Author: Ed Finn
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Apocalypse Moon: Neal Stephenson on his new novel, Seveneves, and the future of humanity
An excerpt from an article on Slate’s Future Tense channel: Neal Stephenson’s new novel, Seveneves, begins: “The Moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.” Scientists realize humanity has roughly two years to come up with a survival strategy before millions of lunar bits start hitting the Earth and ignite the atmosphere in…
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The Inspiration Drought
Slate
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Sharing the Fire
When Thomas Jefferson wrote about the American imagination, he chose the metaphor of fire. Ideas should flow like light in the darkness, “as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.” Jefferson was one of the original American dreamers, a man with many faults but also an explosive mix of creativity…
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Neal Stephenson Interview Podcast on Slate
“We’ve seen obvious lapses in the ability of our technologies to give us things that we want.” – Neal Stephenson Our colleagues at Future Tense have launched a new podcast series on science fiction and their first guest is Neal Stephenson. Check out the interview to hear Tim Wu ask Neal about getting big stuff…
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The Drone Commons
Lee Konstantinou has started a new thread about creating a decentralized, drone-based wireless internet commons that bypasses state and corporate control. Join the conversation about a shadow drone internet!
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Tower Power
Bruce Sterling has started a new thread asking about the tall tower as a potential power source. Could it harness piezoelectric, solar, magnetic, or atmospheric energy? Get in on the conversation about dark lightning!
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Welcome to Hieroglyph
Greetings and welcome to the new Hieroglyph website! We’ve spent a lot of time building a new platform for this project that we hope will be responsive, elegant and easy to use. The site has both public and private areas so contributors can work in small groups or share their thoughts with the public, as…
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Tower Project Overview
The tower project began when Neal Stephenson started asking a simple question: how tall can we build something? As he started working with structural engineer Keith Hjelmstad, it turned out that this question has some surprising answers. To learn more about the project or get involved, check out the Tower Group.
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Solve for X
Neal Stephenson and Michael Crow both spoke recently at Solve for X, a conference organized by Google’s X Lab (http://www.solveforx.com). Each of them addressed the Hieroglyph-Arizona State University partnership and the need for more "moon shot" thinking. Neal's talk about the Tower project and Getting Big Stuff Done is available here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE0n_5qPmRM You can see Michael's discussion of ASU as a "moon shot" factory and the proposed Center for Science and the Imagination here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iYXPPX24WY.