My goals for 2009 are simple:
1. Keep my teaching job, but still find time to write. (Neither of these is a certainty in this economy.)
2. Finish my non-genre novel that I workshopped at TNEO last summer.
3. Find the money to attend those workshops I want to go to--chiefly TNEO and Laurie's Wild West Novel Workshop Weekend.
4. Begin in earnest my YA SF novel (this might be simultaneous with 2.)
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Friday, January 2, 2009
Science Fiction and Human Evolution
I'd like to comment on the future of human evolution today, a subject first broached by H.G. Wells, both in the Time Machine and War of the Worlds. In the Time Machine, Wells speculated that humans might evolve into two species, a master species and a preyed-upon species. In War of the Worlds, he speculated that advanced species would evolve into big brains, telepathy, and stomachs adapted for feeding upon nutritious blood--very vampire-like.
A new article offers a scientist's speculation on the same topic. This article is in the latest Scientific American (January 2009). It's interesting because the author summarizes the basic directions humanity can go: 1) continued natural evolution; 2) splitting off of different human species because of isolation (for example, in isolated space colonies); 3) splitting off of different human species because of artificial genetic engineering; 4) transhuman experimentation (i.e., humans as Borgs).
The article's author, Peter Ward, has been involved with NASA's AstrobiologyInstitute at the University of Washington, and wrote a book on this subject, Future Evolution, in 2001. There's a nice bibliography at the end of the article if you want more information, too.
One interesting bit of detail is that scientists believe that modern humans (i.e., humans in the past 10,000 years) are evolving at a faster rate than at any time since humans split off from chimpanzees around 7million years ago.
The article is published online at ScientificAmerican's website (an excellent place for research, btw): http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-future-of-man
It seems to me that this whole area is a fertile realm of speculation about the direction humans can/should take. I once wrote a short story in which the future human race is split into two--a space-faring humanity and an earth-bound humanity. I don't think I'm finished with the topic yet, but for now, it goes on the back-burner while I work on other things.
A new article offers a scientist's speculation on the same topic. This article is in the latest Scientific American (January 2009). It's interesting because the author summarizes the basic directions humanity can go: 1) continued natural evolution; 2) splitting off of different human species because of isolation (for example, in isolated space colonies); 3) splitting off of different human species because of artificial genetic engineering; 4) transhuman experimentation (i.e., humans as Borgs).
The article's author, Peter Ward, has been involved with NASA's AstrobiologyInstitute at the University of Washington, and wrote a book on this subject, Future Evolution, in 2001. There's a nice bibliography at the end of the article if you want more information, too.
One interesting bit of detail is that scientists believe that modern humans (i.e., humans in the past 10,000 years) are evolving at a faster rate than at any time since humans split off from chimpanzees around 7million years ago.
The article is published online at ScientificAmerican's website (an excellent place for research, btw): http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-future-of-man
It seems to me that this whole area is a fertile realm of speculation about the direction humans can/should take. I once wrote a short story in which the future human race is split into two--a space-faring humanity and an earth-bound humanity. I don't think I'm finished with the topic yet, but for now, it goes on the back-burner while I work on other things.
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