It’s the classic awkward icebreaker: If you could invite anyone, dead or alive, to a dinner party, who would it be? Aristotle? Ailias is a company based in Surrey, UK, which promises to make that hypothetical a reality. It can reanimate historical and current legends with 3D hologram avatars that are fully conversational, knowledgeable, and can be delivered to you in a box.

The technology isn’t bespoke. Many companies provide life-size hologram displays for events and parties, everything from floating 3D displays of Santa’s sleigh or 3D Holo-Trucks. The physicist Dennis Gabor even won a Nobel Prize in 1971 for his work that led to holography, even though a life-size Elon Musk isn’t probably the result that he (or anyone) had in mind.

What sets Ailias apart is the company’s playful focus on history and education, which the company describes as “ultra character creation.” The company focuses on animating dead notable personalities into real-feeling conversational holograms, designed for interaction rather than spectacle. Ailias’ holograms can juggle, do squats, or even breakdance, making your party, exhibition or just about any event an extra special occasion.

Man in the Box

Ailias offers pricing on request, with costs varying depending on whether clients opt for rental, purchase, or whether you’re seeking bespoke characters and activation. When I visited the offices, director Adrian Broadway noted that a minimum week’s rental would run into the thousands of pounds, which includes software subscription costs, delivery, and installation.

Ailias’ current roster has over 70 characters that could be staged in their bespoke boxes, including Henry VIII, Beethoven, Julius Caesar, and a suspiciously sexy Cleopatra. That these are mostly historical figures is no coincidence—Broadway describes these boxes as great for educational settings or museum exhibitions, but admits it also has to do with copyright restrictions on characters as well.

In the United Kingdom, the use of someone’s identity for commercial purposes is treated as a trademark. (In the United States, the right to publicity is protected in some form in most states.) That is to say, if Ailias used a well-known or living celebrity, that would likely land the company in court. But a long-dead historical figure like Henry VIII is unlikely to cause trouble.

In this instance, Ailias had cleared the copyright concerns for the 7-foot-tall AI Albert Einstein, so after hitting the Start Chat button, I talked to Einstein about a wide range of topics, everything from science, music, to his thoughts on Elon Musk. He had a pleasant, soft German accent, and I was impressed at the response speed. Ailias notes that it takes under two seconds for each avatar to respond, which feels about right.

For an educational hologram, I often found myself answering more questions than I was asking. There were times Einstein felt like a large, animated ChatGPT conversation but with a German accent. This is to be expected, as Ailias relies on open source AI and third-party generative video to create the conversations. But there’s no sense of verisimilitude anyway, since Einstein wasn’t really 7 feet tall. I took the opportunity to ask, like an 11-year-old boy would, “Who would win in a fight, you or Isaac Newton?”

It held up as any AI language model would, deflecting back to its area of expertise by settling on a sensible, “It would be more of a fight of ideas.” In the aim of being at least semi-professional, that’s as far as I went. But I’d imagine the language model would do fine with most things a preteen could throw at it.

But in the worst worst-case scenario, we don’t have any control. Instead, the station will crack through the atmosphere. Sure, many pieces will likely end up in the ocean, but some might hit people, possibly in a town or a city. The station could break apart across thousands of miles and multiple continents. This would be exceedingly hard to anticipate. As NASA puts it, “Calculating the probability of this penetration cascading into loss of deorbit capability has a very large range of variables, making predictions ineffective.”

This almost certainly won’t happen to the ISS. At the same time, it’s a far more extreme version of the only way an American space station has ever come down. In 1979, after years spent vacant in orbit, Skylab, the US’s first space station, started sinking toward the atmosphere, where it threatened to fall and drop molten spacecraft parts on Earth. At that point, NASA officials had to remotely wake up its computers and, with only limited control of the station, direct it over a location that would endanger the fewest humans.

In the months before, space agency officials were in frequent contact with the State Department, which disseminated the latest predicted trajectories to embassies across the world. In these situations, oops doesn’t cut it: When one of the Salyuts, a Soviet space station model, was deorbited a few decades ago, flaming bits were littered across Argentina, scaring people and requiring the deployment of at least a few firefighters, according to local newspaper reports.

The ISS is far bigger than either the Salyuts or Skylab. In an uncontrolled deorbit, pieces of debris “up to car and train size,” say experts on the official ISS space station advisory committee, will rain down from the sky. NASA confirms this would pose “a significant risk to the public worldwide.”

