From time to time, I come across news covering collaborations between companies which are either promising or surprising. Sometimes both. A future full of science fiction technologies in medicine &…
Category: futurism
This video shows our key technology demonstrations and equipment developed in our lab, including: 100kW CW gyrotron assembly and operation, beaming of 100kW of…
Jason Silva isn’t a scientist, he’s a synthesizer. And he is a quoting machine. Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson, Ernest Becker, Erik Davis, Steven Johnson. These are Silva’s heroes, and he aims to infect us with his enthusiasm for their ideas. In his new “Creative Sessions” interviews, Silva goes straight to the source.
Instead of a quote from Erik Davis? Davis (author of TechGnosis) is there, sitting on his couch for an hour-long conversation—in which he gets plenty of time to frame his ideas, put meat on the bones, add context. Read more
“In Designed for the Future, author Jared Green asks eighty of today’s most innovative architects, urban planners, landscape architects, journalists, artists, and environmental leaders the same question: what gives you the hope that a sustainable future is possible?”
Edge of Dark is part space-opera, part coming-of-age story, and part exploration of the relationship between humans and the post-human descendants who may ultimately transcend them.
The book takes place in the same universe as Brenda Cooper’s “Ruby’s Song” books (The Creative Fire; The Diamond Deep). However, you don’t need to have read those books to enjoy this one. The story in Edge of Dark picks up decades after the earlier books.
The setting is a solar system in which the most Earth-like planet, once nearly ecologically destroyed, is now in large part a wilderness preserve, still undergoing active restoration. Most humans live on massive space stations in the inner solar system. A few live on smaller space stations a bit further out, closer to the proverbial “Edge”. And beyond that? Beyond that, far from the sun, dwell exiles, cast out long ago for violating social norms by daring to go too far in tinkering with the human mind and body.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that those exiles have grown in strength and have become, in some cases, not just transhuman, but truly posthuman. What follows is a story that is rich in politics, and even more rich in plausible, fascinating, and nuanced tensions created by this juxtaposition of human and posthuman.
There are a tremendous number of stories out there that simple-mindedly posit post-humans as a grave threat and enemy to humanity. (Think “Terminator.”) There are others that take a view that human and post- or trans- human can all learn to get along. (Think “X-Men”.) Brenda Cooper has done something remarkable here: She’s given us a story that isn’t simple or moralistic. It’s complicated. At the beginning of the book, I expected a simple morality play with a specific outcome. Later, I changed my mind. Then I changed it again. What she’s presented is messy, just like real life. It’s wound up with politics, just like real life.
The early parts of the book introduce new characters and new settings. The later parts of the book are what grabbed me. In the end, I was extremely happy I read this. Edge of Dark is a unique view of the interaction of human and post-human in my experience. I recommend it highly.
Anyone who posts to the Lifeboat Foundation blog gets a chance to win a signed copy of Edge of Dark!
The deadline for the contest is June 30. If you need access to our blog, send an email with the subject of “Lifeboat Foundation blog” to [email protected].
It’s hard to believe, but…
Ten years ago…
- The first video was uploaded to YouTube.
- Facebook, then just a year old, dropped “the” from its old URL “thefacebook.com” after acquiring “facebook.com” for $200K.
- An early prototype of an autonomous car completed the DARPA Grand Challenge for the first time.
- The term “drone” meant a military weapon system.
- Bitcoin and blockchain didn’t exist, and wouldn’t be created for three more years.
- Android was a small startup that Google had just acquired.
- There were 6.4 billion humans on Earth, only ~1 billion were online, and none of them had heard of Uber or AirBnb. Read more
Adam Rothstein | Motherboard
“In the city of the future, trains would rocket across overhead rails, airplanes would dive from the sky to land on the roof, and skyscrapers would stretch their sinewed limbs into the heavens to feel the hot pulse of radio waves beating across the planet. This artistic, but unbridled enthusiasm was the last century’s first expression of wholesale tech optimism.” Read more
Article: Harnessing “Black Holes”: The Large Hadron Collider – Ultimate Weapon of Mass Destruction
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