Jean-Baptiste Bernadet “On Knowing & Not”
Karma
This event has ended.
Ten thousand years from now, Vega, not Polaris, will be our North Star. The space satellite Voyager, which was launched in 1979, and which has since been traveling 40,000 miles per hour, will be closer to the absolute emptiness of space than it will be to our home. Even the Earth’s continents, which have been migrating slowly since they initially were formed, will be 850 feet farther apart.
There will also be a new axial tilt in our planet. It will temporarily shift us away from the Sun, lowering global temperatures by as much as 50 degrees.
Around Yucca at that time there will be a grassy plain. Most of Russia won’t be inhabitable. Iran will be a ski resort.
A new volcanic island will appear beside Hawaii.
Plastic will be extinct because petroleum will be too.
And while we won’t be living longer than we currently are living, Frank Tipler’s book The Physics of Immortality says that if we’re wealthy we’ll be able to buy the brains of younger body donors, download our memories into their minds, and then live through them vicariously until we need another donor.
We will be living underground. Or we will be living in giant domes. Or we will be living in a single networked city that sprawls across the planet called “Ecumenopolis.”
Physicist John Fremlin believes, in fact, that the human population by the year 12,000 will be 61 trillion strong. Our food will have to be harvested from algae and cadavers and pumped into our homes as daily liquid rations.
Rodney Brooks, the director of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, believes however that humans are going to have such exquisite control over the genetics of living systems that instead of growing a tree, cutting it down, and then building a table from it, we ultimately will be able to just grow a table from scratch.
Yet as Warwick Collins explains in his book Computer One, most of the work on the planet by the late twenty-first century will be conducted by a giant global supercomputer that will relegate humans to the role of pampered pets. It will control the water supply, the food supply, electricity, transportation. It will be programmed to repair itself and to anticipate situations that might necessitate more repairs, and this is the reason why, 500 years after we invest in building it, Computer One will calculate the chances that human beings might interfere with the work it’s programmed to do. It will reason that interferences are a threat to its efficiency. And it will logically conclude that it could raise its productivity if humans were not around.
It will be quiet on the Earth.
There will be a lot of wind.
(text by John D’Agata excerpted from About a Mountain)
Media
Schedule
from December 12, 2013 to December 22, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-12-12 from 18:00 to 20:00