All this said the ISS would be a great candidate for interplanetary travel. Although it might look a little ungainly, in the vacuum of space there’s little concern for aerodynamics (besides, for a station orbiting at a speed of 17,000 miles/hr, its shape is hardly holding it back!). It’s a tried and tested space-worthy candidate. Plus, the Constellation Program would fit right in. Perhaps the Orion module could be integrated into the station, and the engines from the powerful Ares rocket could be attached for propulsion. If something a little gentler is required, ion propulsion engines are becoming more and more sophisticated.

5) The Apocalypse will be an adventure. It won’t. Somehow when we tell stories of the end of the world, we tend to always leave out the most fundamental experience of life during a disaster, which is powerless suffering. Disasters, as I’ve written before are all about bad food and wet feet and sick babies and pointless pain.

But reality is quite different from this. In reality, even the worst large-scale disasters come in variable speeds; in even the worst disasters, effects are uneven, with some places devastated and others left only mildly scathed; and in almost all disasters, rebuilding begins almost immediately (even the Black Death killing a third to half of the population didn’t put much of dent in Europe’s evolution – indeed some argue it accelerated trade and innovation).

In reality, in a disaster those with the largest stable group and the highest degree of cooperation come out on top, and, in fact, it is often those places which are best governed and most socially coherent that assist other places in the rebuilding… and those hard-hit places are generally quite receptive to good ideas for putting the pieces back together.