Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

By: Damien Broderick

Book Overview

A volume of 15 new, specially commissioned essays by notable journalists and cholars such as Rudy Rucker, Jim Holt and Gregory Benford presenting a series of speculations on the most radical, but... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0977743349
• ISBN13: 9780977743346
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Atlas Books
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 0.78 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.1" x 7.1"

Customer Reviews

Read IT

Read It INVICTUS The difficulty about this sort of essay collection is to get people with the necessary expertise to contribute, and to take the necessary time and trouble over their work. Looking at the CV 's, one has to some extent to take this on trust. But Broderick appears to be a responsible person and I am inclined to think he has carefully excluded phonies. With that minor reservation, I am impressed. Some folk with no or little knowledge of, for example, human evolution will if they read this (unlikely) be shaken by it. It is a short course in where we may be heading by reason of our collective scientific expertise. Those who have no notion of this topic may find much of it it hard to believe. But most of those inclined to get Broderick's book will find useful instruction in it.

Words fail me

Utterly mind-blowing look into what the human race might become. Read this book, then meditate on it, and you will find yourself wrestling with questions like "How is a sufficiently advanced civilization different from God?" and "If we can all connect to each other using some future version of the internet to the point where we can experience each other's thoughts and feelings instantaneously and expand our intellect to the point of processing all of those experiences and understandings simultaneously, what need is there for a self?" The first chapter is a bit math heavy, but don't let that discourage you - follow it as best you can, because the reward of reading this book is as incalculable as some of the stuff our descendants will be doing.

A must

This book is simply the best existing summary of current, cutting-edge hypotheses, projections and estrapolations concerning our distant future, having regard both to posthuman changes and to a more cosmological scale. The subject is attacked from very different angles by a diverse set of contributors who mix vision, technicalities, and - why not? - a poetic sense of what our presence and possible long-term survival in this universe may imply. A fascinating scenario indeed, and a transhumanist challenge to old biases...

Fascinating Exercises for Your Mind

This book stretches anyone's mind. No matter how much science fiction one has read, or futurist literature --there are new ideas contained within the pages of Year Million. Not all the writers are equal, some are better than others--but a few shine brilliantly. You can read and disagree, formulate your own ideas--or nod your head with the 'hmmm' moments when you agree. It is a fun book, I highly enjoyed it.

Highly Recommend!

What an awesome awesome book! I haven't enjoyed a new book that can plausibly be construed as sci-fi for a while. The book is basically a collection of essays by a number of experts in their respective fields. The subjects range from the significance of prime numbers vs. humor, extending human life span, and very very very far off future. The overall claim is that we will basically become aliens with god like abilities (that is unless we do ourselves in first). There are a number of references at the end of the book that are worth looking up.