the study, it’s hard not to be reminded of John Carpenter's The Thing, or the descent into space madness depicted in movies like Event Horizon or Sunshine.

Indeed, the authors shouted out Stephen King’s The Shining as a fictional precursor to the study’s finding that “prolonged isolation [and] constant proximity does not necessarily strengthen relationships but can instead amplify tension, mistrust, and psychological strain.”

In other words, if astronauts start seeing ghostly masked revelers, murdered children, and mercurial bartenders popping up in their Mars base, it’s time to pack it in and head back to Earth. 

Stirring up a wasp’s nest—for science

Corbett, Owen R. et al. “Compensation of labour by noncompetitive individuals mitigates costs of aggressive succession contest in a social wasp.” Animal Behaviour.

Speaking of hostile social dynamics, it’s time to return to the “dynastic violence" beat. Long-time readers of this newsletter will know that I am a sucker for succession battles in eusocial animals such as naked mole rats or matricidal ants—which are ruled over by one breeding female queen.  

This week, scientists updated the genre by watching what happens when you remove queens of the tropical wasp species Polistes canadensis, a shift that increased colony-level aggression “approximately tenfold,” according to a new study. 

In the ensuing power vacuum, rival females vied for the crown through aggressive behaviors including bites, tackles, stings, and air fights. But even as some females took up arms (and stingers), the team was surprised to observe other wasps stepping into foraging or worker roles they had never occupied before to prevent the colony from collapsing in the chaotic interregnum. 

“Contrary to our predictions, these findings support the theory that some form of compensatory mechanism exists in this species, buffering the conflict of queen succession,” said researchers led by Owen R. Corbett of University College London. “This system, in which some individuals compete while others compensate, could be what allows species like P. canadensis to maintain colony function despite aggressive contest-based succession.”

To channel Cersei Lannister: When you play the game of thrones, you win or you…compensate. While that doesn’t have quite the same ring as the original quote, the wasp colonies definitely weathered their dynastic struggles better than Westeros in the end.

Live by the lotus, die by the lotus

Sun, Chenshuang et al. Multidisciplinary analysis reveals the genetic and dietary structure of the seated burials from Tang Dynasty Chang’an.” Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports.

Last, it’s time to take a seat—for eternity. That’s the idea behind a rare funerary custom called “seated burial,” in which bodies are arranged in an upright sitting posture, in contrast to the far more common practice of being “laid to rest” in a supine pose. 

In a new study, archaeologists examined four individuals who lived between the 7th and 9th centuries in what was then called the Chang’an region of northwest China and were buried in seated poses. The study offers “the first direct genetic evidence” to counter predictions that these burials imply a monastic lifestyle or a particular ethnic lineage, according to researchers led by Chenshuang Sun of Fudan University in Shanghai. 

“Our genomic data contradicts the hypothesis that seated burials have a unique origin from ancestors in northern or northeastern Asia” as “we find no evidence of significant differences between seated burial individuals and their contemporaries,” the team concluded. “Although Buddhist symbolic artifacts, such as pagoda-shaped jars, were found in one tomb, isotopic evidence contradicts strict adherence to vegetarian Buddhist precepts.”

In addition to refuting the special status of the skeletal sitters, the study also includes interesting asides, such as records of Buddhist monks who ended up in “seated death” after “passing away in the full-lotus position.” 

Seated burials have been unearthed across the globe, serving as a reminder to us all that we don’t have to take death lying down. 

Thanks for reading! See you next week.