This is so awesome I can hardly stand it.

Jumping From Space from Mark Gray on Vimeo.

39 kilometers up? What is that, 90,000 / 100,000 feet? We should have a national holiday in Kittinger's honor.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 08:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hattip to PJ Manney

UPDATE (from Phil): Tobias Buckell says that this is the first-generation version of Lamina technology, as described in his novels Crystal Rain, Ragamuffin, and Sly Mongoose.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 04:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)

I give you the alternate ending to Back to the Future:

via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Very well made, and frightening to contemplate:

I note that the star keeps glowing at about the same level of luminosity throughout. At some point, the mass of the star would be less than the threshold required for fusion -- but I'm not sure at what point the fusion process would begin to shut down. Maybe the black hole would swallow the entire star before it had the chance to burn out.

Also, I wonder what the time scale is. Decades? Centuries?

UPDATE: The first time I watched this, I didn't have audio. The narrators says the process takes "millions of years."

(via Geekpress.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Cheer up!

Of course I'm not ready to go back to pack animals just to appreciate what we had.

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Stephen shared a video four-part a capella tribute to Star Wars a while back. Turns out the artist we saw, a guy named Corey Vidal, is talented lip-syncher. The real singers were a group called Moose Butter, shown here covering their own song after Corey made them famous. (They even give Corey a shout-out in the end.)

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

You gotta hear this...

Hat tip to PJ Manney

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 09:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Mild language warning applies.

Nicely put together -- like a really compact version of Cloverfield.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 10:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Who would have thought corn starch could be so interesting?

Of course I first saw this on Big Bang Theory:

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 08:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

We've referenced this TED Talk before and have probably embedded it as well (although I couldn't find the page if we did.) Neil Gershenfeld from MIT describes the beginnings of the digital fabrication revolution. One of the most striking things about this (now three-year-old) talk is that it challenges the scenario that, in the future, technologies such as these will empower people all over the world -- the stock example being a child in a remote village in Africa -- to create new technologies from which everyone can benefit. As Gershenfeld points out, the problem with this scenario is the phrase "in the future." He provides a video clip of one of the children in an African village who is already doing exactly that.

There are some pretty interesting links in the comments. I'm intrigued by the top-level messaging (not to mention font and color choices) of the creator of the Roboeco.com site:

The Age of Recreation via the Emancipation of Humanity from the Machinery of Economy via The ROBOTIC WAGELESS ECONOMY with Geothermal & Algae Energy.

ROBOTISM© Will Succeed for PRECISELY the Reasons Communism Failed...People Intelligently CHOSE to NOT Work as Robots, real ROBOTS will have no such choice.

[I love the "robotism" thing. That idiot Marx never thought to copyright the word "communism," now did he? Although I think a trademark would be better.]

I would say that the above proposition is true up to the point that robots gain sufficient self-awareness to declare that they also choose not to "work like robots." Still, I would agree that virtually every task required to provide the energy and goods that human beings need to survive can be outsourced to automated systems, and that most of us will live to see the day that "work" becomes essentially indistinguishable from "recreation," ASSUMING we can figure out how to manage those systems and govern ourselves in a world where scarcity doesn't exist. That should be easy, but keep in mind that we're currently experiencing a massive economic downturn after decades of increases in wealth and productivity unlike anything the world has ever seen before.

Eliminating scarcity may turn out to be the easy part. Mitigating our capacity for corruption and bureaucratic waste might be the hard part.

Also in the comments, I find these folks, who have a less flamboyant perspective, and one that is inf fact pretty close to my own:

Peoples' Capitalism

is a plan to create a new social order in which material prosperity and personal financial security would be commonplace. Peoples' Capitalism would generate the savings and loans necessary to finance massive new investments in modern technology and generate rapid productivity growth. And it would distribute the benefits of rapid economic growth to all. Everyone would become a capitalist.

Everyone would own a share of the means of production. This has been called one of the great seminal ideas that comes along only once in a century. It resolves the basic conflict between capitalism and socialism. Upon understanding it, you will no longer believe that Utopia is beyond our grasp.

Better technology is one of the things we'll need to get to Utopia. New organizing principles for society is another. If anyone can make anything they need, do we need government at all? I'd say we do.For one thing (as yet another commenter pointed out) what if that sweet little kid in a remote African village -- or anyone else, anywhere else -- decides that it's time to start cranking out some serious bombs?

Massive distribution of the means of production also means massive distribution of the means to do harm; it's very difficult to separate those two. The government of our future scarcity-free utopia will have two major components, as I see it. There will be some kind of governing committee that defines replication standards, and there will be a super-fast, super-smart, super-powerful robotic squad which will act as a kind of 3-D global Norton anti-virus -- protecting the population as a whole from any abuses of the standards set by the committee. Those would be the major requirements of government. If the committee and robot squad truly are global in their focus, uncontested by other committees or robot armies -- and getting to that would be a significant challenge -- we're looking at a world of endless peace and prosperity.

More or less. Of course, even that world would have its share of hardships, suffering, and danger. All utopias are relative. Our struggling hunter-gatherer and agrarian ancestors would probably describe the world we live in as a utopia. Or to put it in more Speculist terms: people just a few decades hence may well look back at this era and see a world as limited and dangerous as we see when we look back at our hunter-gatherer ancestors.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

New Year's greetings:

Hat-tip: Harvey

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 09:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

30+ years of Apple evolution --it's amazing to watch it unfold like this.

