John Harris in Orders of Magnitude / pictoral with text by Robert Sheckley
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Here is something you might want to think about. In the future, a new science called gene splicing could produce miracles... ...who is qualified to decide what makes a "better" human being? ...what safeguards will there be against...genes escaping from the laboratory...? Can patents be awarded to private industry for what is essentially life itself? ...can science retain its...freedom in a commercial situation?
Music/The Arts, by Michael Shore
...young pop musicians are making music with electronic equipment... Future shock has arrived, finally. Why the change of mood today? Because, for one thing...these post-Harrisburg, pre-Apocalypse times, ruled by high tech... ...how did the erudite instruments of scientists filter down...to be accepted as the sound of pop music? ...celebrating the idea of man-machine fusion. ...Peter Gabriel (whose brand of music is no doubt despised by the current crop of electro-punks). Punk rock happened in England. ...Americans had no comparable audience of disenfranchised working-class youth, there was disco...a...minority protest music. Disco began as the...escape music of blacks, was adopted by homosexuals... Punk approaches electronics overtly, embracing a nonhuman feature.
The French Connection/UFO Update, by Charles Berlitz
The most fascinating part of the UFO mystery is not so much what UFOs are or where they came from, but how they manage to travel at...32,000 kilometers per hour in our atmosphere and suddenly turn at 90 degrees or fly in the opposite direction.
Telepresence, by Marvin Minsky
...we might solve critical problems of energy, health, productivity... ...scientists often use the words teleoperators or telefactors. I prefer to call them telepresences, a name suggested by my futurist friend... We could have a remote-controlled economy by the twenty-first century...
Interview/Harrison Schmitt
Omni: Is the administration pursuing solar technology strongly enough?
Schmitt: I don't think so. There's a good deal of money going into it, but there's no perspective on the relative status and time frames for development of the many different forms of solar energy. ...solar cells and the power-tower concepts...they're further off than...combining solar with gas- and oil-fired or even coal-fired power plants... I would like to see..."mutually assured protection." I think a combination of lasers...and other technologies...can give us some new policy options for strategic defense... ...it's not clear that...particle-beam technologies...can be made operational for offensive purposes.
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