QM #6

I mean, the whole idea of observers - that's a pedagogical thing. It's very convenient when you're trying to understand something to imagine doing an experiment or think about an observer doing something. But that doesn't have anything to do with physical law, that has to do with the understanding of the law. A physical law is a description of nature, not a description of observers. Using the word observer in any place in physics at all - it's irrelevant. It's never part of a physical theorem. Look, they apply quantum mechanical laws to the Big Bang! There were no observers there!

Robert Serber - The Second Creation

AW #5

The rise of fantasy may have been only a trend led by a best-selling trilogy [Lord of the Rings], or it may have represented the abandonment of a search for rational solutions.

James Gunn - Alternate Worlds

The Next 500 Years #4

Chromatin is a hybrid structure of DNA and protein that manages the complex problem of packaging 3 billion bases of DNA into a small bundle in the cell that is only a few micrometers in size. This is no small feat. The length of DNA from one cell would measure two meters in length if you stretched it out in front of you. This long

Gravitational Waves

Besides the technical reason for preferring that binary stars should not decay in their orbits, one might speculate that another motive encouraging belief in the existence of a static two-body solution was the same as that for Einstein's instinctive  choice of a static cosmology. There is an ancient prejudice that the universe in general is static

Warp Drive Space Race

In March, for my next series of novels I decided to write about the development of a warp drive. I didn't realize at the time how much work was being done on the concept. I ran across this in the online site The Debrief.

 

An international team of physicists behind several revolutionary warp drive concepts, including the first to require no exotic matter, says that recent unprecedented breakthroughs in physics and propulsion have launched the world powers into a Cold War-style, 21st-century space race to build the world’s first working warp drive.

AW #4

The ability to foresee tomorrow's crises, to dramatize their human implications and consequences (and uniquely its unanticipated consequences), and to sample alternatives is one of science fiction's major values. Its more celebrated ability to predict fades to insignificance beside its ability to dramatize.

James Gunn - Alternate Worlds

QM #5

Above all, I hope there will eventually be a solution of the following type (but don't spread this around): That time and space are really only statistical concepts, something like, for instance, temperature, pressure, and so on, in a gas. It's my

AW #3

Science fiction has immense value as a mind-stretching force for the creation of the habit of anticipation. Our children should be studying Arthur C. Clarke, William Tenn, Robert Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Sheckley, not because these writers can tell them about rocket ships and time machines but, more important, because they

QM #4

And I thought that, say, fifty years ago, that this would happen, that these revolutions [quantum mechanics, relativity] and advances in science would have an effect on mankind - on morals, on sociology, whatever. It hasn't happened. We're still up to the same things, or, well, I think, regressed in values. There's this terrible thing [cold war]

AW #2

Science fiction is based upon the belief that the world is changing, that the way we live is changing, and that humanity will adjust to it, or will adjust change to humanity, or will perish.

James Gunn - Alternate Worlds

QM #3

With science I felt I could grab on to actual things and try to understand them. And then they turn out to be so extraordinarily mysterious! Newton's laws of motion, the laws of the electromagnetic field, relativity - they're so far removed from experience, but yet there it is. It's a measure of all the other things that I look at. It gives you an

AW #1

 In any case we live, indisputably, in a science-fiction world. All around us we see evidences of a new order: life is not what it was for our fathers and mothers, and certainly not what it was for their fathers and mothers. Life moves faster, and we move with it or are left behind. We ride the back of galloping technology, and we cannot dismount without breaking our necks. We – at least most of us – watch pictures

QM #2

Quantum mechanics and relativity affected me deeply - personally. It affected my attitude toward the world. I've always thought of physics as a sort of ivory tower, from which you venture forth into all other human affairs, of all kinds. That's why I became a physicist. I could've earned more money as a lawyer.

I.I. Rabi - The Second Creation

Engineering Cells

By the mid-2030s or 2040s, ideally, we will be able to get human boots on Mars, enabling us to directly see how humans respond to Martian living and how well our “molecular risk mitigation” plans work. Once there, we will be able to test more

Deontogenic Ethics

Deontogenic ethics includes four simple pieces: (1) consciousness must exist to be used; (2) long-term survival depends on plans to extend beyond the solar system in which our species originated; (3) long-term survival depends on the metaspecies, but is not only for the metaspecies; and (4) the needs of the metaspecies and conservation of their responsibilities may supersede individuals' needs or wants.

QM #1

“At first there were very few who believed in the existence of these bodies smaller than atoms. I was even told long afterwards by a distinguished physicist who had been present at my lecture at the Royal Institution that he thought I had been 'pulling their legs.' I was not surprised at this, as I had myself come to this explanation of my experiments with great reluctance, and it was only after I was convinced that the experiment left no escape from it that I published my belief in the existence of bodies smaller than atoms.”

J.J. Thomson – Director of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, England, 1897.

pg. 13, The Second Creation

The Next 500 Years #3

To save life, we will need to engineer it. Notably, humans are already accidentally engineering life and directing evolution; now it is time to do it with volition, direction, and purpose.

Christopher E. Mason

The Next 500 Years #2

This [awareness of extinction of all life] gives us an awesome responsibility, power, and opportunity to become the universe's shepherds and guardians of all life-forms – quite literally a duty to the universe – to preserve life. This means we need to prevent the death of not only our species, but of all species on which we depend and any others we may find that are or were threatened –

The Next 500 Years #1

  . . . The fundamental thesis of this book is that the same innate, biological capacities of ingenuity and creation that have enabled humans to build rockets to reach other planets will also be needed for designing and engineering the organisms that will sustainably inhabit those planets.

