In the winter of 2020, on one of my aimless, frigid quarantine walks around my silent neighborhood, I remember being struck by a thought: did a medieval European peasant know that he was living through what is now widely known as the Dark Ages? Was there some moment when he leaned against his hoe in the fields, gazed up at the uncaring sky, and dimly perceived that he was unlucky enough to have been born into a bad century, perhaps even a bad millennium, too late for classical antiquity and too early for the Renaissance? I was sympathetic toward that notional peasant, because I was feeling the same way. The tide of history was overwhelming; I was minuscule, my life brought to a terrifying standstill by an airborne virus. I thought that if the humans who survived into the year 2500 looked back on my era, they would see it as cursed or benighted, the beginning of a downward slide.

"The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg criticized re-editing books in an effort to avoid offending modern audiences and argued "that's how kids learn." Among the most tragic events in human cultural history was the destruction of works from the great library of Alexandria. Blamed on Julius Caesar as well as later Christian and Muslim zealots, the net loss of knowledge from this font of ancient wisdom roughly coincided with what we call the Dark Ages, and we may be repeating history. From its beginnings one of the great promises of computer technology was the possibility of maintaining a library of all human writing that could not burn, that would neither fade nor wither. The irony, that has not been considered closely enough, is how easily this same technology can revise or fabricate literary and historical classics, which is tantamount to destroying them.

This week, Americans celebrated the successful delivery of NASA's Perseverance rover to its destination on the Martian surface, marking the dawn of a new era of interplanetary exploration. However, when it comes to searching the solar system around us, the US has not always led from the front. During the Reagan administration, for example, the agency saw its budget pared down in favor of building up arms ahead of an anticipated Cold War faceoff with the Soviet Union, as we see in this excerpt from David W Brown's latest work, The Mission. Excerpted from the book THE MISSION: or: How a Disciple of Carl Sagan, an Ex-Motocross Racer, a Texas Tea Party Congressman, the World's Worst Typewriter Saleswoman, California Mountain People, and an Anonymous NASA Functionary Went to War with Mars, Survived an Insurgency at Saturn, Traded Blows with Washington, and Stole a Ride on an Alabama Moon Rocket to Send a Space Robot to Jupiter in Search of the Second Garden of Eden at the Bottom of an Alien Ocean Inside of an Ice World Called Europa (A True Story) 2021 by David W. Brown. For planetary scientists, the Jimmy Carter–Ronald Reagan years were in retrospect like the Dark Ages, and they, the monks tending in enclaves to the embers of civilization.

It's been a wild ride this year, but you can always rely on Assassin's Creed to lighten the mood. Let's see what those zany historians at Ubisoft have cooked up for us in the excitingly named Assassin's Creed Valhalla … Peterborough, is it? I have nothing against our beautiful cathedral cities, rolling plains and park-and-ride services, but after 12 months of Brexit, Covid-19 and forest fires, plus the cancellation of the Eurovision song contest, I was hoping for something a little less Tough Mudder from this giddy, quasi-historical, action-adventure series, which previously had us gallivanting around Atlantis. For the first few hours, you're thrown into the icy political drama of ninth-century Norway, where Viking warrior Eivor runs around snow-blasted islands having stern conversations about the future of her clan. I went with female Eivor.)

Science and reason have invaded our lives, becoming almost inescapable. We have learned to listen to the facts of Science, to accept them as a proven Truth, a basis for all knowledge. We have learned that disbelief in this Truth is absurd, and a kind of intellectual heresy. Ask the person next to you whether they believe in Science, and chances are they'll say yes. Due to our upbringing and education we have learned to accept its facts like Gospel.

SpaceX is developing a reusable rocket-spaceship system called the BFR to help make Mars settlement economically feasible. Humanity's brutal and bellicose past provides ample justification for pursuing settlements on the moon and Mars, Elon Musk says. The billionaire entrepreneur has long stressed that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help make humanity a multiplanet species -- a giant leap that would render us much less vulnerable to extinction. Human civilization faces many grave threats over the long haul, from asteroid strikes and climate change to artificial intelligence run amok, Musk has said over the years. And he recently highlighted our well-documented inability to get along with each other as another frightening factor.

Video: Is regulating AI a bad idea? Entrepreneur Elon Musk has long held the position that innovators need to be aware of the social risk artificial intelligence (AI) presents to the future, but at South by Southwest (SXSW) on Sunday, the SpaceX founder pieced together his plan for the second coming of the Dark Ages, noting AI "scares the hell" out of him. Machine learning, task automation and robotics are already widely used in business. These and other AI technologies are about to multiply, and we look at how organizations can best take advantage of them. Making an appearance on a couch with his friend, creator of science fiction western series Westworld Jonathan Nolan, Musk said that although he's not usually an advocate for regulation and oversight, the AI proposition is where he can make an exception.

As close to a quarter million people descended on a city of six hundred thousand, CES 2018 became the perfect metaphor for the current state of modern society. Walking the floor last week at the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC), the hum of the crowd buzzed celebrating the long awaited arrival of the age of social robots, autonomous vehicles, and artificial intelligence. In the same way that Alexa was last year's CES story, social robots were everywhere this year, turning the show floor into a Disney-inspired mechatronic festival (see above). The applications promoted ranged from mobile airport/advertising kiosks to retail customer service agents to family in-home companions. One French upstart, Blue Frog Robotics, stood out from the crowd of ivory-colored rolling bots.

SURFING the web and making free internet phone calls on your Wi-Fi laptop, listening to your iPod on the way home, it often seems that, technologically speaking, we are enjoying a golden age. Human inventiveness is so finely honed, and the globalised technology industries so productive, that there appears to be an invention to cater for every modern whim. But according to a new analysis, this view couldn't be more wrong: far from being in technological nirvana, we are fast approaching a new dark age. That, at least, is the conclusion of Jonathan Huebner, a physicist working at the Pentagon's Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. He says the rate of technological innovation reached a peak a century ago and has been declining ever since. And like the lookout on the Titanic who spotted the fateful iceberg, Huebner sees the end of innovation looming dead ahead.

This panel, which met in Austin, Texas, discussed the "deep unease among AI researchers who have been around more than the last four years or so ... that perhaps expectations about AI are too high, and that this will eventually result in disaster."