Nuclear Futurism

Nuclear Futurism PDF Author: Liam Sprod
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780994338
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the time of ends, the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons confronts us with a new philosophy of the future.

Nuclear Futurism

Nuclear Futurism PDF Author: Liam Sprod
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1780994338
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 147

Get Book Here

Book Description
In the time of ends, the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons confronts us with a new philosophy of the future.

Science Fiction and Futurism

Science Fiction and Futurism PDF Author: Ace G. Pilkington
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786498560
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
Science and science fiction have become inseparable--with common stories, interconnected thought experiments, and shared language. This reference book lays out that relationship and its all-but-magical terms and ideas. Those who think seriously about the future are changing the world, reshaping how we speak and how we think. This book fully covers the terms that collected, clarified and crystallized the futurists' ideas, sometimes showing them off, sometimes slowing them down, and sometimes propelling them to fame and making them the common currency of our culture. The many entries in this encyclopedic work offer a guided tour of the vast territories occupied by science fiction and futurism. In his Foreword, David Brin says, "Provocative and enticing? Filled with 'huh!' moments and leads to great stories? That describes this volume."

The Future of Nuclear Waste

The Future of Nuclear Waste PDF Author: Rosemary Joyce
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190888156
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Get Book Here

Book Description
How can nations ensure that buried nuclear waste goes undisturbed for thousands of years? The United States government tried to solve this problem with the help of experts they identified in communication, materials science, and futurism. From the perspective of a contemporary archaeologist, The Future of Nuclear Waste looks at what these experts suggested, and what the government endorsed: designs for a modern monument, an artificial ruin, a purpose-built archaeological site that would escape future exploration. One design, selected for development, argued that because specific archaeological sites and objects (among them Stonehenge, Serpent Mound, the Rosetta Stone, and rock art) made long ago have endured and are seen as significant today, contemporary engineers could build monuments that would be equally effective in conveying messages that last even longer. An alternative proposal, which government planners set aside, was rooted in the idea that universal archetypes of design arouse similar human emotions in all times and places. Both proposals used common sense, assuming that human reactions and understandings are relatively predictable. Employing an anthropology of common sense, Rosemary Joyce explores why people chosen for their expertise relied on generalizations contradicted by the actual history of preservation and interpretation of archaeological sites and the closest analogues to archetype-based designs, which are the large scale installations produced in the Land Art movement. The book reveals the underlying imagination shared by the experts, government planners, and artists, in which the American West is an empty space available for projects like these. It counters this with the dissenting voices of indigenous scholars and activists who document the presence on these nuclear landscapes of Native American people. The result is an eye-opening and unique demonstration of how a deep understanding of the remote past informs critical debates about the present.

Artificial intelligence and the future of warfare

Artificial intelligence and the future of warfare PDF Author: James Johnson
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526145073
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Get Book Here

Book Description
This volume offers an innovative and counter-intuitive study of how and why artificial intelligence-infused weapon systems will affect the strategic stability between nuclear-armed states. Johnson demystifies the hype surrounding artificial intelligence (AI) in the context of nuclear weapons and, more broadly, future warfare. The book highlights the potential, multifaceted intersections of this and other disruptive technology – robotics and autonomy, cyber, drone swarming, big data analytics, and quantum communications – with nuclear stability. Anticipating and preparing for the consequences of the AI-empowered weapon systems are fast becoming a critical task for national security and statecraft. Johnson considers the impact of these trends on deterrence, military escalation, and strategic stability between nuclear-armed states – especially China and the United States. The book draws on a wealth of political and cognitive science, strategic studies, and technical analysis to shed light on the coalescence of developments in AI and other disruptive emerging technologies. Artificial intelligence and the future of warfare sketches a clear picture of the potential impact of AI on the digitized battlefield and broadens our understanding of critical questions for international affairs. AI will profoundly change how wars are fought, and how decision-makers think about nuclear deterrence, escalation management, and strategic stability – but not for the reasons you might think.

Future Fear

Future Fear PDF Author: John Potts
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031594126
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description


Film and the Nuclear Age

Film and the Nuclear Age PDF Author: Toni A. Perrine
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317732197
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Get Book Here

Book Description
Just as we generally pay scant attention to the potential dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war, until quite recently, scholars have made limited critical attempts to understand the cultural manifestations of the nuclear status quo. Films that feature nuclear issues most often simplify and trivialize the subject. They also convey a sense of the ambivalence and anxiety that pervades cultural responses to our nuclear capability. The production of popular narrative films with nuclear topics largely conforms to periods of heightened nuclear awareness or fear, such as the fear of fallout from nuclear testing manifested in the atomic creatures in science fiction movies of the late 1950s. By their very numbers, and through a set of recurring stylistic and narrative conventions, nuclear films reflect a deep-seated cultural anxiety. This study includes detailed textual analysis of films that depict nuclear issues including the development and use of the first atomic bombs, nuclear testing and the fear of fallout, nuclear power, the Cold War arms race, loose nukes, and future nuclear war and its aftermath.(Includes bibliographic references, index, filmography, choronology; Illustrated)

Tense Future

Tense Future PDF Author: Paul K. Saint-Amour
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0190266295
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 369

