Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches From the Edges of Science
“I received this strange news item, but it had no address on it, so I am passing it on to lucky you. By post-man I will have meant (mostly) posthuman. And he (so to speak) rings twice. At least.
The first ringing is literal and refers to what comes after humans in evolution. The first ringing announcement that the posthuman has arrived has to do with speciation, guesswork, machines; with loose predictions that fall off a cliff of accuracy as we extrapolate physically nonextrapolatable trends int...o the future. The classic example of such a trend is the graph of human transportation modes over time. I discovered this in John Platt’s futurism class at Harvard, which I audited in the 1980s (after 1984, before 2001). Extrapolated, the hyperbolic curve of increasing velocity made by peripatetic pedestrian philosopher, horse-drawn carriage, automobile, airplane, and rocket ship does not take long to exceed the speed of light, a progression that is impossible under Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.MoreLess
The first ringing is literal and refers to what comes after humans in evolution. The first ringing announcement that the posthuman has arrived has to do with speciation, guesswork, machines; with loose predictions that fall off a cliff of accuracy as we extrapolate physically nonextrapolatable trends int...o the future. The classic example of such a trend is the graph of human transportation modes over time. I discovered this in John Platt’s futurism class at Harvard, which I audited in the 1980s (after 1984, before 2001). Extrapolated, the hyperbolic curve of increasing velocity made by peripatetic pedestrian philosopher, horse-drawn carriage, automobile, airplane, and rocket ship does not take long to exceed the speed of light, a progression that is impossible under Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity.MoreLess
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