This Will Change Everything
Ideas That Will Shape the Future
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2.9 • 15 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
Editor of This Will Change Everything, John Brockman collects the responses of 150 intellectual superstars to the question “what game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?” What students get is Ian McEwan (author of Atonement) on the full flourishing of solar power; Steven Pinker (author of The Language Instinct) on the introduction of direct-to-consumer genomics; Richard Dawkins (author of The God Delusion) on cross-species breeding; and Sam Harris (The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation) mind-reading technology-just to name a few.
Exhilarating, visionary, sometimes frightening, but always fascinating, This Will Change Everything provides students with an eye-opening road map of their near future as told by some of the world’s sharpest minds.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part of a series stemming from his online science journal Edge (www.edge.com), including What Have You Changed Your Mind About? and What Is Your Dangerous Idea?, author and editor Brockman presents 136 answers to the question, "What game-changing scientific ideas and developments do you expect to live to see?" Milan architect Stefano Boeri responds with a single sentence: "Discovering that someone from the future has already come to visit us." Most others take the question more seriously; J. Craig Venter believes his laboratory will use "digitized genetic information" to direct organisms in creating biofuels and recycling carbon dioxide. Like biofuels, several topics are recurrent: both Robert Shapiro and Douglas Rushikoff consider discovering a "Separate Origin for Life," a terrestrial unicellular organism that doesn't belong to our tree of life; Leo M. Chalupa and Alison Gopnik both consider the possibility resetting the adult brain's plasticity-its capacity for learning-to childhood levels. Futurologist Juan Enriquez believes that reengineering body parts and the brain will lead to "human speciation" unseen for hundreds of thousands of years, while controversial atheist Richard Dawkins suggests that reverse-engineering evolution could create a highly illuminating "continuum between every species and every other." Full of ideas wild (neurocosmetics, "resizing ourselves," "intuiting in six dimensions") and more close-to-home ("Basketball and Science Camps," solar technology"), this volume offers dozens of ingenious ways to think about progress.
