2014 September

Neuroplasticity, Neurobiology and the Brain

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately into neuroplasticity and neurobiology, and some of the cool, freaky things that brains can do–and some of the tragic ones. Favorite weird brain facts/research angles/brain hacks, anyone?

Author
Elizabeth Bear is a science fiction and fantasy author based in Massachusetts. In 2005 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she has also won two Hugo Awards, for Best Short Story and Best Novelette. Elizabeth is an instructor at the Viable Paradise science fiction and fantasy writers’ workshop and also teaches at Clarion, Clarion West, the WisCon Writer’s Respite, and Odyssey.

Hacking the Human Mind

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

It seems to me that one of the great technological revolutions ongoing around us right now involved practical neurobiology–we’re getting more and more adept at understanding how brains work, in other words, and how to hack them.

Author
Elizabeth Bear is a science fiction and fantasy author based in Massachusetts. In 2005 she won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and she has also won two Hugo Awards, for Best Short Story and Best Novelette. Elizabeth is an instructor at the Viable Paradise science fiction and fantasy writers’ workshop and also teaches at Clarion, Clarion West, the WisCon Writer’s Respite, and Odyssey.

Protecting Protected Land

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

There are many places in the world that governments, NGOs, or a combination have protected. Many people and organizations are working for more preserved lands. So imagine a future where some large amount of land – maybe 25% is protected.

Author
Brenda Cooper is a science fiction author, futurist, and technology professional. She is the chief information officer for the city of Kirkland, Washington, and a member of the Futurist Board for the Lifeboat Foundation. Brenda is the author of seven novels, including The Silver Ship and the Sea, which won the Endeavor Award in 2008.

Methane Burps in the Arctic and Climate Change

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

I’ve been following the rather ominous reports in the last few years of methane bubbling up from the Arctic ocean floor as the ocean warms.

Author
Vandana Singh is a science fiction author and assistant professor of physics at Framingham State College. Her short stories, which most recently include “Peripateia” (2013), “Cry of the Kharchal” (2013), “With Fate Conspire” (2013), and “A Handful of Rice” (2012), frequently appear in Year’s Best and other anthologies. She also writes poetry as well as novels and short stories for children.

Biomimicry and Eco-Friendly 3-D Printing

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

The reason why I say biomimicry is a movement rather than solely a new technological trend is that it appears to be informed by an ethos that seems to me at least to have a basis in ethics — that we learn from nature, and refrain from exploiting nature.

Author
Vandana Singh is a science fiction author and assistant professor of physics at Framingham State College. Her short stories, which most recently include “Peripateia” (2013), “Cry of the Kharchal” (2013), “With Fate Conspire” (2013), and “A Handful of Rice” (2012), frequently appear in Year’s Best and other anthologies. She also writes poetry as well as novels and short stories for children.

Longer-Than-Lifetime-Projects

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

Many institutions have lasted multiple lifetimes—religions, cities, universities, militaries, a very few corporations—and often that was the intent, but these were not beginning-middle-end projects. What is so worth building that multiple generations would feel inspired to bear down on it for lifetimes?

– Stewart Brand

Author

The Future of Agriculture

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

The question is what synergistic technologies can we deploy to halt and then reverse the effect of human agriculture on the land? And, what would Earth look like if agriculture were offloaded, either to vertical farms or, in Gerard K. O’Neill’s vision, to orbital farms?

Author
Karl Schroeder divides his time between writing fiction and analyzing the future impact of science and technology on society. He is the author of nine novels and has pioneered a new mode of writing that blends fiction and rigorous futures research: Crisis in Zefra (2005) and Crisis in Urlia (2011) were commissioned by the Canadian army as research tools. Karl holds a master’s degree in strategic foresight and innovation from OCAD University in Toronto.

Urban Sustainability

September 5, 2014 in Forum Quotes

I would like to see more green fiction. In some of the stories that I have attempted, the current “green” fad has matured into genuine policy level cultural priority and established business practice, as well as a staple concern of urban planning. How can we make our cities more sustainable? Make urban areas coexist with the natural ecosystem rather than dominate it?

