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#1 2004-05-22 06:11:09
- Palomar
- Member
- From: USA
- Registered: 2002-05-30
- Posts: 9,734
Re: Gray Matter(s) - ...brainwaves of the future
*I'm posting this a bit "tongue in cheek."
I recently purchased a couple of those old Ace Doubles -- sci-fi stories published in the 1960s. You know, a story on one side of the book; flip it over and there's the 2nd story.
I notice the first story (published in 1965) is set in 2017; an America patterned after Orwell's _1984_.
Okay, so sci-fi writers seem to like to portray future human societies either in (to various degrees, depending on author) a positive-utopian light (humans become more refined, less war-like, more reasonable, kind, etc., through continued natural evolution) or in a negative-utopian light (humans enslaved by further mind-control and manipulation techniques, usually with the aid of technology).
So, which do you think is the most likely scenario for the future?
--Cindy 
We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...
--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)
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#2 2004-05-22 20:00:57
- Josh Cryer
- Moderator
- Registered: 2001-09-29
- Posts: 3,830
Re: Gray Matter(s) - ...brainwaves of the future
Quite a bit of scifi is really despotic in my opinion (maybe more than that which is utopian). I believe that our future is bright, but I don't see us all being "kind and reasonable" etc. I think that short of brainwashing all of society, there will always be people who want to cause crap for everyone.
I guess Kurzweil's writings have influanced me the most, although Iain Banks books are really the implementation of those idea in a fictional universe (Kurzweil thinks that "machine" intelligence would be far more pervasive, and I disagree with that because I think humans will find such hightened intelligence boring since it leaves... literally... nothing to the imagination, nothing to chance, etc).
Some useful links while MER are active. [url=http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html]Offical site[/url] [url=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.html]NASA TV[/url] [url=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/]JPL MER2004[/url] [url=http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html]Text feed[/url]
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The amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth totals some 3.9 million exajoules a year.
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#3 2004-05-22 20:23:50
- John Creighton
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- From: Nova Scotia, Canada
- Registered: 2001-09-04
- Posts: 2,401
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Re: Gray Matter(s) - ...brainwaves of the future
I don’t know….you may see a little bit of everything depending on what part of what planet you are on. I think the human story will just get larger and more complex.
Dig into the [url=http://child-civilization.blogspot.com/2006/12/political-grab-bag.html]political grab bag[/url] at [url=http://child-civilization.blogspot.com/]Child Civilization[/url]
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