Ed Regis

How does a Great Mambo Chicken come about anyway? Well, some scientists were sitting around wandering what was so great about living in one-G conditions all the time. They made a big centrifuge, put some straw, chicken feed, and some chickens in there and spun them up to two-and-a-half Gs for months. The chickens did their chicken thing: they cackled, scratched around, laid eggs, and had grand chicken-ly times. Twenty-three generations went through this. They came out buff and muscled. Great show more Mambo Chickens. They had lost their excess fat, their hearts were pumping more blood, their extensor muscles were big, and their wingbeating exercises and treadmill tests showed a three-fold increase in strength. They strutted and stomped on the treadmills showing off their bad-self chickenness.

The human condition or the human predicament is not admired by many humans. Everybody wants to condemn it or improve it. Acceptance of it as is is considered feeble at best. Why is that? Religions emphasize the spiritual and denigrate the physical and the sordid thoughts that emanate from mushy brain tissue. Some come up with a formula that goes something like- have a salvation event, wear a hair shirt, fleece the poor, pray for the end-times to hurry up and get here, and then eternal paradise happens. The techno-nerds eliminate the faith part and decide they will create their own paradise by manipulating matter in all kinds of ways. Downloadable brains and personalities, back-up copies, exchangeable bodies of all kinds, cryogenic time-outs, and even more out-there ideas. The difference between the religionists and the techno-heaveners is one of faith and one of degrees of action. If the faith is expended in a nonactive delusion then not much happens in the present world. There are results if the faithful try to strong-arm their beliefs on others. Death comes and whatever happens on the other side of death happens. The other camp decides to manipulate the physical world in a effort to create their own visions of paradise in physical manifestations. The electronic self has to have a substrate to reside in.

Philosophy is hard enough to contemplate with humanity in the picture. Add transhumanism to mix and it's like trying to completely understand infinity. Vertigo ensues. Regis is a philosopher and the underlying theme of this book is hubris. Not a horror of hubris but an incredulous amazement of hubristic transhuman thinking in some circles. He uses italics extensively to bring across this incredulity. It's not a complicated read and many parts are entertaining. He is a philosopher with a sense of humor. The book was published twenty-one years ago. That makes for an interesting timeline about what has happened since. The robotics progress has been exponential since then.

I have a fondness for crazy people. Not psychopaths but crazy people that think really big crazy thoughts. This book is full of such characters. Some of them are actually dead now which probably messed up their goal of not dying. I'm not sure I want them to succeed with some of their grandiose plans for reshaping humanity and the universe but technology has a pattern of marching on bit by bit. Is it really a good idea to dismantle Jupiter? Or squeeze the sun to get some energy? It wasn't that long ago that many thought human flight was so hubristic that the gods would swoop down and knock humanity's wings off. show less

My reactions upon reading this book in 1991.

Regis' fast-paced style has enough wit to make this book funny and lend just the right amount of incredulity and sarcasm. Many of the ideas of these supremely confidant, hubristic thinkers are not that new to an sf reader, even one who doesn't specifically search out these speculations or hard sf. About the only new ideas I heard were the engineering of suns and ways to beat the heat death and proton-decay of the universe. The rest -- cryonics, show more mind-machine transfers, artificial life, memes, nanotech, non-rocket space drives, space colonies, macro engineering -- I'd all been exposed to before, mostly in sf.

Indeed the link between sf and these ideas are strong. These scientists often are fans of sf, some even writers, of it. And most of these ideas were first proposed in sf and the attempt to realize them motivated by sf. Others have, as all outrageous scientific ideas do, motivated sf. L-5 space colonies are a prime example. Cryonics seems to have developed a postive feedback loop with sf. Of course, these ideas have a willing audience in sf circles. (Hans Moravecs ideas seem to be realized in detail in Philip C. Jennings who, while I have no conclusive proof, seems knowledgeable about Moravec.)

