The topics:

• Don't forget Valentine's Day!

  Stephen took his Valentine to 1800 Prime Steak House Saturday night. If you're ever in the Shreveport/Bossier City area, check it out.

• When risk is irrational: The EU is banning GM food.

  Some of the poorer countries in Africa are faced with a grim choice - adapting GM food to be able to produce enough for their own people, or stay with unmodified food so they can sell their crops to Europe.

• Recycling is important for the environment. But if the United States tried to adopt a system as onerous as the system in Sweden, there'd be the risk of a backlash. Phil recommends recycling our waste to make fuel.

• When making fuel, particularly ethanol, we have to beware the risk of unintended consequences. This week we learned that using food to make ethanol pushes corn production to places like Brazile where rain forests are slashed and burned. Counting that, the study argues, more carbon is released with corn ethanol than gasoline.

  Stephen thinks we can make ethanol without using food or food crop land.

• Gilgamesh was said to be 2/3rds devine, 1/3 human. Phil wondered how that parentage was possible. Well, now its possible for embryos to come from 3 or any number of parents. What are the risks of designer babies? To the baby? To society?

• Existential risk - the various risks that our species could be wiped out.

• Stephen considered existential risks awhile back and thinks unfriendly AI might be the biggest risk.

• If you're concerned about existential risk, get involved in the Lifeboat Foundation.

• After covering the risks, Phil and Stephen decided to hit something lighter - if it weren't for the expense, what cool sci-fi stuff would be developed? According to Wired, Gundam Mechas (pronouced, I've learned, "gun dumb") would cost $725,000,000. If that's true, couldn't a giant mecha be worth that money in the right circumstance?

• And we might have Project Orion too. Project Orion was the huge nuclear powered spacecraft that would have lifted off and cruised through space on nuclear explosions. The project's motto was "Saturn by '70." That's 1970, not 2070.

• Phil mentioned 20 Things You Didn't Know About Science Fiction

• Here's the interview that revealed that William Gibson was late to computing. Gibson bought his first computer after writing his second novel Count Zero. Neuromancer was written on a manual typewriter.
  

Our front bumper is a sample of Marginal Prophets' "The Difficult Song."

Our exit music this week is from Scott Andrew. The song is "More Good Days."

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