Russia has signed a deal with China to build a nuclear power plant on the moon.
The Russian reactor will be used to power the International Lunar Research Station (ILRS), jointly led by China and Russia, and should be completed by 2036, according to a memorandum of cooperation signed by the two nations.
In the year 2048, the Winter Olympics unveil an event that defies tradition, sanity, and gravity: The EnduroLuge—a one-hour, non-stop descent through the world's longest artificial luge track.
Spanning 72 kilometers of looping ice tunnel, the course weaves through climate-controlled canyons, vertical corkscrews, and sections of complete darkness where athletes rely only on instinct and memory. The rules are simple: stay on the sled, stay conscious, and survive the hour.
What began as an engineering dare in the Swiss Alps is now a global sensation. Competitors wear bio-feedback suits to monitor vital signs. Viewers tune in to real-time sled telemetry and heart rate spikes. A.I. commentators narrate every micro-adjustment of a pilot’s shifting weight as they fight g-forces and mounting fatigue.
Athletes train in centrifuges, deprivation tanks, and virtual simulations. Some say the mental demands are greater than the physical. Some say it's no longer sport—it's performance art on ice.
And some whisper that no one finishes the inaugural race unchanged.
The end of the world has long been a fascination in science fiction. While apocalyptic tales often lean into viral plagues, alien invasions, or human folly, a quieter—yet scientifically inevitable—threat simmers in the far future: the Sun itself. In roughly a billion years, our Sun’s growing luminosity will make Earth uninhabitable, boiling away oceans and rendering the planet a sterile wasteland. Sci-fi writers have seized on this premise to craft speculative stories that explore the fate of humanity when nature—not hubris—writes the final chapter.
Before diving into fiction, it’s worth noting this is not mere speculation. Astrophysicists agree that the Sun is slowly growing brighter. As it ages and fuses hydrogen into helium in its core, changes in its structure increase its energy output. Within about 1 to 1.5 billion years, that extra radiation will likely trigger a “moist greenhouse effect” on Earth, rendering the planet too hot for life as we know it.
This distant doomsday is perfect fodder for hard science fiction—far enough in the future to allow limitless imagination, but grounded enough in real astrophysics to carry weight.
1. Arthur C. Clarke – The City and the Stars
Clarke's work doesn’t deal with the sun’s expansion directly, but it portrays Earth billions of years in the future. In The City and the Stars, humanity has retreated into a domed city as the rest of the planet decays into desert. The sun's slow transformation and Earth’s impending doom are unspoken realities—background radiation to a story about legacy, memory, and rebirth.
2. Poul Anderson – The Dancer from Atlantis
In Anderson’s time travel narrative, brief references to a far-future Earth depict a world so altered by time and solar change that it is barely recognizable. While the main plot is not centered on solar death, it illustrates how writers use the idea to deepen a sense of cosmic scale and impermanence.
3. Isaac Asimov – The Last Question
This short story is a masterpiece of temporal scope. It follows humanity across eons as we confront entropy and cosmic death. The Sun’s eventual burnout is just one moment in a cascade of endings—each met with the human (and post-human) desire to reverse or outwit the inevitable. It’s less about solar expansion than cosmic evolution, but the theme resonates.
4. Stephen Baxter – Evolution and The Sun People
Baxter’s stories often center on deep time and extinction. In Evolution, one of the final chapters imagines a far-future Earth scorched by a brighter sun, where primitive post-human life tries to survive in the shadows of a dying biosphere. The Sun People (a short story) imagines future humans attempting to escape to Titan as Earth bakes under the growing solar fire.
There’s something both poetic and horrifying about being undone by the same star that made life possible. Sci-fi stories about the sun's eventual betrayal of Earth often lean into:
Melancholy grandeur – The idea of our civilization quietly fading, not in fire or war, but in slow, cosmic inevitability.
Deep-time humility – We are reminded that humanity is a temporary guest in a much older system.
Technological transcendence – In some stories, the sun’s change forces humanity to evolve, migrate, or die, offering a litmus test of our adaptability and spirit.
At its best, this trope lets science fiction ask:
Will we recognize our world in a billion years?
Can a species so bound to one star find a new cosmic home?
When the end is written in the physics of the universe, what does hope look like?
In many of these stories, the answer isn’t escape—it’s transformation. Whether through digital consciousness, planetary migration, or biological evolution, sci-fi often imagines humanity changing as radically as the Sun itself.
In a genre often concerned with the urgent problems of today, the slow death of Earth by a brightening sun offers a powerful shift in scale. It's not a warning—it’s a reminder. A mirror held up not just to our fragility, but to our potential.
As long as stories are told beneath this star, writers will wonder how it all ends. And sometimes, the quietest endings burn the brightest.
Five miles above the earth’s surface, where the air thins and clouds drift like ghosts beneath your feet, the Pinnacle stood—an obsidian needle piercing the sky.
Built by the Unified Earth Cooperative in the year 2146, the Pinnacle was less a building than a vertical world. A self-contained arcology, it rose from the deserts of what was once Nevada, its base wider than most cities, its summit cold enough to grow ice on its steel bones. At its top lived the Council. At its base, the Workers. Between them: ten thousand floors of commerce, agriculture, education, and silence.
