openspace4life: (Default)
"And that's your guiding star, isn't it? What's of use."

- Dr. Simon Tam, in Serenity

"Have you ever wondered how we will be remembered a thousand years from now, when we are as remote as Charlemagne? Many [technophiles] would be satisfied with a list that includes the following: the technoscientific revolution continued, globalized, and unstoppable; computer capacity approaching that of the human brain; robotic auxiliaries proliferating; cells rebuilt from molecules; space colonized; population growth slackening; the world democratized; international trade accelerated; people better fed and healthier than ever before; life span stretched; religion holding firm."

- E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life, Chapter 6

One libertarian technophile named Charles Stross recently published a novel, Accelerando, envisioning a near future that closely matches these predictions. It's certainly not a standard take on radical optimism, though. read more )
openspace4life: (Default)
"Call us a disease, I don't care--I am a human, and I want us to spread everywhere like an epidemic, so we can never be stamped out."

-Colonel Graff of the Interstellar Colonization Ministry, in Shadow of the Giant

(For those few who don't know what I'm talking about, this is how an AI program named Agent Smith describes humanity in the movie The Matrix: "I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet..." Source)

March 2015

S M T W T F S
1234567
89101112 1314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031    

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jul. 5th, 2025 05:03 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios