Brian Stableford recently wrote a six book future history centered around human attempts at life extension. It takes 500 years to get it right with people in different times either assuming there will be life extension treatments awaiting them when they age or knowing that they are doomed to be the last generation of mortals. I've read the first three and I can't really do justice to it here, but they cover overpopulation , desperate space colonization attempts, and a Capitalist Cabal that ends up owning the world through stock market manipulation. One of the later books, Fountains of Youth is the 500 year diary of a emortal name Mortimer Gray. He is famous for writing a History of Death where he tries to understand the mindset of past mortal humans and the various ways they coped with knowledge of death.
The series consists of four entertaining books: The Cassandra Complex, Inherit the Earth, Architects of Emortality, and Dark Ararat. There are also two big idea books: Fountains of Youth and The Omega Expedition (you need to read these in order because FOY has a big suprise at the end).
After years of banging my head against this age limit (mostly from hearing about great physicists making their big discoveries at age 26 or so), I came up with a different interpretation. Most breakthroughs come about after many researchers have been taking a crack at it for a long time. The one who finally gets through is the one whose education is idiosyncratic enough that he is able to see the problem in a unique way that leads to a solution. So it might not have to do with a fresh brain so much as fresh point of view.
Re:Anyone read it yet?
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Wolframania
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I read as much of it as I could stand. The thing that irked me even more than when he claims that complexity theory has been languishing, since he stopped publishing, was his excessive use of the word 'so-called'. There's the 'so-called Fibonacci Numbers', the 'so-called Game of Life', and the 'so-called prime numbers'. Are we supposed to think that the prime numbers are not really the prime numbers? Or is Wolfram writing some kind of giant patent application.
Painful as it was, I read most of the book just to make sure I wasn't missing anything. The truth is that he hasn't had a useful idea in the past 15 years. The rest of it is either just wanking, like his speculations on how the laws of physics could be generated by a CA - pure speculation with no way of using his ideas to solve any real problems. Other times he's just plain wrong, such as his idea that natural selection is not the cause of life complexity.
His reasoning is pretty flimsy going something like this:
One-dimensional CA are as complex as anything produced by two or more dimensions (he shows a one dimensional cross section of the Game of Life and it looks sort of like his beloved Rule 110 CA which is all he needs for proof. Three or more dimensional CA's are not discussed, since he can't print them in his book)
1D CA's can only be set up that emulate a small set of patterns. This is refered to as following contraints.
Therefore, everything in nature must be fundamentally simple. There is no way for things to be developed that can follow predefined constraints, and hence natural selection has no ability to optimise organisms, and all life on earth is just stuff that was thrown together any kind of mutants you put together would be just as viable, the brain works the same way, yada yada yada.
I'm going to be sick. I'm glad I returned it, and please don't get me started on the notes!
In his essay, The Android and the Human PKD writes about how juvenile delinquents are the only thing between us and 1984 (he mentions phone phreaking as an example):
The absolutely horrible technological society - that was our dream,
our vision of the future. We could foresee nothing equipped with
enough, power, guile, or whatever to impede the coming of the dreadful
nightmare society. It never occurred to us that the delinquent kids
might abort it out of the the sheer perverse malice of their little
souls, God bless them.
Zardos is a cult classic.
How can you put down a movie with a giant floating head. I rented this flick several times just to show people the first five minutes.
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Brian Stableford recently wrote a six book future history centered around human attempts at life extension. It takes 500 years to get it right with people in different times either assuming there will be life extension treatments awaiting them when they age or knowing that they are doomed to be the last generation of mortals. I've read the first three and I can't really do justice to it here, but they cover overpopulation , desperate space colonization attempts, and a Capitalist Cabal that ends up owning the world through stock market manipulation. One of the later books, Fountains of Youth is the 500 year diary of a emortal name Mortimer Gray. He is famous for writing a History of Death where he tries to understand the mindset of past mortal humans and the various ways they coped with knowledge of death.
The series consists of four entertaining books: The Cassandra Complex, Inherit the Earth, Architects of Emortality, and Dark Ararat. There are also two big idea books: Fountains of Youth and The Omega Expedition (you need to read these in order because FOY has a big suprise at the end).
After years of banging my head against this age limit (mostly from hearing about great physicists making their big discoveries at age 26 or so), I came up with a different interpretation. Most breakthroughs come about after many researchers have been taking a crack at it for a long time. The one who finally gets through is the one whose education is idiosyncratic enough that he is able to see the problem in a unique way that leads to a solution. So it might not have to do with a fresh brain so much as fresh point of view.
Painful as it was, I read most of the book just to make sure I wasn't missing anything. The truth is that he hasn't had a useful idea in the past 15 years. The rest of it is either just wanking, like his speculations on how the laws of physics could be generated by a CA - pure speculation with no way of using his ideas to solve any real problems. Other times he's just plain wrong, such as his idea that natural selection is not the cause of life complexity.
His reasoning is pretty flimsy going something like this:
I'm going to be sick. I'm glad I returned it, and please don't get me started on the notes!
Zardos is a cult classic. How can you put down a movie with a giant floating head. I rented this flick several times just to show people the first five minutes.