Age of Reason, Age of Enlightenment, Dark Age, Iron Age, Victorian Age, Stone Age.......etc How do you think future historians, scholars, anthropologists, archeologists 100-500 years from no will view these times we live in?

Age of Fucked. I think we're entering into another dark age. Reading abilities are dropping. the TV god is giving out all the information. I've been thinking a lot lately about this. remembering when the whole blair witch thing hit. i saw that fake documentry with a friend before the movie came out, and he totally bought into it. he was so sure that it was real that he wouldn't believe anything i said until he actually saw one of the actors alive and well. i hear this happened with a lot of people. so what happens if someone starts giving us programming and never giving us the punchline? people put too much faith in TV. the whole media. the whole idea of needing hard proof to dispell the "Truth" that TV gave someone is a scary scary thing.

i thought we were the information age.

i agree, how would you go about addressing the problem? Are we completly fucked? A book can't compete with an interactive TV or DVD. With education one should be able to determine fact from fiction, but then again, isn't the point of entertainment, to make us suspend our disbelief to accept the point of the storyteller? Have the storytellers become too good? Are we in anymore danger from TV, than we are in the printed media. People accept that shit in the Enquirer and all the other silly publications as fact more time than you would be comfortable with.

"With education one should be able to determine fact from fiction" unfortunately though, i don't think this is true either. education is extremely biased and history is often written only from one perspective. is it possible that we're exposed to more (dare i say gullible, backward, or 'less gifted') people just because we are exposed to more people? that aside- tv bad but i'm still very happy about the ifc

what is ifc? Yes, i think the advent of TV and the internet have made it easier for anyone to get their ideas across, no matter how looney. And of course history texts and education can be jaded. But how do we preserve what little integrity the education system has left? You see, this is interesting, because i was thinking about this the other day, and I kept coming up with more questions than answers.....i thought you guys might like this.....

independent film channel

We may be called the Age of Transition, as old ways and traditions are/were blown apart in this age to make way for something so different and radical that even now, we can't imagine living that way. People of the future will not be able to imagine living any other way. I thinkthe Transition will come in the form of space colonization, and the transition will be between our current short-sighted way of living on Earth and a long-term focus in the future, with people making the commitment to go exploring space and never coming back.

I'm planning on raising my children to be prepared to colonize distant planets.

The Technological Revolution

I think/in the future/this age will be known as the Age of Ignorance. Becuz we are forever learning but never accepting the truth. I think in the future/this age will be known as the Age of Deception/becuz never before has it been so easy to dupe so many into believing almost anything. UFOs... Elvis sitings... that you can get rich day-trading... that personal happiness is an inalienable right/no matter how many families you fracture or hearts you break in order to achieve it... that money is God & God is a myth... that you are entitled to anything you can buy. Part of it is t.v. & the prevelance of media messages everywhere we turn. But a larger part is the fact that most of us want the quick-fix, simple answer. "No, no -- divorce doesn't cause any real harm to kids! It's better to split up than stay in an unhappy marriage...." "Men are from Mars & women are from Venus & you are all such idiots that yr relationship problems can be neatly analyzed w/a few cliched labels & easily fixed if you read this book/by this video tape/attend this seminar..." "Feeling blue? Taking a pill! Gotta headache? Take a pill? Edgy & anxious? Take a pill? But tell yr kids JUST SAY NO TO DRUGS!". I think this age will be known as the Souless Age becuz we are so hooked into all kinds of technology (esp. the Web/which I admit to loving) which allows us to chatter at each other w/out every really seeing or touching or knowing one another. And also becuz within the next 10 years/some corporation w/enuf payola $$ to spread around will succeed in cloning the 1st human -- probably some phenomenally talented athlete-cum-cash-cow -- & this will create the 1st human w/out a soul in a literal sense. But hey -- that's just me, right?

I think it's a tie between Sarah and Nate. The age is totaly fucked. Anyone looking back on this is going to wonder what the hell we were thinking. But it's also the Technological Revolution--all this stuff being developed so quickly. People never had souls to begien with.

But don't we look other times in the past and wonder what the hell they were thinking? I tend to think we will be revered as an Information Age. We can never access information fast enough. Everything we do is about accessibility. Faster faster, we need it fast and we needed it yesterday. I tend to take Sem's approach as well that we are in a transition. Though technology has being enhanced at an increasingly rapid rate, I think that is merely a catalyst, not a revolution. I don't think many are opposed to technology on the whole. If anything we embrace it. Are there any writers that you know of who are are diligent against the repercussions of our technical advances? Perhaps it's too early to tell. Once we have ignored history and made our earth unliveable, we will expand into the universe, we are too curious for our own good. Not that this is a bad thing. Technology has only allowed us to do what would probably happen anyway, only faster.

