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We'll leave the “why nots” for another time along with the other really good reasons Hawking provided for why we can't time travel to the past. What we want to talk about, and what Hawking says is entirely possible, is time travel to the future. Everyone has heard that the faster you travel the slower times goes. Hawking does an excellent job of explaining how this is possible. He makes the Holy Grail of time travel, living much longer lives, seem tantalizingly tangible. What we want to do now, is examine if the same is possible without an enormous space ship that takes five years to reach top speed, as Hawking suggests is needed for successful time travel. Warning, long personal anecdote approaching. Make that two, long personal anecdotes approaching.

Back in the days of disco and pinball, I was chatting with a buddy at a dinner party where alcohol was not the only item on the menu. We were delving into deep discussions when I asked him this: Does time appear to speed up or slow down with accomplishment? Phrased another way, does time fly faster when your having fun or doing your homework, watching TV or writing brilliant articles. His answer: time goes faster with the more you accomplish in that time. My answer; just the opposite.

Before you scratch you head like my buddy did, consider another anecdote, from my oldest brother. When he was a young teen he took the time to explain to me—an eight-year-old—a time theory of his own. At that age Magilla Gorilla was as important to me as the passage of time. In fact, Magilla Gorilla often marked the passage of time. But his theory has stuck with me for decades and has loomed more prominent with the passage of time. His theory is this: every day of your life is shorter than the day before because it makes up a smaller percentage of your life.

Still reading? Then you might be asking: What does the first anecdote have to do with the second? For that answer we need to look at the longest day of your life, your first true birthday. That's the day you come into the world and start taking everything in. (You could argue time in the womb is time served here on earth, but we're working from the day you're born because we think that's when the learning really begins.) Here's where this gets tricky. I mentioned above the relationship between time and accomplishment. For the sake of argument, lets change that to time and learning. So learning is our measure of accomplishment. Look at the eyes on this kid. He's taking everything in. Is it fair to say that you learn at least as much, if not more, on the day you are born than any other day of your life?

So what the hell does that have to do with Hawking's talk about time travel? We're not sure. But maybe you don't need a great big ship to slow time down.

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Everybody wants a house on the water. But a house in the water? These folks are pushing the idea of building communities in the ocean as the apex of sustainable living. Starting with the energy requirements; all the wind, solar and wave energy you want, provided the homes are built in the right places. Fortunately, two thirds of the world is covered with water. So, there are plenty of locations to chose from. Planned properly, ocean-based housing could produce enough alternative energy to run washing machines, flatscreen TVs, dehumidifiers and a desalinization plant or two for drinking water. Seaweed can taste pretty good cooked right and fish is so much better for you than beef, with a lot more variety.

Alright, we admit ocean living may be something of a hard sell. There is always the occasional rogue wave to worry about. But oil platforms seems to survive pretty well. The organization linked above just got a $250,000 shot-in-the-arm arm from the inventor of Paypal. He also pledged to pony up another $100,000 to match other donations to the group. Money well spent? Possibly. The last issue of NBN talked about low-lying nation's threatened by rising tides looking for ways to run the ship, even as it sinks, so to speak. There are other opportunities here. By moving offshore we free up lots of land for agriculture and recreation if we move offshore. Think of how nice a vacation in the mountains or desert will sound when you spend every other day of your life at sea. We can leave the land for those animals that can't leave the land.

Most important, perhaps, seasteading opens up the prospect of building a brand new community. It's so much easier to plan a community when you don't have centuries worth of bad planning to work around. you could customer-tailor communities. Starting fresh with only the best technology and surplus clean energy to employ it makes for some pretty exciting living conditions. This should not be dismissed out of hand, and apparently isn't. Think of the sunsets, and sunrises, every day.

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Imagine glass ground up so fine you can spray it like paint. Now, imaging that spray forms a new sheet of glass over what ever it comes into contact with. That's what these folks are claiming. Spray-on glass that forms a flexible barrier that's infinitely easier to clean and keep clean. All these claims come down to this poorly explained sentence in the article linked above. The spray: "has a long-lasting antibacterial effect because microbes landing on the surface cannot divide or replicate easily." Why not?

Perhaps it has something to do with the nanoparticles of glass in the spray filling in all the nano holes on the surface being sprayed. A stainless steel restaurant kitchen table may look smooth, but on the bacteria-size level it's a very rough surface, as this electro-microscope photo of a steel surface suggests. This spray-on glass fills all those tiny voids so less moisture gets in and there are fewer nooks and crannies for bacteria to hide and fester in. Make sense? Good, because we just made it up. But, it makes sense to us so maybe it's right. It would be nice if the article was a little clearer. Obviously, any dirt and bacteria already in the sprayed surface is trapped under the glass, which is kind of funky. 

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A Swiss fellow we're reluctant to label a scientist because he has taken pictures of UFOs from UFOs, says an asteroid the size of a Home Depot is scheduled to wipe out Europe in 2036. Normally, we'd dismiss this fellow as being Swiss, but it appears NASA is saying similar things. The Asteroid is called Apophos and she's heading this way. Why this confidant of ET is issuing press releases on the subject is anyone's guess. If you read the whole thing you might find an answer. We included this video to add a little gravity, pardon the pun, to the asteroid story.

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This story is fairly bizarre if true. Cavemen practicing sustainable fishing? No doubt they didn't have factory fishing ships or mortgages to pay. They just took what they needed. Bet they didn't throw out a lot of what they caught either. My wife and I were at Lenny and Joes in Connecticut this weekend. They were shoveling out platefuls of fried food at a mind-numbing rate. Mountains of the stuff, and I have to say it was delicious. But how much of that stuff ended in the trash? A third?

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Using trees to fight forest fires may sound like weird science but that's precisely what the US Forest Service, MIT and a Canton, MA, electronics firm will be investigating this spring in what could well become the nation's first country-wide network of outdoor fire alarms. The science is solid as are the mechanics. Trees create a tiny electric current that's used to maintain the ideal pH in the roots and trunk in varying soil acidity conditions. The more acidic or basic the surrounding earth, the more electricity the tree creates. A team of MIT scientists in a paper published last month found it was a renewable source of power and that tapping it was harmless to the host tree.

 These findings have cleared the way for the Canton firm Voltree to start field testing an environmental sensor the firm designed that literally plugs into the tree. Daily soil moisture, temperature and air humidity measurements will be taken by this device and transmitted via radio signal to Forest Service monitoring stations scattered throughout the country. That sensor will include an emergency signal that's emitted whenever surrounding air temperatures indicate fire has broken out. This device is going to be tested this spring at a Forest Service field science center in Idaho. There are other potential uses for this power including motion and/or radioactivity detectors fixed along the nation’s borders. The MIT folks think that might be reaching, Voltree isn’t so sure. Still, the study findings clear the way for serious research and development to begin, with potentially far reaching results.