Tag Archives: the future

A Prophetic Film from 1940

It’s title: To New Horizons. The logic is sunny and simple, but it has proven (thus far) to be pretty much dead on.

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A Prediction for the Next Three Years: The Californication of America Will Proceed Apace

It’s 2014. What will it be like in January of 2017? To answer this question, I think we should look backward to 35 years ago, when it was 1979. Jimmy Carter was president, the multi-ethnic “We are Family” Pittsburgh Pirates … Continue reading

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Contemporary Life in Perspective

A stunning statistic (via Bloomberg Businessweek): The global median income is around $3 to $4 a day. That means that half of the world’s population lives on less than that. Here’s another stunning statistic (from the same source): According to … Continue reading

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The Anti-Green Energy Meme

Courtesy of FOX News: __________ The reality? An industrial economy can get a substantial portion of its energy from renewables. Germany, for example, gets over 20% of its electrical power from renewables. Over 20%. And that number is projected to rise … Continue reading

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Robert Wright Claims History is Moving Toward More and More Non-Zero Sum Games

Every day, in a lot of ways, are we really getting better and better?

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President Obama’s Legacy: America at One Gigabit Per Second?

In The New York Times this week, Thomas Friedman shared his take on the world we live in: It’s a world in which the increasing velocity of globalization and the Information Technology revolution are reshaping every job, workplace and industry. … Continue reading

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The New Hitler Youth of India

With India’s rise on the global stage, it would seem valuable to know the attitudes of its most elite educated teenagers, and Dilip D’Sousa at the Daily Beast reports that a not inconsiderable number of them harbor fascist sentiments: My … Continue reading

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Thinking and Apocalypse: Heuristic (Shorthand) Thinking vs. Critical Thinking. Should We Be Optimistic About Our Future?

Given the paucity of sustained critical thinking in our culture, science writer K. C. Cole reflects on our prospects for collective survival in a recent (and I think important) review at the Los Angeles Review of Books: No one in … Continue reading

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What do Harvard, MIT, Coursera, and Udacity Have in Common?

Answer: ambitions for offering massively open online courses. MOOCS. That’s what they’re calling them. This is really great news, and certainly puts on display the Internet’s power for good [New York Times]: Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a … Continue reading

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The Google Goggle Future

A little too boy-in-a-bubble claustrophobic for me, but I suppose one would get used to it. I didn’t look at this video and say, “Wow!” (as I expected to). Instead, I felt oddly vacant afterwards, as if Google Goggle Life would … Continue reading

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Mars Life Missions Cancelled: Short Sighted and Evidence of America’s Decline

The following is in the New York Times this week: Just as NASA is on the cusp of answering the most fascinating questions about Mars — is there, was there or could there be life there? — the money needed to provide the answers … Continue reading

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2012: Will Iran’s Nuke Program Lead to the End of the World?

Maybe. The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, . . . believes Israel is closer to utilizing the military option in dealing with Iran’s nuclear program than it is to finding a diplomatic solution to the threat. . … Continue reading

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Fusion on a White Horse? Michio Kaku Thinks So

Great news! Fusion’s technological problems appear to be “licked”, and (predicts Michio Kaku) will, by 2030-2040, be a feasible alternative to fossil fuels. Kaku also predicts that solar will become price competitive with fossil fuels within the next 15 years. See Kaku talking about these … Continue reading

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Which Germany would you like to live in? Luther’s, Hitler’s, or Habermas’s?

In thinking about what worldviews are broadly contending for the human future, it occurs to me that Germany, over the past 500 years, has basically passed through the three key ones: The religious civilizational vision. This is embodied today by contemporary fundamentalists … Continue reading

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Eugenics Revival Watch: What’s Richard Dawkins’s Position on Eugenics?

He wants an open discussion concerning the subject. Below is the full text of what he wrote as a contribution to the book, What is Your Dangerous Idea? (Simon & Schuster 2006). Richard Dawkins’s statement also appeared in the The Herald of Scotland in November … Continue reading

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Atheism’s Real Problem Going Forward: Universal Humanism vs. Johann Gottfried Herder, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Friedrich Nietzsche

The fact that we evolved from social primates, and not, say, loner sharks, is sufficient to account for human moral impulses. Aristotle famously defined us as the political (or social) animal. But being a tribal species in which demonized out-groups are … Continue reading

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What is Humanism, and Where is 21st Century Atheism Taking Us, Really?

Just as Unitarianism is the featherbed for catching the falling Christian (Erasmus Darwin), humanism is the featherbed for catching the falling atheist. What humanism functions to conceal for the squeamish atheist and agnostic (and I am one of those squeamish agnostics) is … Continue reading

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Worldview Wars (and Who’s Winning)

I think that what evangelical Albert Mohler wrote recently at his blog is true: The future shape of the world appears to be a worldview competition between Christianity, Islam, and Western Secularism. And I think it’s quite obvious which one … Continue reading

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Critical Thinking Watch: Ray Kurzweil Says Solar Cells Will Power the World in 16 Years. Should We Believe Him?

Futurist and inventor, Ray Kurzweil, predicts that advances in nanotechnology will result in solar energy powering the world in just 16 years. The Big Think website recently interviewed him, and here is part of the editors’ summary: [H]ow far away … Continue reading

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A Bit of Happy News for the Weekend

Willem Buiter is Citgroup’s chief economist, and here’s CNBC today reporting his forecast for the global economy over the next 40 years: “We expect strong growth in the world economy until 2050, with average real GDP growth rates of 4.6 percent … Continue reading

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