Category Archives: Transhuman News

Total Reset: Advertising Marketing In A Connected World: Futurist / Keynote speaker Gerd Leonhard
Advertising This is an excerpt of my talk at SMK 2011 in Zagreb, see Update: Gerd s new Kindle book "The Future of Content" is now available for 3.90 gerd.fm...

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Total Reset: Advertising & Marketing In A Connected World: Futurist / Keynote speaker Gerd Leonhard - Video

Celebrated Philosopher explains female squirting
Douglas Rushkoff, Author of Present Shock, explains the danger of always needing to replace what you have with something better, and how the female orgasm ma...

By: Amish Futurist

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Celebrated Philosopher explains female squirting - Video

A look into the future of libraries with futurist Garry Golden and Tech Guru Al Car
Join Garry for this follow-up webinar, along side tech guru Al Carlson, where attendees will have an opportunity to hear from Garry, and then to interact wit...

By: TBLibraryConsortium

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A look into the future of libraries with futurist Garry Golden and Tech Guru Al Car - Video

A rendering that depicts the future city of Liverpool.

By Rebecca Hiscott2014-03-19 10:06:59 UTC

Our visions of the future have always been more complex than hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers.

Sure, there were the various tropes from many bad sci-fi movies (and a few good ones), such as food in pill form, flying cars, personal jetpacks and robot butlers. But futurists also envisioned brave new worlds that have since been entirely forgotten the death of the letters C, X and Q, for example, not to mention the use of discarded underwear to manufacture candy (ew).

We doff our caps to Paleofuture for making these future-happy predictions from years hence so easily available. Below, we've resuscitated a few of our favorites, which have yet to come true.

"These prophecies will seem strange, almost impossible," begins a 1900 article in Ladies' Home Journal. "Yet they have come from the most conservative and learned minds in America."

These "learned minds" suggested that by the year 2000, certain letters of the alphabet would simply vanish: "There will be no C, X or Q in our every-day alphabet. They will be abandoned because unnecessary. Spelling by sound will have been adopted, first by the newspapers. English will be a language of condensed words expressing condensed ideas, and will be more extensively spoken than any other. Russian will be second."

In this French caricature called "Voyage a la lune" ("Journey to the moon"), a man rides a bicycle-like flying machine while looking through a telescope.

In 1909, Jules Bois, alternately referred to by The New York Times as a "mystic," a "litterateur" and a "Frenchman," rightly predicted that the era's ideal of feminine beauty would be overturned: "Physical weakness, extreme delicacy of physiognomy and acquiescence in a mere secondary position in the social organization will have given place to a type in which beauty and muscular development will be combined." (See: fitspo.)

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8 Bizarre Futurist Predictions That Never Came True

Last March, scientists met at a TEDx conference to discuss which extinct animals would be good candidates to bring back from the dead, called de-extinction.

One year later, futurist and environmentalist Stewart Brand appeared on Tuesday at a Ted conference in Vancouver to present the status of a few de-extinction projects.

At the paleogenomics lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz, for example, lab leader Beth Shapiro and a young scientist, Ben Novak, are trying to revive the first passenger pigeon by altering the DNA of the sally band-tailed pigeon, the passenger's closest genetic relative. A flock of band-tailed pigeons, Brand said, "is being groomed to become the first surrogate parents of passenger pigeons."

Keith Schengili-Roberts

The passenger pigeon went from numbering in the billions to being wiped out by the 19th century.

In another part of the world, Russian scientist Sergey Zimov has created a preserve in Siberia called Pleistocene Park that attempts to restore the type of grassland that existed when woolly mammoths called that place home. Zimov hopes to eventually re-introduce these hairy creatures to the environment.

While the thought of having herds of woolly mammoths running around doesn't immediately sound like a great idea, Brand makes a compelling case for why we should pursue the technique.

De-extinction is not just about reversing extinction, Brand says, but about helping to prevent extinction. It "could help revolutionize conservation," he said.

That's because de-extinction can be used to combat what's called the "extinction vortex" when animal populations fall, inbreeding becomes more common and species go extinct by loss of genetic variation. Endangered species like the black-footed ferret could potentially be saved by introducing old genes into current populations, Brand said.

Brand is the founder and former editor of the Whole Earth Catalog and the co-founder of the Long Now Foundation, an institution that supports projects that promote long-term thinking.

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Futurist Makes A Compelling Argument For Why We Should Bring Animals Back From Extinction