Science Fiction Writers - Janet E. Morris

"But people don't go after information themselves, they believe what they hear. This is, historically, the failing of democracy. You have mass rule and you have ascendancy of the mediocre. It's happening in science fiction too. You get a readership which is wider, editors who are only doing science fiction on the way to something more exciting, such as women's romances, and therefore you get mediocre science fiction.

From the book Dream Makers by Charles Platt. 

Science Fiction Writers - Poul Anderson

"I've been interested off and on in the fact that if this industrial civilization of ours suffers a hiatus, we may never be able to rebuild it, not because the knowledge will be lacking but because we won't have the rich natural resources on which the first civilization was founded."

From the book Dream Makers 2 by Charles Platt.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Institutional Collapse

"Systems do change, and institutions do collapse and die, and new ones spring up. One way this happens is by internal restructuring in a coup d'etat, as the young turks take over from the old turks. Usually this is in response to great external pressures on the system. Another possibility is that outsiders simply topple the institution and create a new one.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Obsolete Institutions

"Some of our best-known leaders in business and industry are actually very intelligent people, but they make very unintelligent decisions. I think the explanation of this paradox lies in the decision-making institutions. I believe that our institutions are stupid, because they're obsolete, and you could put teams of geniuses to work in those institutions and the results would still be stupid."

From an interview by Charles Platt in the book "Dream Makers 2" forty years ago.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Unanticipated Consequences

"The peculiar position we find ourselves in today challenges the old political assumptions that have been made by radicals of both Right and Left, that an elite is running things for its own advantage, against our best interests. That presupposes that the decisions being taken by an elite will actually bring about the results which they anticipate.

Futurist Alvin Toffler - Economic Disruption

"We're not going to go through a classical depression or classical inflation. What we're seeing is the emergence of a differentiated society. While some people are eating dog food, there's money to burn in other communities - the sharp contrast between a Second-Wave community like Youngstown or Detroit, and embryonic Third-Wave

Science Fiction Writers - Arthur C. Clarke

Arthur Clarke writing in the 1960s:

Whatever the eventual outcome of our exploration of space we can be reasonably certain of some immediate benefits - and I am deliberately ignoring such 'practical' returns as the multi-billion dollar improvements in weather forecasting and

AI #5

It is also worth noting that significant subsets of the AI community are motivated by forms of open-source ideology that consider it desirable to deploy AGI systems with effectively no safeguards, in the interest of promoting technological advancement at any cost.

Science Fiction #3

 . . . science fiction developed out of fantasy when technology began to shape the way people lived and the future became a better guide to decision-making than history, when what is going to happen became more important than what has happened.

                                                        - James Gunn from his book Alternate Worlds

Science Fiction #2

Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in

AI #4

There are already indications that even previous generations of LLMs can be modified to display chemical synthesis capabilities, and robust scaling laws have even been proposed that apply specifically to these capabilities. On the basis of these results, it seems likely that, in the near future, the application of scaled transformers to

Science Fiction #1

Science fiction is based upon the belief that the world is changing, that the way we live is changing, and that humanity will adjust to it, or will adjust change to humanity, or will perish.

- James Gunn

AI #3

Not only are we unable to predict which specific AI capabilities will emerge at higher levels of scale, but we also lack the means by which to assess an existing AI system’s full range of capabilities.

AI #2

Conversations with researchers at large U.S. technology companies have suggested that their companies’ decisions to develop or release new breakthrough models, or to invest more heavily in their safety, are heavily influenced by concerns over public sentiment. This extends particularly to anticipated government or regulatory 

AI #1

These models [LLM AI] could begin to automate large portions of the economy. We believe that companies that train the best 2025/26 models will be too far ahead for anyone to catch up in subsequent cycles. - Anthropic

Science Fiction Writers - Frank Herbert

In an interview in the book Four Science Fiction Masters with Frank Martin, the author Frank Herbert said: "We change our past by what we learn. If a person began reading the trilogy [Dune] by reading Children of Dune, then read the other two [Dune and Dune Messiah], it would change them. They'd be different books.

Science Fiction Writers - Algis Budrys

Algis Budrys had this to say about science fiction to Charles Platt author of Dream Makers:

"I think that all forms of fiction and art are actually survival mechanisms. Far from being frills and decorations on the face of some kind of practical world, they are just about the most practical thing there is. They consist of a series of affirmations or

Science Fiction Writers - Norman Spinrad

In the book Dream Makers by Charles Platt, Norman Spinrad had this to say about his science fiction book A World Between:

"Part of what it's about is the paradox that faces all democratic systems when confronted by totalitarian systems trying to subvert them: how do you preserve your

Science Fiction Writers - Ben Bova

Ben Bova in an April, 1979 interview with Charles Platt in the book Dream Makers Volume 1 had this to say about the future of book publishing: “I think electronic publishing is going to be the alternative that allows people to write books and have them published even though they are not mass-market books. What we'll be seeing in the next decade or two is the growth of electronic publishing and the elimination of paper,

Science Fiction Writers - Isaac Asimov

In the book Dream Makers Volume 1 by Charles Platt published in 1980, some of the writers interviewed offer their thoughts about what was then in humanity's future. Isaac Asimov had this to say about the explosion in population:

“My feeling is that the chance of our surviving into the twenty-first century as a working civilization is less than fifty percent but greater than zero. There are several items, each one of which is sufficient to do us in. Number one is the population problem. If we multiply sufficiently, then, even if everything else goes right, we're still going to ruin ourselves. Unfortunately it's difficult to make people see this, but I imagine that the time will come very shortly in which a third child will be outlawed, by prohibitive taxation, or forcible sterilization after the second child. Only two things will prevent this. One: if nonviolent means of reducing the birthrate prevail; in other words, if human beings choose not to have too many children. Two: if the population problem overtakes us so that the world is reduced to chaos and anarchy before we can even try drastic means.”