Category Archives: Humanity

The Transformation of the World

At the  H+ Magazine  site I have a piece that expands on some of the ideas we explored in our recent FastForward Radio on the subject of human exceptionalism. Are homo sapiens just one of the many diverse life forms on this planet, or is there something unique about us? In some ways, the question […]

Humanity Rocks — FastForward Radio

Are human beings better or more important than other living things? Should we be just as concerned about the lives of animals as we are our fellow humans? Woud the world be better off without humans? Phil  and Stephen  discuss the case for human exceptionalism and explain why humanity has a unique role to play […]

Persistence

One of the greatest achievements in human history, perhaps the greatest, is the development of tools to make information persistent. Imagine the world before the invention of writing: knowledge could only be stored in living human brains. It took years and years to build up a viable collection of information in any one mind, and […]

Hey I Know That Guy!

You hear a lot about how the “average person” does this or thinks that, of things that will or won’t appeal to the average person — but does such an entity really exist? Is there really an average person? National Geographic says yes. They have crunched the numbers and come up with an answer. Check out the […]

The Smart Ones

The Boskops. They were here on the planet contemporaneously with us. They had great big heads and cute little faces. They were smarter than us. How much smarter? Well, it says here that we are Homo Erectus to their Homo Sapiens. Put your head around that one. We spend a lot of time here at […]

Safeguarding Humanity

I was born into a world in which no individual or group claimed to own the mission embodied in the Lifeboat Foundation’s two-word motto. Government agencies, charitable organizations, universities, hospitals, religious institutions — all might have laid claim to some peace of the puzzle. But safeguarding humanity? That was out of everyone’s scope. It would […]