Showing posts with label Predictions. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Predictions. Show all posts

The Next 100 Years of Science - The Next 100 Years of Science

The Long Now Foundation. C owell Theater - San Francisco, CA. Mar 10th, 2006
The Next 100 Years of Science: Long-term Trends in the Scientific Method with Kevin Kelly.
The co-founding editor of "Wired" magazine and author of "Out of Control" is working on a new book on "what technology wants." His research led to the first-ever history of scientific methodology. Starting from this long-term view of science's past transformation, he speculates on how the practice of science will change in the future.
Science, says Kevin Kelly, is the process of changing how we know things. It is the foundation our culture and society. While civilizations come and go, science grows steadily onward. It does this by watching itself.Recursion is the essence of science. For example, science papers cite other science papers, and that process of research pointing at itself invokes a whole higher level, the emergent shape of citation space. Recursion always does that. It is the engine of scientific progress and thus of the progress of society.
A particularly fruitful way to look at the history of science is to study how science itself has changed over time, with an eye to what that trajectory might suggest about the future. Kelly chronicled a sequence of new recursive devices in science - The Long Now Foundation




The Next 100 Years of Science - FORA.tv

Paleo-Future: Wernher von Braun's Space Shuttle (1950s)

Wernher von Braun's Space Shuttle (1950s)

These illustrations by Fred Freeman show Wernher von Braun's concept for a space shuttle in the 1950s. The illustrations can be found in the book Visions of Spaceflight: Images from the Ordway Collection.

To provide safety in case of a malfunction of the reusable upper stage - von Braun's 1950s shuttle concept - crew and passengers press buttons on their chair arms. Contour seats straighten automatically and enclosures snap shut forming sealed escape capsules. To abandon ship, the crew and passengers push another button and the capsules, guided by rails, are ejected by explosive powder charges. The arrangement is seen in cross-section.

After ejection, the capsules' descent is controlled by four-foot steel mesh parachutes. At about 150 above the ground or water, a proximity fuse sets off a small rocket that further slows the rate of fall.


Paleo-Future: Wernher von Braun's Space Shuttle (1950s)

A HISTORY OF THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE

"Description: Interest in the future is not new. Human reason and imagination have always compelled people to reflect on the past and speculate on what will be. This essay surveys the principal means humans have used over the millennia to consider the long-term future and how their actions might affect it."



A HISTORY OF THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE:

Pandemic (A possible look of the future)

1 hr 28 min 27 sec - Jun 19, 2007
An interesting documentary that shows the effects of a possible future outbreak of avian flu and how it would spread across the world.