Author Archives: Phil Bowermaster

FastForward Radio

Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon welcomed futurist Brian Wang back to FastForward Radio.

Topics included interesting developments related to energy, DNA electronics (and other possibilities for DNA engineering) and weather machines.


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brianlittle.jpgBrian L. Wang, M.B.A. is the Director of Research for the Lifeboat Foundation. Brian is a long time futurist who has been involved with nanotechnology associations since 1994. He is now a member of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (CRN) Task Force where he moderates the technology sub-task force. He is also on the Nanoethics Group Advisory Board. He is also the mastermind behind Next Big Future.

Phil at Convergence 08

Here’s me giving thoughts on how the Obama administration can get off to a good start from a Speculist standpoint:

And here’s my recap of how we can resolve the meme wars:

More on that here.

Friday Videos

30+ years of Apple evolution –it’s amazing to watch it unfold like this.

Nice song, too.

Waking Up

Did you ever hear one of those little electric timers they use at Starbucks? I’m not sure what they’re for — some drinks require precise timing, I suppose. I was meeting some friends at a Starbucks earlier this evening and I had an experience that I’ve had a few times before — a very odd experinece.

I should note that I used to have an alarm clock that made the exact same chiming sound as one of these Starbucks timers. Not a similar sound — the exact same sound. When I hear that sound, something way down in my brain tells me that it’s time to change my state of consciousness. Specifically, it tells me that I need to wake up. It’s a classic pavlovian response. There must have been many times that I have heard that sound while dreaming and, upon receiving the signal, had the world around me dissolve away to be replaced with the real world.

So when I hear the timer go off at Starbucks, my brain gets the signal to wake up, and there is this moment of expectation that the dreamworld around me is going to disappear. It only lasts for an instant, but it is a profound and disorienting sensation. The world becomes a very unreal place for a moment, and I become frustrated that there is not a real world to wake up to.

Just for a moment, I get a glimpse of another level of reality — a more real level of reality — but of course, this is no “glimpse,” just a sense that that other level is there and that I’m missing out on it. All I know about this other level of reality is that it’s more real than the one I’m in…and that I can’t get there.

And it is a complete illusion, of course.

But maybe it’s more than that, too. I don’t believe that the real world is an illusion and that I need to awaken to some enlightened state of existence. (Well, I don’t entirely believe that.) But I do believe that trying to perceive and understand our world in a new way — to get to the “next level,” if only metaphorically –is a huge part of the journey we’re all on. And it’s good to be reminded of that, even by a cheap electronic timer.

Fascinating Topics

I missed this last week: Michael Anissimov provides a thorough run-down of what went on at the Terasem Movement 4th Colloquium on the Law of Futuristic Persons in Melbourne, Florida. Topics ranged from the legal rights of people in biostasis to how to teach robots right from wrong. The focus is on putting together the appropriate legal framework to deal with these major changes in how define little insignificant cocnepts such as what is human or what it means to be alive.

I was a few miles away at a completely different (day-job-related) conference while Michael was attending the Colloquim. I think he got the better deal!

Speaking of Life Out There

Is it the source of life here? Popular Mechanics details five experiments aimed at showing that terrestrial life could have come from space:

Drill on Mars

Send Samples to Space

Expose Life to Re-entry

Shoot Bacteria From a Gun

Study Extreme Life on Earth

We reported on one of the re-entry experiments a while back. In that instance, the bacteria riding a re-entering “meteor” got fried pretty badly. Maybe this time out they will embed the samples deeper in the rock.

There are profound implications if life can be shown to survive a journey through space, and even more profound if life can be shown definitively to have come from elsewhere. Of course, we then face the mystery of how did life come to exist there? That’s assuming we can ever even figure out where “there” is.

Via Instapundit.

He Says There's Probably Life Out There

And he may be right:

Hawking Predicts Discovery of Alien Life: But Asks, Will It be Carbon Based?

On the 50th anniversary of NASA, Stephen Hawking, Newton’s heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, answered the question, “Are we alone?”

His answer was short and simple; probably not!

Hawking presented three options. One, being that there is no life out there, and two – somewhat pessimistically, but subsequently, a little too realistic – being that when intelligent life gets smart enough to send signals in to space, it is also busying itself with making nuclear bombs.

Hawking, known not only for his sharp mind, but his sharp sense of humor, prefers option number three. “Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,” he quickly added: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

If I were a betting man, I think I would have to go with option one. If aliens were out there, there’s an argument to be made that we should already know about them. Or maybe they’re just avoiding us.

But, hey, I’m ready for the aliens to show up and prove me wrong.

Any time they care to.

He Says There’s Probably Life Out There

And he may be right:

Hawking Predicts Discovery of Alien Life: But Asks, Will It be Carbon Based?

On the 50th anniversary of NASA, Stephen Hawking, Newton’s heir as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge, answered the question, “Are we alone?”

His answer was short and simple; probably not!

Hawking presented three options. One, being that there is no life out there, and two – somewhat pessimistically, but subsequently, a little too realistic – being that when intelligent life gets smart enough to send signals in to space, it is also busying itself with making nuclear bombs.

Hawking, known not only for his sharp mind, but his sharp sense of humor, prefers option number three. “Primitive life is very common and intelligent life is fairly rare,” he quickly added: “Some would say it has yet to occur on earth.”

If I were a betting man, I think I would have to go with option one. If aliens were out there, there’s an argument to be made that we should already know about them. Or maybe they’re just avoiding us.

But, hey, I’m ready for the aliens to show up and prove me wrong.

Any time they care to.

Big Bounce

It’s a great question, just exactly the kind we like to ask:

Did our cosmos exist before the big bang?

According to the big bounce picture formulated by theoretical physicist Abhay Ashtekar and others, the cosmos grew from the collapse of a pre-existing universe. Will the same fate await us?It depends. We used to think that the universe was dominated by the gravity of its stars and other matter: either the universe is dense enough for gravity to halt the expansion from the big bang and pull everything back, or else it isn’t, in which case the expansion would carry on forever. However, observations of distant supernovae in the past 10 years have challenged that view. They show not just that the universe is expanding, but also that the expansion is speeding up due to a mysterious repulsive force that cosmologists call “dark energy”. So if the universe fails to contract, has it already bounced its last bounce?Perhaps not. Cosmologists are still very much in the dark about dark energy. Some theoretical models speculate that the nature of dark energy could change over time, switching from a repulsive to an attractive force that behaves much like gravity. If that happens, the universe will stop expanding and the galaxies will begin to rush together. A question mark also hangs over the universe’s matter and energy density, which we have not measured with sufficient accuracy to be sure that the universe will not eventually stop expanding. If it turns out to be a smidgen greater than current observations, then it is a recipe for cosmic collapse.According to the big bounce, in both scenarios the universe will eventually collapse until it reaches the highest density allowed by the theory. At this point, the universe will rebound and begin expanding again – the ultimate in cosmic recycling.

It expands, it contracts. The universe is an accordion!

Or maybe accordion is the wrong analogy — here’s a picture of the cosmos in action:

The slinky is our universe. The stairs would then be…the context in which the universe exists. How big is the staircase, I wonder? Infinite?

More thoughts here.