There could be any number of physical laws in place instead of the ones we know, some of them possibly even more probable than the ones we know. But if other laws existed, we as humans may not.

We’ve come a long way from cultivating a handful of cancer cells in a lab, and every day scientists learn more about the particular wants and needs of our tissues and organs.

Before you sign up for immortality, be forewarned: It isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Even in the comparatively sweet world of fiction there are plenty of souls embittered by immortality.

In school we learn the Sun is eight light minutes away or about 150,000,000 kilometers distant. These are just large numbers, though, and we don’t really have a sense of them.

A.I. has been a very real thing in the world for more than a century. A.I.s have made for skilled chess players, therapists, and the most curiously compelling week of Jeopardy! ever broadcast.

When we think of “amnesia,” we think of the classic soap opera example. A character endures some sort of emotionally traumatizing situation or blow to the head.

After all, they come to us. We barely have the means to leave low-Earth orbit, but these would-be conquerors have traveled light years with the express purpose of pressing us into human-flavored cider.

In the past few years, something very exciting happened in the field of human genetics: After decoding the human genome, scientists began to realize that the old paradigm of genes as the sole player of inheritance had to be modified.

Philosophers like to think science works in an orderly way, in which scientists propose hypotheses, conduct experiments to validate their ideas, then emerge triumphantly from the laboratory to publish their results. Sometimes that happens.

Just as a single important equation in physics can hold a myriad of solutions and describe a dazzling array of behavior, so too a sufficiently rich story.