Get Book Here

Book Description
We know that trauma can leave syndromes in its wake. But can the anticipation of violence be a form of violence as well? Tense Future argues that it can-that twentieth-century war technologies and practices, particularly the aerial bombing of population centers, introduced non-combatants to a coercive and traumatizing expectation. During wartime, civilians braced for the next raid; during peacetime they braced for the next war. The pre-traumatic stress they experienced permeates the century's public debates and cultural works. In a series of groundbreaking readings, Saint-Amour illustrates how air war prophets theorized the wounding power of anticipation, how archive theory changed course in war's shadow, and how speculative fiction conjured visions of a civilizational collapse that would end literacy itself. And in this book's central chapters, he shows us how Ford Madox Ford, Robert Musil, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and other interwar modernist writers faced the memory of one war and the prospect of another, some by pitting their fictions' encyclopedic scale and formal turbulence against total war, others by conceding war's inevitability while refusing to long for a politically regressive peace. Total war: a conflict that exempts no one, disregarding any difference between soldier and civilian. Tense Future forever alters our understanding of the concept of total war by tracing its emergence during the First World War, its incubation in air power theory between the wars, and above all its profound partiality. For total war, during most of the twentieth century, meant conflict between imperial nation states; it did not include the violence those states routinely visited on colonial subjects during peacetime. Tacking back and forth between metropole and colony, between world war and police action, Saint-Amour describes the interwar refashioning of a world system of violence-production, one that remains largely intact in our own moment of perpetual interwar.

Visions of Energy Futures

Visions of Energy Futures PDF Author: Benjamin K. Sovacool
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429632509
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book examines the visions, fantasies, frames, discourses, imaginaries, and expectations associated with six state-of-the-art energy systems—nuclear power, hydrogen fuel cells, shale gas, clean coal, smart meters, and electric vehicles—playing a key role in current deliberations about low-carbon energy supply and use. Visions of Energy Futures: Imagining and Innovating Low-Carbon Transitions unveils what the future of energy systems could look like, and how their meanings are produced, often alongside moments of contestation. Theoretically, it analyzes these technological case studies with emerging concepts from various disciplines: utopianism (history of technology), symbolic convergence (communication studies), technological frames (social construction of technology), discursive coalitions (discourse analysis and linguistics), sociotechnical imaginaries (science and technology studies), and the sociology of expectations (innovation studies, future studies). It draws from these cases to create a synthetic set of dichotomies and frameworks for energy futures based on original data collected across two global epistemic communities— nuclear physicists and hydrogen engineers—and experts in Eastern Europe and the Nordic region, stakeholders in South Africa, and newspapers in the United Kingdom. This book is motivated by the premise that tackling climate change via low-carbon energy systems and practices is one of the most significant challenges of the twenty-first century, and that success will require not only new energy technologies, but also new ways of understanding language, visions, and discursive politics. The discursive creation of the energy systems of tomorrow are propagated in polity, hoping to be realized as the material fact of the future, but processed in conflicting ways with underlying tensions as to how contemporary societies ought to be ordered. This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of energy policy, energy and environment, and technology assessment.

Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android

Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android PDF Author: John Kinsella
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000348849
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 230

Get Book Here

Book Description
Nuclear Theory Degree Zero: Essays Against the Nuclear Android investigates the threat conveyed and maintained by the nuclear cycle: mining, research, health, power generation and weaponry. Central to this polyvalent 'report' on the infiltration of our lives and control over them exerted by the industrial-military complex, are critiques of the creation, storage and use of atomic weapons, the exploitation of Australian Aboriginal people and their lands through British atomic testing in the 1950s, and an exposé of a language of denial in the world of nuclear mining/energy/military usages. 'Nuclear' is also parenthetically investigated in its function as extended metaphor and question for poetry and poetics. Key is a consideration of the use of the language of the 'atomic' in cultural spaces, and in 'the arts'. Indigenous land-rights claims in the face of uranium mining, the semantics of waste and of the glib usage by nuclear power companies of the fact of global warming to suit their own corrosive agendas. The triumphalism of scientific and cultural discourse around 'nuclear' and the threats by nuclear fission are by association brought into question. The nuclear cycle throws the whole future of human beings into doubt, and this book seeks to assemble new resources of resistance through creative and critical mediums, including poetry and poetics. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.

Future

Future PDF Author: Lawrence R. Samuel
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292719140
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book Here

Book Description
The future is not a fixed idea but a highly variable one that reflects the values of those who are imagining it. By studying the ways that visionaries imagined the future—particularly that of America—in the past century, much can be learned about the cultural dynamics of the time. In this social history, Lawrence R. Samuel examines the future visions of intellectuals, artists, scientists, businesspeople, and others to tell a chronological story about the history of the future in the past century. He defines six separate eras of future narratives from 1920 to the present day, and argues that the milestones reached during these years—especially related to air and space travel, atomic and nuclear weapons, the women's and civil rights movements, and the advent of biological and genetic engineering—sparked the possibilities of tomorrow in the public's imagination, and helped make the twentieth century the first century to be significantly more about the future than the past. The idea of the future grew both in volume and importance as it rode the technological wave into the new millennium, and the author tracks the process by which most people, to some degree, have now become futurists as the need to anticipate tomorrow accelerates.