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Author: W. Patrick McCray
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 366
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Book Description
The story of the visionary scientists who invented the future In 1969, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill began looking outward to space colonies as the new frontier for humanity's expansion. A decade later, Eric Drexler, an MIT-trained engineer, turned his attention to the molecular world as the place where society's future needs could be met using self-replicating nanoscale machines. These modern utopians predicted that their technologies could transform society as humans mastered the ability to create new worlds, undertook atomic-scale engineering, and, if truly successful, overcame their own biological limits. The Visioneers tells the story of how these scientists and the communities they fostered imagined, designed, and popularized speculative technologies such as space colonies and nanotechnologies. Patrick McCray traces how these visioneers blended countercultural ideals with hard science, entrepreneurship, libertarianism, and unbridled optimism about the future. He shows how they built networks that communicated their ideas to writers, politicians, and corporate leaders. But the visioneers were not immune to failure—or to the lures of profit, celebrity, and hype. O'Neill and Drexler faced difficulty funding their work and overcoming colleagues' skepticism, and saw their ideas co-opted and transformed by Timothy Leary, the scriptwriters of Star Trek, and many others. Ultimately, both men struggled to overcome stigma and ostracism as they tried to unshackle their visioneering from pejorative labels like "fringe" and "pseudoscience.? The Visioneers provides a balanced look at the successes and pitfalls they encountered. The book exposes the dangers of promotion—oversimplification, misuse, and misunderstanding—that can plague exploratory science. But above all, it highlights the importance of radical new ideas that inspire us to support cutting-edge research into tomorrow's technologies.
Author: W. Patrick McCray
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691176299
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 366
Get Book Here
Book Description
The story of the visionary scientists who invented the future In 1969, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill began looking outward to space colonies as the new frontier for humanity's expansion. A decade later, Eric Drexler, an MIT-trained engineer, turned his attention to the molecular world as the place where society's future needs could be met using self-replicating nanoscale machines. These modern utopians predicted that their technologies could transform society as humans mastered the ability to create new worlds, undertook atomic-scale engineering, and, if truly successful, overcame their own biological limits. The Visioneers tells the story of how these scientists and the communities they fostered imagined, designed, and popularized speculative technologies such as space colonies and nanotechnologies. Patrick McCray traces how these visioneers blended countercultural ideals with hard science, entrepreneurship, libertarianism, and unbridled optimism about the future. He shows how they built networks that communicated their ideas to writers, politicians, and corporate leaders. But the visioneers were not immune to failure—or to the lures of profit, celebrity, and hype. O'Neill and Drexler faced difficulty funding their work and overcoming colleagues' skepticism, and saw their ideas co-opted and transformed by Timothy Leary, the scriptwriters of Star Trek, and many others. Ultimately, both men struggled to overcome stigma and ostracism as they tried to unshackle their visioneering from pejorative labels like "fringe" and "pseudoscience.? The Visioneers provides a balanced look at the successes and pitfalls they encountered. The book exposes the dangers of promotion—oversimplification, misuse, and misunderstanding—that can plague exploratory science. But above all, it highlights the importance of radical new ideas that inspire us to support cutting-edge research into tomorrow's technologies.
Author: W. Patrick McCray
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691139830
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 367
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Book Description
In 1969, Princeton physicist Gerard O'Neill began looking outward to space colonies as the new frontier for humanity's expansion. A decade later, Eric Drexler, an MIT-trained engineer, turned his attention to the molecular world as the place where society's future needs could be met using self-replicating nanoscale machines. Patrick McCray traces how these visioneers and the communities they fostered blended countercultural ideals with hard science, entrepreneurship, libertarianism and unbridled optimism about the future.
Author: Alexander Schieffer
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 295605175X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 102
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Book Description
Pioneering Pathways: 88 Integral Leaders and Changemakers from 43 countries across diverse cultures, backgrounds and ages, from 7 to 91, associated with Home for Humanity, respond to the question: From your personal perspective and experience, and looking from your own current cultural and societal context: What are the most effective ways to transform our divided world into a home for humanity, and nurture the paradigm shift towards a regenerative, inclusive, just and peaceful Earth Civilization?
Author: Martin Sand
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658226846
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 319
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Book Description
Martin Sand explores the problems of responsibility at the early, visionary stages of technological development. He discusses the increasingly dominant concept of innovation and outlines how narratives about the future are currently used to facilitate technological change, to foster networks, and to raise public awareness for innovations. This set of activities is under increasing scrutiny as a form of “visioneering”. The author discusses intentionality and freedom as important, albeit fuzzy, preconditions for being responsible. He distinguishes being from holding responsible and explores this distinction’s effects on the problem of moral luck. Finally, he develops a virtue ethical framework to discuss visioneers’ and innovators’ responsibilities.
Author: Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1623563879
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 401
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Book Description
Game Studies is a rapidly growing area of contemporary scholarship, yet volumes in the area have tended to focus on more general issues. With Playing with the Past, game studies is taken to the next level by offering a specific and detailed analysis of one area of digital game play -- the representation of history. The collection focuses on the ways in which gamers engage with, play with, recreate, subvert, reverse and direct the historical past, and what effect this has on the ways in which we go about constructing the present or imagining a future. What can World War Two strategy games teach us about the reality of this complex and multifaceted period? Do the possibilities of playing with the past change the way we understand history? If we embody a colonialist's perspective to conquer 'primitive' tribes in Colonization, does this privilege a distinct way of viewing history as benevolent intervention over imperialist expansion? The fusion of these two fields allows the editors to pose new questions about the ways in which gamers interact with their game worlds. Drawing these threads together, the collection concludes by asking whether digital games - which represent history or historical change - alter the way we, today, understand history itself.