Author

The Gadget and the Burn

September 5, 2014 in Links

Cory Doctorow shares an excerpt from “The Man Who Sold the Moon” on Medium.

Author
Nina Miller has been a designer at Arizona State University since 2005. Nina has taught foundation level courses in the ASU Visual Communications program and she has been an actor and performer in Phoenix since 1995. Her research in Interaction Design focuses on theatrical improvisation and how it might inspire the collaborative design process. Nina is a board member, instructor and improvisor at The Torch Theatre, a non-profit improv collective in central Phoenix.

Solarpunk: Notes toward a manifesto

September 4, 2014 in Hieroglyph

It’s hard out here for futurists under 30.

As we percolated through our respective nations’ education systems, we were exposed to WorldChanging and TED talks, to artfully-designed green consumerism and sustainable development NGOs. Yet we also grew up with doomsday predictions slated to hit before our expected retirement ages, with the slow but inexorable militarization of metropolitan police departments, with the failure of the existing political order to deal with the existential-but-not-yet-urgent threat of climate change. Many of us feel it’s unethical to bring children into a world like ours. We have grown up under a shadow, and if we sometimes resemble fungus it should be taken as a credit to our adaptability.

We’re solarpunks because the only other options are denial or despair.

The promises offered by most Singulatarians and Transhumanists are individualist and unsustainable: How many of them are scoped for a world where energy is not cheap and plentiful, to say nothing of rare earth elements?

Solarpunk is about finding ways to make life more wonderful for us right now, and more importantly for the generations that follow us – i.e., extending human life at the species level, rather than individually. Our future must involve repurposing and creating new things from what we already have (instead of 20th century “destroy it all and build something completely different” modernism). Our futurism is not nihilistic like cyberpunk and it avoids steampunk’s potentially quasi-reactionary tendencies: it is about ingenuity, generativity, independence, and community.

And yes, there’s a -punk there, and not just because it’s become a trendy suffix. There’s an oppositional quality to solarpunk, but it’s an opposition that begins with infrastructure as a form of resistance. We’re already seeing it in the struggles of public utilities to deal with the explosion in rooftop solar. “Dealing with infrastructure is a protection against being robbed of one’s self-determination,” said Chokwe Lumumba, the late mayor of Jackson, MS, and he was right. Certainly there are good reasons to have a grid, and we don’t want it to rot away, but one of the healthy things about local resilience is that it puts you in a much better bargaining position against the people who might want to shut you off (We’re looking at you, Detroit).

Solarpunk punkSolarpunk draws on the ideal of Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, Ghandi’s ideal of swadeshi and subsequent Salt March, and countless other traditions of innovative dissent. (FWIW, both Ghandi and Jefferson were inventors.)

The visual aesthetics of Solarpunk are open and evolving. As it stands, it’s a mash-up of the following:

  • 1800s age-of-sail/frontier living (but with more bicycles)
  • Creative reuse of existing infrastructure (sometimes post-apocalyptic, sometimes present-weird)
  • Jugaad-style innovation from the developing world
  • High-tech backends with simple, elegant outputs

Obviously, the further you get into the future, the more ambitious you can get. In the long-term, solarpunk takes the images we’ve been fed by bright-green blogs and draws them out further, longer, and deeper. Imagine permaculturists thinking in cathedral time. Consider terraced irrigation systems that also act as fluidic computers. Contemplate the life of a Department of Reclamation officer managing a sparsely populated American southwest given over to solar collection and pump storage. Imagine “smart cities” being junked in favor of smart citizenry.

Tumblr lit up within the last week from this post envisioning a form of solar punk with an art nouveau Edwardian-garden aesthetic, which is gorgeous and reminds me of Miyazaki. There’s something lovely in the way it reacts against the mainstream visions of overly smooth, clean, white modernist iPod futures. Solarpunk is a future with a human face and dirt behind its ears.

Image courtesy of Olivia/Land of Masks and Jewels. Check out Olivia’s Tumblr post on solarpunk, which has stellar artwork and some great additional thoughts on the concept!

Author
Adam Flynn is a researcher-at-large and artistic troublemaker. He lives in San Francisco, tweets as @threadbare, and can usually be found mining the intersections of the antiquarian and futuristic.