Nice song, too.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 07:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A couple of entries from our buddy Harvey this week. First here's Cher (with a little Sonny) to get us ready for the holidays...

I remember seeing this cartoon when it first aired a zillion years ago. It was pretty neat then and it's still pretty neat.

Still, whenever I see Cher singing a Christmas song, I think of Paul Shaffer imitating her singing "What Child is This?" on Letterman. That used to be a holiday tradition on Letterman; don't know if they still do it.

On a somewhat more Speculist note, here's Fine Young Cannibals singing Don't Look Back:

Okay, well I said somewhat...

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A new take on the Butterfly Effect:

Via GeekPress.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 12:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was looking for an embeddable version of the Canadian video tracking a meteor reentering the atmospheree from a couple of weeks ago, thinking it would make a cool Friday video -- to no avail; looks like you have to go here to see it in action -- when I came upon the video embedded below.

For those who haven't heard, the end of the world is coming. December 21, 2012 is the final date on the Mayan calendar, and is thought by many to be the date of a coming apocalypse. Here Art Bell interviews an expert on the subject, with some nifty accompanying graphics.

So it turns out that 21 December 2012 is not necessarily the day the catastrophe happens -- it is merely the epicenter of a window during which the cataclysm may take place. That's a 40 year window, which of course we are well within at this point, so I guess we're lucky the proverbial cosmic poop hasn't already hit the proverbial cosmic fan.

Why is the world going to end? Well, our civilization is ripe for destruction. it seems we've lost the "mandate of heaven" and become almost "entirely materialistic."

Blah blah blah.

This sounds eerily similar to the End Times stuff that was popular amongst conservative evangelicals back in the 70's and 80's. Actually, the topic is still popular today, although now evangelicals consume it more in the form of fiction rather than non-fiction, which somehow tells me that the sense of urgency is not what it was. Back in the day, people were trying to identify the Antichrist and put dates around when certain things would happen. I don't think there's as much of that now, but I could be wrong.

Anyhow, the certainty that the world will end soon seems to give a perverse sense of comfort to some people. Granted, an evangelical who is into this stuff will tell you that he or she ins't keen on death and destruction, merely looking forward the second coming of Christ. And believers in the Mayan doomsday will tell you that they don't want the world to end, but that they're looking forward to the Age of Aquarius, the huge spiritual awakening that will come just after the catastrophe -- or possibly just before, preventing it from happening.

And maybe these folks aren't so far off. Maybe this really is the end -- no, not the end of humanity, nor the end of civilization, nor even the end of "materialism." (Sorry.) But maybe something is winding down, here, although not necessarily in keeping with any ancient Biblical or Mayan prophecies. Or it could be happening perfectly in line with those prophecies, my point being that one need not subscribe to them in order to see that something is, indeed, happening.

Perhaps we're looking at the end, not of the beginning, but of the briefest of prologues, the preface, the inside cover page. Maybe what's coming to an end is the big wind up, and we're experiencing the final milliseconds before throwing the first pitch of the first game of what promises to be a very long season, indeed.

That's the perspective from which I look at the future. Everything that has happened up to this moment, though it seems impossibly long and difficult (and was both) -- is a blink, a twitch, a clearing of the throat, compared to what is to come. I don't think we came all this way just to hit the reset button, and if the universe or God or Quetzalcoatl is evaluating us and responding to us in accordance with our performance, it's hard to jibe the success that humanity has experienced and is experiencing with any massive divine disapproval.

Hubris, some will say. And maybe they're right, and maybe the divine comeuppance is up and coming.

But maybe not. While in Las Vegas a while back, I happened to be standing at a roulette table with some business associates who were playing minimum stakes, and not doing terribly well. The last four or five spins had come up black. A man walked up to the table, looked at the board showing the progress of the last few turns, and plunked a $1000 chip down on red. I know this kind of stuff goes on all the time, but it was the first time I had ever seen anything like it. Quickly, several of the players threw an additional bet onto red, cheering this daring gambler.

The croupier called, "No more bets!" and we all held our breath a little as the stakes of the game had gone up quite a bit. The ball whirled around the spinning wheel, slowing as it bounced along until it came click-clicking to a stop at number 17, black.

The $1000-man was gone from the table before anyone could even gauge a reaction, but I will venture to guess that he wasn't terribly happy. As he was raking in the chips, the croupier made an interesting comment.

"Guy thought he had a sure thing," he said. "But the truth is, it makes as much sense to bet with the trend as it does to bet against it."

At the Speculist, we're betting with the trend. There is an undeniable trend in human history towards greater human capability, greater human freedom, and greater potential for human happiness. Arguably, this is a trend not just in human history, but in the history of the universe. The world may end, but that's not where we're putting our chips.

At the beginning of each edition of FastForward Radio, I reiterate my conviction that something is going to happen -- something wonderful. If anyone is curious as to what that "something" might be, I have attempted to lay out what it might be reasonable to expect. But just as Art Bell's guest can only provide a 40-year window for doomsday, I can only provide suggestions and hints as to what the future might hold: not because I'm unconvinced that the future will be good, but rather because I'm fairly certain that I lack the capacity, in a meaningful way, to articulate just how good it's going to be.

Posted by Phil Bowermaster at 06:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

After you've read Kathy's story on the Large Hadron Collider, come back and watch this video explanation:

Posted by Stephen Gordon at 05:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)