Cults and the people who join them have been a constant fascination of many filmmakers and Netflix’s Wild Wild Country really brought talking about them back in style. We thought most of them were relegated to small, oddball communes after the Human Potential Movement petered out, and, of course, the Church of Scientology. But cults never really went away or declined in popularity. They keep recruiting new members, and new cults are steadily cropping up. But how are cults still popular in a connected, sarcastic world where their dirty secrets are only a social media deep dive away? And what strange new iterations of these groups might we see sooner rather than later?

We’ve found organic compounds in countless places around the cosmos, and we have some evidence that comets and asteroids affected life right here on Earth. By that logic, the galaxy should be crawling with chatty aliens looking for other intelligent life, yet we’re still not sure if we’ve ever heard from them, or if they’re out there at all. This is known as the Fermi Paradox, and there are solutions to it. It’s just that some of them are a little more dark and doomsday-ish than we might like to think about…

Contrary to what you may have been told by creationists, humans evolved to cooperate as a species, to help each other survive and build stable communities. We don’t expect things to be equal, but we do want fairness, much like our evolutionary cousins. So what happens when we begin acquiring massive wealth and power? Well, according to science, the empathy that serves as our social glue blunts, as the concentration of wealth and power increases, the beneficiaries of this inequality chasm lose their ability to relate to mere mortals, and the only way to snap them out of it is to remind them that they’re human, just like the rest of us.

Imagine for a moment if you couldn’t go much faster than 10% of the speed of light and that taking a really, really long nap in a cryogenic tank was out of the question. How do you explore what lies outside our solar system? And even more importantly, what would you do once you get to your destination, with help decades, if not centuries away, and two way communication more or less irrelevant to your continued existence? We could still travel to other stars. But we’d have to radically adjust our expectations of how those missions would go.

Millennials, according to pundits everywhere, were supposed to be the generation that took sex, drugs, and rock and roll to apocalyptic, society-shattering extremes. Instead, they’ve grown up and became the tamest generation in more than a century. And far from constant drug-fueled orgies, they’re actually suffering from what some researchers have called a “sex deficit.” Why? Nobody seems to know for sure, but some of the most popular explanations tend to focus on the impact of new technology, and no, we’re not talking about smartphones. We’re talking, once again, about the kind of technology that changed the world.

When computer scientist and sci-fi author Vernon Vinge described a fantastical world seemingly torn from the pages of cyberpunk novels and presented is as our likely future, he started a while philosophy which saw our days as flesh and blood numbered. But as the approximate date of our ascension approaches, we’re nowhere close to anything even remotely like the constant predictions of Singularitarians. We’re going to dive into exactly why they’re still waiting for the Nerd Rapture with bated breath.

Life is short, relatively speaking. Human life expectancy in the industrialized world today is just a notch over 80 and as low as 66 in developing nations, while the oldest person whose birth date we can confirm died at just over 122 years old. And since the dawn of civilization, a whole lot of people wanted to push those numbers way higher, trying everything from magical spells, to mercury cocktails, to strategic diets, to experimental supplements. But why hasn’t it worked? What’s the longest theoretical lifespan humans could actually have? And what would we need to do to actually have a shot at living for hundreds or thousands of years?

Well, folks, that’s all for the universe as we know it. Cold, dark, and filled with disintegrating stellar corpses. But your civilization is still around. What do you do? Where do you go as the cosmos itself dies? Believe it or not, your best bet is to head towards the nearest remnant of a dead star, and the more exotic the better. That’s where you can find steady sources of energy, and with them, options for how to continue your existence. How will you harness that energy? And how could you use it to survive the end of everything? We’re about to prep for the end of days. Literally.

You probably hear the term artificial intelligence about ten times a day now. But what does it actually mean? What makes a machine intelligent? Is it how a certain algorithm works? Is it what the machine is capable of computing? How is it acquired? Turns out that when you try to nail down an exact definition of the term, things start getting very complicated very quickly, not to mention hard to explain. At the same time, since understanding when a computer becomes smart enough to take your job is going to be critical for your future, we have to at least try.

Robots and computers are now involved in virtually every facet of the global economy, and they might well be coming for your job next because, after all, you’re only human. Machines don’t need sleep, food, or pay, and they don’t forget things or get overwhelmed unlike us meatbags. Your only tool to cope with the coming changes? Education. The only thing standing in your way? Lawmakers who can’t be bothered to understand how the world has changed and allow us to adapt accordingly. If these warnings sound grim, well, so is protracted unemployment in Western nations which believe that the beatings should continue until morale improves.