Regis manages to constantly shift his story from topic to topic, scientist to scientist, back and forth while making it completely clear. The book is obviously arranged from the hubris of escaping earth's gravitational well without governmental help (well, actually it starts with the hubris of Evel Knievel trying to jump the Snake River Canyon) to the hubris of trying to escape the death of the universe. Many of the characters are fascinating especially robochauvinist Hans Moravec, the man who would be computer. Moravec's schemes (and similar ones) are one of the few ideas I have trouble with. I have serious doubts (given the subtle interplays of chemistry, genetics, environment, and its seemingly chaotic organization) that the brain can be encoded in program form. And even it it could there's the frightening, to me, question: is the copy really you? I also had trouble with some of the examples of artificial life. Using the metaphor of life seems useful -- especially with memes, but I feel there should be some blob of matter associated with the life. Maybe I'm wrong.

Moravec wants to tamper with the stuff of humanity: the body, mind, and intellect. Is is silly to regret leaving the mortal coil ("putting away childish things" as Paul said) and its delights but terrible limitations and weaknesses Moravec is, in some sense, right in resenting the cravings of the body even though we find their satisfaction, well, satisfying. Why want to struggle to do things as a mere human? Will friendship, love survive the transformation. (And will, asks an old sf question, those "mind children" be lotus-eaters in a computer simulation? And will it matter if they do?). The "apocalyptic" (true in a religious sense, less so in a secular one) transformation of society is to be applauded and feared, ripe with fearful, resentful ambivalence in both visions. show less

Just when I was starting to feel a little self-conscious about my list so far being dominated by graphic novels and children's books, I managed to plow through this tome. Okay, that's an unfair characterization. At times, I was enraptured by this book. I delivered spontaneous lectures to my husband and my co-workers. I posted quotes on Facebook. I engaged in conversation with a cashier who took my money after I spent a lunch period reading voraciously. But to get to these amazing stories, to show more get to those turns of phrase that were so poetical and profound that I was moved to claim this book as a part of my personal gospel, there was a lot to plow through.

To say this book was uneven would be a master understatement. Church gave himself an ambitious structure -- telling the progress of synthetic biology as a parallel to the processes of natural evolution. It was a wonderful concept, and in the places where it worked it was brilliant. But in other chapters it was so clearly forced that I wished he hadn't bothered. I also found it strange where he chose to explain concepts in great detail (like the chirality of organic molecules) and where there seemed to be no attempt to explain at all (exactly how one obtains sequences of synthetic DNA -- something central to most of the enterprises in his book.) Finally, there are so many mentions of Church's own work, Church's various business start-ups and organizations that eventually it prompted some eye-rolling.

Why, with all this complaining, would I still give this book four out of five stars? Well, because the content is simply amazing. It is hard to walk away from this book and not be awe-struck at what mere mortals have been able to achieve with the tools of science, hopeful for the future, and even a mystical sense of connection with it all. There are amazing stories in here, of synthetic cyanobacteria that can synthesize diesel fuel from the sun, synthetic organisms that can sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in large quantities, scientists working to resurrect species from extinction, possible treatments for cancer, therapies that could render organisms immune to all viruses, and so much more -- an international competition inspiring college students on shoestring budgets to engineer possible solutions to an astonishing variety of problems.

Of course, there are ethical considerations in this work, and there are moments (especially in the very beginning), where Church is annoyingly starry-eyed. But what Church sets out to do here is to impress us with the audacity of his dream. (And how close much of it is to reality!) And I must admit, I'm walking away a little starry-eyed myself. show less

This book presents a fascinating approach to "pathological technology," advancements that are inherently foolhardy and dangerous yet are so cool that people persist in perpetuating it anyway. The main focus (about 2/3 of the book) is on the Hindenburg, and that's where the book excels. Regis shows the evolution of airship tech through the 19th century and the vital role played by Zeppelin, and how the "Delirium" induced by airships caused his company to flourish despite sequential airship show more disasters. The details on the Hindenburg disaster are fascinating and well-written.

Where the book feels less persuasive is in chapters on atomic advancements and future space technology, especially the latter. Maybe I've simply succumbed to science fiction "delirium" myself, as a writer in the genre, but I felt like he was sneering at scientific developments that don't exist yet and had no right to judge them as "pathological yet."

While not a perfect book, it is a fairly quick read and certainly worthwhile for the data on the rise and fall (literally and figuratively) of airships. show less