Author: Volker Janssen
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520289102
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400
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Book Description
The American WestÑwhere such landmarks as the Golden Gate Bridge rival wild landscapes in popularity and iconic significanceÑhas been viewed as a frontier of technological innovation. Where Minds and Matters Meet calls attention to the convergence of Western history and the history of technology, showing that the regionÕs politics and culture have shaped seemingly placeless, global technological practices and institutions. Drawing on political and social history as well as art history, the bookÕs essays take the cultural measure of the regionÕs great technological milestones, including San DiegoÕs Panama-California Exposition, the building of the Hetch Hetchy Dam in the Sierras, and traffic planning in Los Angeles. Contributors: Amy Bix, Louise Nelson Dyble, Patrick McCray, Linda Nash, Peter Neushul, Matthew W. Roth, Bruce Sinclair, L. Chase Smith, Carlene Stephens, Aristotle Tympas, Jason Weems, Peter Westwick, Stephanie Young
Author: Natalie Koch
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839763728
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
A revelatory new history of the colonization of the American West **Longlisted for the 2023 Cundill History Prize** The iconic deserts of the American southwest could not have been colonized and settled without the help of desert experts from the Middle East. For example: In 1856, a caravan of thirty-three camels arrived in Indianola, Texas, led by a Syrian cameleer the Americans called "Hi Jolly." This "camel corps," the US government hoped, could help the army secure the new southwest swath of the country just wrested from Mexico. Though the dream of the camel corps - and sadly, the camels - died, the idea of drawing on expertise, knowledge, and practices from the desert countries of the Middle East did not. As Natalie Koch demonstrates in this evocative, narrative history, the exchange of colonial technologies between the Arabian Peninsula and United States over the past two centuries - from date palm farming and desert agriculture to the utopian sci-fi dreams of Biosphere 2 and Frank Herbert's Dune - bound the two regions together, solidifying the colonization of the US West and, eventually, the reach of American power into the Middle East. Koch teaches us to see deserts anew, not as mythic sites of romance or empty wastelands but as an "arid empire," a crucial political space where imperial dreams coalesce.
Author: Jenny Andersson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131751145X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272
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Book Description
This book reconsiders the power of the idea of the future. Bringing together perspectives from cultural history, environmental history, political history and the history of science, it investigates how the future became a specific field of action in liberal democratic, state socialist and post-colonial regimes after the Second World War. It highlights the emergence of new forms of predictive scientific expertise in this period, and shows how such forms of expertise interacted with political systems of the Cold War world order, as the future became the prism for dealing with post-industrialisation, technoscientific progress, changing social values, Cold War tensions and an emerging Third World. A forgotten problem of cultural history, the future re-emerges in this volume as a fundamentally contested field in which forms of control and central forms of resistance met, as different actors set out to colonise and control and others to liberate. The individual studies of this book show how the West European, African, Romanian and Czechoslovak "long term" was constructed through forms of expertise, computer simulations and models, and they reveal how such constructions both opened up new realities but also imposed limits on possible futures.
Author: Kathleen Webster O'Malley
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
ISBN: 1401969135
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 274
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Book Description
A guide to trusting in the wisdom of our nightly visions and describing how engaging with our dream world can give us a sense of direction, help us to heal current and past hurts, including pre-birth trauma. We can analyze and interpret our dreams, but we can do so much more: when we understand and engage with our dreams, we are able to tap into a special, deeper kind of healing. The process of healing is not about putting the same pieces back together; rather, it is about reclaiming what is already within us that could never be broken, the essence of who we are as individuals and as interconnected parts of a greater whole. In THE HEALING WISDOM OF DREAMS, health and wellness practitioner Kathleen Webster O'Malley gently guides us through the process of using our dreams to heal unwanted patterns and live more authentically. She provides specific tools for enhancing dream recall, including dream journaling, and brings in the practices of dream incubation--how to ask our dream a question and receive and interpret an answer--lucid dreaming, and Tibetan dream yoga practices. Nightmares are inevitable when we start to dive deeper into our vulnerabilities and traumas, and O'Malley discusses how to re-vision them as urgent messages that serve to deliver profound realizations. She explores the more mystical side of dreaming: visions from ancestors and spirit guides, animal guides, and archetypes that appear in our dreams. Finally, she encourages us to grant ourselves permission to be playful in our dreams, to envision ourselves as archeologists unearthing our hidden gifts.
Author: Nathan Furr
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1633696553
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 161
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Book Description
New Tools to Overcome the Human Barriers to Change Leaders know that their job is to transform their organizations to keep pace with technology and an ever-changing business environment. They also know that they are bound to fail in doing so. But this discouraging prospect is not because they won't be able to solve a technological or strategic problem. Leaders will fail because of intractable human responses associated with change--responses such as fear, ingrained habits, politics, incrementalism, and lack of imagination. These stumbling blocks always arise when we humans are faced with change, but what if we had a way to transcend them? This book reveals a radical new method for doing just that. Written by the executive who designed and implemented it, the neuroscientist who helped make it work, and the academic who explains why it works and how to do it, Leading Transformation introduces an innovative yet proven process for creating breakthrough change. Divided into three steps--envisioning the possible, breaking down resistance, and prototyping the future--this process uses cutting-edge tools such as science fiction, cartoons, rap music, artifact trails, and neuroprototypes to overcome people's inability to imagine or react to what doesn't yet exist, override powerful habits and routines that prevent them from changing, and create compelling narratives about the organization's future and how to get there. Showing how these tools have been used successfully by companies such as Lowe's, Walmart, Pepsi, IKEA, Google, Microsoft, and others, the process revealed in this book gives leaders the means to transcend the human barriers that block change and lead their organizations confidently into the future.