It is a technological age, and an information age. I think that this period will be remembered for technology--which was a transition for us. Moving from the steam powered (ok. I know that steam power hasn't been around as long as humanity has. I was trying to use a cute metaphor but decided not to.) world of the past into this world--but then again, for people looking back on us, this world may seem like a stone age technology wise. I'm not sure what to think. It's certainly a world of change. There. I contradicted myself.

I think space colonization will go the way of human cloning. A handful of rich people or corps. will try it. It will fail miserably. Word will get out abt their horrible failure. Then everyone will wise up & start looking in our own backyard -- to the sea -- for places to colonize. Real estate in space or on other planets may be free/but there are no usable resources out there. Which makes long-term living on The Moon or Mars or Vacation Space Station impractical. But the oceans offer us food/a water source (all we have to do is figure out a cheap desalinazation process)& a heat/light source (those amazing undersea volcanos & hot springs you see on TLC & the Discover Channel). Plus/we have considerable more experience w/undersea living than we do w/outerspace living. We'll see...

"Real estate in space or on other planets may be free/but there are no usable resources out there. Which makes long-term living on The Moon or Mars or Vacation Space Station impractical." i think this exemplifies why we are limited. There are all kinds of resources we have yet to figure out how to use. They have developed ways of launching spacecraft simply by utilizing any given planets gravitational pull, almost as a slingshot. To a certain extent this is how the probe which is currently studying Jupiter's moons, Gallileo satellite(spell?) works if I am not mistaken. It may sound looney, but space is full of resources, like gases, gravity or lack there of, solar energy, hell matter iself could be broken down to create energy. Who knows. Again, it sounds nutty, but I think there are means and ways beyond our comprehension that lie ahead, as far as space life/travel goes.

and as far as it only being for the rich, well, they said the same thing about flying. remember the term Jet Set? it used to refer to people who were so rich they could afford to fly as a means of transportation, while everyone else had to take a bus or train or drive one's self. We live in inan age where people can discuss teh next generation of supercomputers using DNA as circuitry, and nobody says that's preposterous. They have already cloned a monkey by splitting embryonic cells. Only one lived, but in cloning that's a spectacular result. If you can do it with monkeys, you can do it with humans. What's truly astounding about the age we're entering is that people are becoming blase about things that should be rocking them back on their heels and slapping their heads in amazement.

Right on Sem,I slap my head over those things everyday I wish I could have opened my eyes sooner.

yeah. I saw that thing about how they cloned a monkey here in portland on the cover of the oregonian a few days ago, and I didn't even bother to read the article fully. I suspect that humans have already been cloned by some dr. moreau somewhere. part of what was said in the article made sense. it's good to work with clones in the lab because they make such great control groups. they're genetically identical to the one you experiement on. and some of it was pretty funny. I think the lab pr person said something about how now they can use fewer animals. but that's a semantics issue, isn't it?

this is the computer age.

They say less is known about the sea than deep space. Or rather, the deep sea. Not sure if this is still true. Anybody?

A fantastic book on the problems of working in the deep sea is Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. Not just a great treasure hunt story, but really a human story: the nobility of the people on the SS Central Ammerica as it was sinking in the 1851, but also the ingenuity of a small group of people in the 1990's recovering the gold and artifacts on board. The point was made that yes, the two are about the same in difficulty, but we have much more experience in space than the deep sea. Hell, no one's ever seem a live giant squid, just the occasional corspe on a beach.

Sorry, that last book was by Gary Kinder and is now out in paperback. Space, especially other bodies, is jam packed with usuable materials, from hydrogen to heavy metals. The main economic rationale for putting a permanent base on the moon is for mining and shipping minerals back to earth. I remember back in 1978 reading a book called In His Image by David Rorvik, which purported to be the story of the cloning of a human being. It was quite controversial, though plausible; the science described in detail was almost exactly the same method used two decades later for Dolly the sheep. But I (and most others) doubt the story. He claimed he was hired by a rich American to put him in touch with a geneticist whom he called Darwin. Why would a human clone not have a soul? If one believes that a soul is "implanted" in a "naturally" conceived embryo, then there's no real reason to think it wouldn't happen in the similarly produced clone embryo. I fully expect commercial space travel in my lifetime. There are companies actively planning it now. Hilton has an orbiting hotel literally on the drawing board. There's a billionaire developer (Robert Bigelow, a hero of mine) in Nevada who's already funded a company with the first half billion, and hired the very top gun at NASA to implement private space travel. I know Wired (search under Bigelow) did an article on the guy recently, as have other magazines and newspapers.