Read more“China is basically a market that has the ability to clone everything,” said Beijing-based researcher Edward Yu, CEO of Analysis International.
Quotes
Read moreFor millennia, caribou seeking relief from summer heat and insects have made their way to ice patches where they bed down until cooler temperatures prevail. Hunters noticed caribou were, in effect, marooned on these ice islands and took advantage.
“I’m never surprised at the brilliance of ancient hunters anymore. I feel stupid that we didn’t find this sooner,” says Andrews.
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The results have been extraordinary. Andrews and his team have found 2400-year-old spear throwing tools, a 1000-year-old ground squirrel snare, and bows and arrows dating back 850 years. Biologists involved in the project are examining dung for plant remains, insect parts, pollen and caribou parasites. Others are studying DNA evidence to track the lineage and migration patterns of caribou. Andrews also works closely with the Shutaot’ine or Mountain Dene, drawing on their guiding experience and traditional knowledge.
“The implements are truly amazing. There are wooden arrows and dart shafts so fine you can’t believe someone sat down with a stone and made them.”
Read moreThe 68-year-old scientist says a visit by extraterrestrials to Earth would be like Christopher Columbus arriving in the Americas, “which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”
He speculates most extraterrestrial life will be similar to microbes, or small animals — but adds advanced lifeforms may be “nomads, looking to conquer and colonize.”
Read moreMy favorite science fiction film wardrobe is worn by David Bowie’s alien, in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He turns up for his first terrestrial business meeting wearing a brand new $1.99 Chinese flannel workshirt, buttoned at the neck, its printed plaid fabric about half an inch thick, under a shiny, sleazy, striped business suit. The sense of the character’s inability to read or articulate our cultural codes is perfect, and heartbreaking.
Read moreIn 19 countries, from Singapore to Iceland, people have a life expectancy of about 80 years. Of all the people in human history who ever reached the age of 65, half are alive now. Meanwhile, women around the world have half as many children as their mothers. And if Japan is the model, their daughters may have half as many as they do.
Homo sapiens is ageing fast, and the implications of this may overwhelm all other factors shaping the species over the coming decades – with more wrinklies than pimplies, more walking frames than bike stabilisers, more slippers and pipes than bootees and buggies, and more grey power than student power. The longevity revolution affects every country, every community and almost every household. It promises to restructure the economy, reshape the family, redefine politics and even rearrange the geopolitical order over the coming century.
Read moreThe Obama space plan relies on private companies to fly to the space station, giving them almost $6 billion to build their own rockets and ships. It also extends the space station’s life by five years and puts billions into research to eventually develop new government rocket ships for future missions to a nearby asteroid, to the moon, to Martian moons or other points in space. Those stops would be stepping stones on an eventual mission to Mars itself.
Read moreSo it’s up to those who have a general systems orientation towards the world, people who understand holism and non-linearity and have a real passion about pattern recognition, to make sense of the world as we pass through this great transition. Forecasting and futurists should find kinship with the best science fiction writers and understand that both are really dealing with the creation of compelling narratives and that these narratives are templates for change. In this respect, futurists should be empowered with the notion that they are really helping to design the future.
Read moreThe truth is, no one made much money off the Pistols, although McLaren made the most. The plug was pulled on our film, “Who Killed Bambi?,” after a day and a half of shooting, when the electricians walked off the set after McLaren couldn’t pay them. Meyer had presciently demanded his own weekly pay in advance every Monday morning.
The Catch-22 with punk rock, and indeed with all forms of entertainment designed to shock and offend the bourgeoisie, is that if your act is too convincing, you put yourself out of business, a fact carefully noted by today’s rappers as they go as far as they can without going too far.
The Sex Pistols went too far. They never had a period that could be described as actual success. Even touring England at the height of their fame, they were booked into clubs under false names. They were hated by the establishment, shut down by the police and pilloried by the press (“The Filth and the Fury” takes its title from a banner headline that once occupied a full front page of the Daily Mirror). That was bad enough. Worse was that their own fans sometimes attacked them, lashed into a frenzy by the front line of Rotten and Vicious, who were sometimes performers, sometimes bear-baiters.
Fight for the future
Here’s the thing; if you stop at “this is not my future” and go no further, then someone else will make their version of the future and I can almost guarantee you’re not going to like it. I can guarantee this because you already don’t like it. We’re living in the future of men who saw people as commodities and human lives as disposable sources of income. It’s not some grand conspiracy, it’s just people who have a vision of the future where the top 2% get richer and the rest of the world… well… you want to be in that 2%, right? And the only way that is going to happen is if you buy into their future and not into the steam-sustainability-and-goggles future, the Ayahuasca-and-shamanism future, the Russian-feminist-ninja future or the Japanese-post-gender-newtype future.
We don’t have nice things because we let other people take them away from us. We have these futures that seem alien to us because we let them happen. I’m including you, me and 99% of all the humans and mutants I have ever met in that “we”, too. We are the reason there are no jetpacks or flying cars or universal distribution of water and food. “We have met the enemy,” as a great man once said, “and he is us”. We contribute to a future that has no place for us in so many ways: inaction, being convinced that we don’t have voices that count, being convinced that the only choices we have are the choices we can buy, despair, alienation… the list goes on and on. We let the beautiful amazing, weird, fucked-up futures we hold next to our hearts die stillborn in the face of futures so alien to most of us that they might as well be dread Cthulhu sleeping beneath the waves.
Excerpt from Your Jetpack (Cannibal Futures) by Emily Dare
Read more "Fight for the future"
Read moreThe Chinese,” he warned in an interview in November with Politico.com, “are in danger of producing huge quantities of goods and products that they will be unable to sell.
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 