OPTIMISM Wrestles PESSIMISM
John Shirley
A Moon Ocean!
Scientists learn that Saturn’s moon Enceladus has the only ocean beyond Earth known to contain all six elements needed for life.“We now really have found that Enceladus’s subsurface ocean is the most habitable place in the solar system, at least as far as we know,” said lead author Frank Postberg, a professor at the Free University of Berlin.
The discovery of dissolved sodium phosphate, announced in a report published Wednesday in the journal Nature, makes Enceladus all the more intriguing.
Probably carried out with remote robotics, the marvelous opportunity for exploration of the ocean on the moon Enceladus may bring the real possibility of discovering new forms of life and studying a primeval ocean–but it may also be a boon to humanity, in the next century, in other ways.…
HORIZON SCANNING: The Global Future
Horizon scanning is a method futures researchers use to expand their personal awareness of weak signals of change that are emerging around them every day, of which they were not previously aware. William Gibson is often quoted as saying “the future is already here, but it’s just not evenly distributed.” Less often quoted, he goes on to point out that it (the future) “is arriving constantly, in bits and pieces.” In other words, the future isn’t here full cloth, but the threads are here, from which the future will be woven. Other people have pointed out the human brain is a “prediction machine,” constantly turning out predictions, mostly subconsciously, scanning for threats, food, sex, money, power, and so forth.…
OPTIMISM/PESSIMISM: The Next 50 Years: Why I’m Optimistic Because Everything Will Be Terrible
John Shirley
A while back I did a TEDx talk on the next fifty years. The following contains edited selections of my talk–and some updates.
Two singularities? It’s a contradiction in terms — two singularities. But there are two, there’s the fanciful technological singularity of the imagination, and there is the tech singularity that’s more likely to actually come about. The false singularity, supposed to come between 2030 and 2045, is almost a supernatural event in the minds of many people. With its dream of technologically achieved eternal life, it has the reek of religious mythology; the unconscious fear of mortality.…