I have to admit that I am enamored of the idea, but I'm going to give it until the end of the week before I make any final decision. That said, the benefits of moving to a smaller number of posts per week seems an overall benefit for me--and it allows y'all to digest the information I've posted here without feeling like you're on information overload. That said, if I happen to find something I want to blather on about on an "off" day, you may find a few extra posts here and there. Or I may just throw a post or two up on Twitter, Facebook, or my Tumblr account.
With that all out of the way, ...I figured we could start off with one of my favorite topics: space!
I found an article on MSN today about an auction that started today where they're selling off bits of memorabilia from our manned space missions to the moon. While I certainly can't afford any of that stuff (not to mention that I'd have no idea where to put it,) I'm kind of hoping that some of it will go to museums rather than private collections. Here's a bit of video with regard to the sale.
Our next mental landscape comes to us from the Pew Research Center. There is an eight-page report detailing what many experts and people believe the future of the internet will be like. I happened to check in on page 6 to read some of the more hopeful thoughts. What struck me most about the opinions of what the internet would be like in 2025 was that most of the people when they addressed the subject did so from a self-oriented perspective--as in, they spoke about it in ways that related to their fields of expertise. While this isn't terribly unexpected, I found myself wondering if any of us can really step outside of ourselves to see a broader view of the world and its emerging technologies.
Certainly most people saw the internet as a tool for everything from medicine to education, but their ideas on how that technology would be transformed in just over eleven years I think said more about them than about the actual truth of the future. After all, some of the technological advances thought up in the 1960's still haven't shown their faces here in 2014. In essence, what I saw when I read the hopeful theses of the internet's future wasn't as astonishing in scope as what we might hope for it to be--and in those cases where people were decidedly hopeful, they seemed to completely throw reality out the window.
Here are some of the opinions that I believe share the most wisdom with regard to the internet's future:
Jeremy Epstein, senior computer scientist at SRI International, currently working with the National Science Foundation as lead program director for Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace, responded, “Combined with mass media, the Internet will increase the impact of English worldwide, and by doing so, increase Westernization. At the same time, it will increase pushback against perceptions of Westernization, and will make it easier for groups opposed to homogenization to communicate. The influence of the Internet in the Arab Spring (although ultimately unsuccessful) is the harbinger of the future. Countries that cut themselves off (e.g., Cuba, North Korea) or significantly limit speech (e.g., China) will risk putting themselves at significant economic disadvantage. On the other hand, necessity is the mother of invention, and such countries will find significant innovation among their populations to getting around controls. If that innovation can be harnessed, it may help them in the long run.”
Stephen Abram, a prominent library blogger, said, “The greatest impact will be on world health. Unfortunately I don’t foresee the same impacts on the biggest causes of sadness – education, poverty, nutrition, etc. I pray that the political and global will will be there to solve the big problems and not just the digital ones — global warming, war, under-employment, etc.”
There are those who expect progress to be made, but not everywhere. Olivier Crepin-Leblond, managing director of Global Information Highway Ltd. in London, UK, wrote, “The biggest impact of the Internet will be on freedom. In some countries, it will enable freedom. In others, it will kill it by being used as a tool to brainwash populations.”
Speaking on the subject of the internet for a moment, I recently got invited to play Ingress--a mobile app game that utilizes real-world locations for its game play. It also encourages walking, and I was asked to participate on the side of the Enlightened.
I hope some of the rest of you will join John and I as we seek to spur humanity on toward our next level of evolution.That said, there's something exciting in my mind about games that utilize the real world as part of the game. It's something that could have a profound effect on the way that we play games in the future, as well as view things like art, historical sites, conservation, and music. Imagine, for just a moment, that a composer wrote a piece of music while sitting somewhere in the world. Now imagine being able to hear the sound of their music while sitting where they were when they composed it--seeing the landscape, hearing its natural harmonies. Or, better yet, imagine buildings overlaid with a virtual picture that you can only see when you hold up your mobile device to it.
Games like Ingress are the first incarnations of those future ideas, and I hope that you'll consider playing not just for the game aspect, but also to help further the study of virtual communities and virtual-real world technologies.
And last, but not least, a bit of news from the SyFy channel.
According to the Hollywood Reporter, the channel's production staff is getting something of an overhaul as they look toward doing more space operas and less of the B-grade and budget sci-fi films. While they've planned an interesting line up for this year, there are a few things that I'm really looking forward to seeing.
The first is a mythological drama named Olympus set to show in 2015.With all the recent shows detailing our childhood fairy-tales, it is interesting to me that the SyFy channel has decided to take a page from a place in my childhood I like to remember as Clash of the Titans. What made the movie great wasn't the mythology, though; it was the story that they told with it, and this new show looks like it might hold up to some of that promise. From what I can gather, the show is about a young male character named Hero--the choices and decisions he makes as humanity seeks to leave the gods behind.
Whether it will be any good or not, and whether it can break out of the comic book mold that we have come to expect from DC Comics and Agents of Shield, I don't know, but I am hopeful.
And yet another bit of awesome from the SyFy channel is set to show this May in which Wil Wheaton gets to have his very own talk show.
To say that I am excited about this is understating things a bit, and while I understand that a lot of people might not care for the guy, I, for one, am glad that he is able to promote science, science fiction, and humor a la Chris Hardwick on his VERY OWN TALK SHOW!
And with that, I will leave you to the rest of your week to contemplate the awesome.
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