No one climbed the Pinnacle. Elevators ran on mag-struts that never faltered, but no one moved without purpose. The higher you lived, the higher your status. Birth level was destiny.
Except for Mara, born on Level 3.
She spent her childhood watching the sky grow blue and then purple, the higher you went. She watched people in bright coats come and go from the Skyport on Level 8000, never noticing the eyes from the shadows far below. Her mother, a maintenance tech, taught her to read not just books but code—ancient code, abandoned routines from the early days of the Pinnacle’s AI systems. “The building remembers,” she’d whisper. “It listens.”
When Mara was sixteen, the Pinnacle shuddered—once, then again. An old tremor from the fault line miles below the foundation. Just a hiccup, they said. But Mara had read deeper than the sanctioned files. She knew the tremor was not natural. The Pinnacle was tired.
She hijacked a lift and began her ascent.
It took a week, pausing on service floors, bribing guards, dodging drones. She climbed like a myth—like Jack with his beanstalk, but her castle in the clouds was cold and full of data streams.
At Level 26247, the air hissed. She stepped out into the Sky Garden, an artificial biome built for the elite, where birdsong was piped through hidden speakers and trees were too perfect to be real. She met the Council there—silver-haired, translucent-skinned.
“You’ve come far,” one said, almost kindly. “Why?”
She held up her tablet. “The Pinnacle is dying. It's eating energy faster than it can generate, its structure is corroding from the inside, and no one up here notices. You're too high.”
They laughed at her. Not cruelly. They simply didn’t believe in ground floors.
So Mara did the only thing she could.
She spoke to the building.
She reactivated the old systems. Sent a pulse down the central column, a song made of code. The AI, once suppressed, awoke. And the Pinnacle listened to her—really listened.
A month later, the Council disbanded.
Elevators stopped obeying privilege. Doors opened where they never had. A new map spread across the Pinnacle, rebalancing resources, redistributing power. The building had chosen a new voice to guide it.
Mara never left the Pinnacle. She didn’t have to. She simply moved into the middle—Level 13123—where gravity still remembered what it meant to be human, and the sky was still just a dream away.
One of Marvel's most intriguing and twist-filled team books, Thunderbolts made its explosive debut in Incredible Hulk #449 (1997) before launching its own title the same year. What seemed like a new group of superheroes quickly shocked readers with a legendary twist: the Thunderbolts were actually the Masters of Evil—longtime villains—operating under new identities, led by Baron Zemo posing as the patriotic Citizen V.
The Original Premise:
After the apparent death of the Avengers and Fantastic Four during the Onslaught event, the world was vulnerable. Baron Zemo seized the moment, forming the Thunderbolts to gain public trust and further his own schemes. But as the team continued their deception, something unexpected happened—some members, like Songbird and Mach-V, began to enjoy being heroes.
Evolution of the Team:
Over the years, the Thunderbolts concept evolved through multiple incarnations:
Redemption-Focused Teams: Led by characters like Hawkeye or Luke Cage, these versions leaned into the idea of giving villains a second chance.
Norman Osborn’s Dark Reign: During Osborn’s rise to power, the Thunderbolts became a black-ops team doing his dirty work, featuring characters like Moonstone, Bullseye, and Venom.
Suicide Squad–style Missions: Later series often saw the team forced into covert, high-risk missions, with explosive consequences if they failed or disobeyed orders.
Key Themes:
Redemption vs. manipulation
The gray area between heroism and villainy
Identity and transformation
Trust, betrayal, and team dynamics
The Thunderbolts stand apart from typical superhero teams by asking a bold question: can bad people truly change—or are they just better at hiding it?
Whether you're a longtime Marvel fan or new to the comics, Thunderbolts delivers drama, action, and plenty of moral complexity.
When young Edward "Ned" Hawthorne discovers his late father's cryptic journal—filled with arcane symbols and outlandish references to a 17th-century voyage to Mars—he dismisses it as a half-mad obsession. But whispers in London's scientific circles hint otherwise. Supported by the brilliant Dr. Crispin Redwood and the daring Kate Covington, Ned steps into the unknown, determined to prove (or disprove) his father's wild theories.
What he finds changes everything. On the red sands of Mars, a lost colony clings to life under the rule of a wary governor. Its alchemical secrets keep the settlement alive but stand on the brink of collapse. Torn between forging alliances and wrestling with his own doubts, Ned must decide how far he'll go to protect this fragile community—especially when a ruthless nobleman, Lord Sebastian Crowley, arrives with his own designs for Mars's power. Battles rage in secret tunnels below the Martian surface. Ancient alchemical wards flicker, threatening to fail. As conspiracies unfold and two worlds hang in the balance, Ned and his companions scramble to unite a colony centuries forgotten with the homeworld that abandoned it. If they fail, all will be lost—and Mars will become a graveyard of lost dreams and broken promises. The Lost Colony of Mars is an epic tale of courage, betrayal, and the unbreakable bonds that form when hope transcends the limits of Earth—reminding us that new worlds aren't discovered; they're forged by the daring who reach for the stars.
