Greetings and welcome.
I have always had a love of science and all things scientific. I was six years old when the astronauts of Apollo 11 landed on the moon and I still remember vividly the excitement I felt watching Armstrong step on to "Lunafirma". I knew at that moment that over a quarter of a million miles away something historic was happening, and I knew that I wanted to do something similar.
I followed the remaining Apollo missions, the Skylab missions, the Viking missions to Mars, the shuttle, ISS, Hubble, Galileo, Cassini...the list goes on and on. And last night, May 25, 2008, I watched as a group of fellow geeks waited for word that the Phoenix Lander touched down on the northern polar region of Mars. And 39 years after the first words from the moon reached earth, I still felt sense of excitement at what was happening. And I was envious of the people sitting in that control room at JPL watching their computer screens, waiting for a signal from a computer that had traveled nine months through space to reach its destination. What a great job that must be. Damn...
With all of this in mind, I would like to start a discussion on the way science may effect the way humans live in the future. This may sound like a discussion on science fiction, but I am a follower of people like Robert Zubrin and Ray Kurzweil. These scientists see a rapid expansion of knowledge and an eventual move off planet. The expansion of knowledge is obvious in the rapid advances made in mapping the human genome. And the move off planet will start as soon as big business finds a way to exploit the natural resources of the solar system instead of the earth's. (Or after the earths resources are no longer profitable to exploit).
Please contribute freely. Tell me when I am out of my mind. Add plausible ideas. And by all means, let's not limit these discussions to space exploration. There is plenty going in the fields of medicine, energy development, aerospace, physics and other disciplines of science.
Enjoy...P
4 comments:
It's a great start! I'm glad you finally decided to do this!
Love, D
Woo hoo! Can't wait to read more! Here's an interesting article for you. Maybe kick-start the posts?
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/science/03dark.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
OK, lemme try that again:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/03/
science/03dark.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
It's not a working link, but I trust you'll figure it out! :-)
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can't recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil's work. The book is ""My Stroke of Insight"" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor's talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It's spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I'm not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I've read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they're making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven't heard Dr Taylor's TEDTalk, that's an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it's 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There's a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best ""Fantastic Voyage"" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
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