Author: Hieroglyph Administrator

When I first encountered the story, I was expecting it to be very futuristic – to happen maybe a hundred years in the future. But it struck very close to home. These are things that I think will happen in the next decade.

To understand these new complexities, we need a new human consciousness. To understand that our actions have consequences, even though they are disconnected in time and space. This is also what we try to address in our work whenever we have the opportunity.

As a scholar, the questions that this story raises, if this were a real technology, would be: “What exactly is going on in the software, in the intelligence that sits behind the system? How is it programmed such that we can read the Dorians with such subtlety and guide ourselves to a decision?”

Brad Allenby, President’s Professor of Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering; Lincoln Professor of Engineering and Ethics; Professor of Law, Arizona State University  The most immediate response to the nice little piece by Charlie Jane Anders, “The Day It All Ended,” is pleasure at reading an optimistic story. This is more rare than you would think,…

Bruce Sterling confronts the reader with the problem of verticality—the dizzying heights of ascent with its slow release from warm temperature and gravity and oxygen and a protective ozone layer. Height has been a long looming quest for humans. In the opening volume of his A History of Religious Ideas Mircea Eliade begins by explaining…

I think the story is a really interesting analysis of how economic activity might evolve in the solar system. […] You have the emergence of diverse cultures that predominate in different environments. You have a distinct Mars culture and a very different Deimos culture. You also have a very interesting treatment of a different economic…

I am working on a project to assess learning using brain data, and this story does prompt me to further consider a natural extension of that line of research – can the brain be manipulated to accelerate learning?

I think that one of the most realistic messages in the story is that the separation between humans and nature is a fiction. People want to go out into nature, so you can’t conserve nature by blocking it off from people. Also, people are part of nature. When you can change your environment like we…