An interesting FAQ on the
meaning of life has some relevance for forward thinkers, and indeed for anyone wondering what kind of career they should go into if they want their work to matter to the future. Specifically, the following section:
What will make a difference two hundred million years from now? In order of importance:
Advances in supercomputing hardware and artificial intelligence.
Advances in computing hardware and software programming techniques.
Advances in cognitive science, neurosurgery, neuroimaging, and neurosilicate interfaces.
Deregulation or capital flows which make the above work easier.
Advances in science and technology in general.
Advances in the computing industry and the Internet in general.
Preventing riots, wars, and other disruptions to civilization.
Providing essential infrastructure and manufacturing for the world economy.
Providing fringe infrastructure for the world economy.
The
Extropy Institute is dedicated to a so-called Transhumanist future. That may sound like jargon, and indeed it is, but they are only one of a handful of intellectual groups still devoted to anything like the concept of a coming Utopia. Perfection is never possible, of course, but I believe the striving for it is what keeps us alive. And these guys are definitely striving. How can you not love a group whose slogan reads
Incubating positive futures since 1988 through tomorrow?
The Future And Its Enemies is a book that suggests a new political dichotomy: not liberal versus conservative, but those who embrace change and those who feel the future is something to approach with caution. Myself, I'm firmly in the former camp.
Okay, I haven't been too good about keeping this blog up (one blog is exhausting enough by itself). I do intend to keep it up, and a radical redesign is on the way. In the meantime, here's a whole passel of interesting futurist sites to take note of:
A Futurist at the Movies is very erudite, and ranks films according to the believability of their future.
Revelations of the Future Kind is a list of links so comprehensive that it almost makes me throw up my hands and give up on the whole Future Daze idea. Almost ...
An Illustrated Speculative Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change is wonderfully earnest, although there's a little less of the "illustrated" than the title might make you think. Still, an excellent place to start visualizing the future.
Five years ago, experts at the University of Washington produced a
Guide to the Year 2088.FutureFile claims to be the Web's leading resource about the future, although author Todd Maffin seems to be as busy as I am -- the top link is from May 13.
Around the turn of the millennium, Britain's Sunday Times came up with a
Chronicle of the Future (Dammit, that's the name I was going to use for my futurism project ...) It suffers from the expected problems of newspaper sensationalism and pre-millennial hype, but is still worth checking out for the illustrations and the wonderful style: writing from the future, not to it.
E.T., Don’t Phone Home; Drop a Line Instead
NEW BRUNSWICK/PISCATAWAY, N.J. – Were E.T. really interested in getting in touch with home, he might be better off writing than phoning, according to Christopher Rose, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
Rose contends that inscribing information and physically sending it to some location in deep space is more energy-efficient than pulsing it out on radio waves, which disperse as they travel.
“Think of a flashlight beam,” Rose says. “Its intensity decreases as it gets farther from its source. The same is true of the beam of a laser pointer, though the distance is much longer. The unavoidable fact is that waves, both light and radio, disperse over distance, and over great distance, they disperse a lot.”
Rose and Gregory Wright, a physicist, are co-authors of a paper titled, “Inscribed matter as an energy-efficient means of communication with an extraterrestrial civilization,” which appears on the cover of the September 2 issue of Nature. The paper grew out of Rose’s work at the Wireless Information Network Laboratory (WINLAB) at Rutgers’ School of Engineering. “Our original question was, ‘How do you get the most bits per second over a wireless channel?’” Rose says. This led him to consider distance, and the “energy budget” required for sending a signal. The budget increases with distance, Rose contends, and the detectability of the signal diminishes. The less detectable a message is, the lower its speed.
In addition, Rose says, when waves pass a particular point, they’ve passed it for good. Potential recipients at that point might be unable to snag a passing message for any one of many reasons. They might not be listening. They might be extinct. So someone sending such a message would have to send it over and over to increase the chance of its being received. The energy budget goes up accordingly. A physical message, however, stays where it lands.
Rose is in favor of listening for that close encounter, but he thinks researchers should have their eyes open, too. Rose speculates that “messages” might be anything from actual text in a real language to (more likely) organic material embedded in an asteroid – or in the crater made by such an asteroid upon striking Earth. Messages – and Rose suggests there might be many of them, perhaps millions – might literally be at our feet. They might be awaiting our discovery on the moon, or on one of Jupiter’s moons. They might be dramatic or mundane. A bottle floating in the ocean is just a bottle floating in the ocean – unless, upon closer inspection, it turns out to have a message in it.
Rose concedes that this idea may be hard to accept, but this difficulty arises from our concern about time. If the sender isn’t concerned about reaching the recipient and getting an answer in his own lifetime, inscribing and sending is the way to go.
“If haste is unimportant, sending messages inscribed on some material can be strikingly more efficient than communicating by electromagnetic waves,” Rose says.
Of course, E.T.’s choice of medium might be affected by how much he had to say. “Since messages require protection from cosmic radiation, and small messages might be difficult to find amid the clutter near a recipient, ‘inscribed matter’ is most effective for long, archival messages, as opposed to potentially short ‘we exist’ announcements,” Rose says.