OK—the nightmare is over. Thus concludes my anxiety-ridden spiral. Here are the facts as they stand in 2026:

As far as WIRED can tell, no one has ever died because a piece of space station hit them. Some pieces of Skylab did fall on a remote part of Western Australia, and Jimmy Carter formally apologized, but no one was hurt. The odds of a piece hitting a populated area are low. Most of the world is ocean, and most land is uninhabited. In 2024, a piece of space trash that was ejected from the ISS survived atmospheric burn-up, fell through the sky, and crashed through the roof of a home belonging to a very real, and rightfully perturbed, Florida man. He tweeted about it and then sued NASA, but he wasn’t injured.

For this story, WIRED reviewed dozens of NASA documents, including backup plans and contingencies for emergencies, and spoke to more than a dozen people, including three astronauts who’ve visited the ISS, and no one seemed that freaked out. One astronaut said the most worrisome scenario that actively crossed his mind in orbit was getting a toothache. The ISS has had some emergencies, including a first-ever medical evacuation in January, but generally things have been remarkably stable. In fact, one of the most impressive things about the ISS is that nothing very dramatic has ever happened to it. No experiment has gone too haywire. It hasn’t been hit by an asteroid.

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in networking is increasing rapidly, with the latest stage in this technological evolution seeing comms tech firm Nokia announce a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to bring the first agentic AI-powered 5G-Advanced network slicing solution in a live 5G network.

The intent-based 5G slicing innovation combines Nokia’s network slicing with AWS AI platform technologies to empower comms providers in delivering premium services precisely where and when they are needed.

Outlining the challenge that they believe is facing the industry, Nokia and AWS said that providers can face challenges optimising network performance during unpredictable events such as traffic surges, emergencies or mass gatherings, which can result in suboptimal service quality and inefficient resource utilisation.

Hosted by AWS, the autonomous network slicing intelligence dynamically adapts and manages even the most challenging traffic conditions across varied geographical areas. The agentic AI-powered approach is said to be the key to unlocking “significant” customer value across diverse applications and use cases by creating premium services that respond intelligently to dynamic conditions, ensuring optimal performance precisely where and when customers need it. 

The end-to-end advanced network slicing technology across RAN-transport-core especially utilises Nokia’s 5G AirScale base station, MantaRay SMO and agentic AI modules, which are seamlessly integrated with the Amazon Bedrock artificial intelligence platform.

The agentic AI modules operate in multiple modes: chatbot, on-demand, scheduled and autonomous. All modules interact with Amazon Bedrock via APIs. Furthermore, applications and use cases powered by agentic AIs are enhanced with Nokia’s Edge Slicing solution, bringing cloud applications and workloads directly to mobile users and devices over high-capacity, secure and low-latency networks.

Nokia noted that its AI slicing technology uses agentic AI to analyse real-world internet data, including locations, events, traffic, incidents and maps to deliver adaptive network slicing. Cited typical use cases for the agentic AI-powered 5G-Advanced network slicing include intent-based enterprise and industrial slicing, on-demand slicing with agentic AI, and agentic AI for mass events.

As regards to the former, the intent-based enterprise and industrial slicing technology will see use in measuring live network KPIs such as bit rate and latency, and autonomously adjusts RAN policies to meet enterprise SLAs across campuses, business parks and city areas. This is intended to enhance premium slicing services for critical applications in manufacturing, the internet of things (IoT), drones, smart cities, hospitals, energy transportation and ports.

On-demand slicing with agentic AI also boosts network performance for selected 5G base stations. When activated by external data, Nokia believes that this service will provide first responders and public safety authorities with better network connectivity during emergencies. On-demand network slicing with agentic-AI is said to preserve quality of service for premium 5G+/5G Advanced and FWA customers using gaming, streaming, XR and AI applications in response to major traffic surges, weather conditions and environmental changes.

Nokia added that agentic AI for mass events will deliver much broader capacity availability during high-demand moments such as concerts and sporting events. AI analyses network data, infers patterns and sets slicing policies for scheduled events, optimising premium 5G slicing for VIP spectators, payment applications, fan engagement, video broadcasting and operational crews in arenas, parks and conference centres.

Operators Du and Orange are the first to explore the innovation in their respective networks. In November 2024, Nokia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) telecoms and digital services provider du carried out a transport network slicing trial to gain benefits of dedicated infrastructure and reduce overall energy consumption.