Steps to Colonizing Space

The third technological revolution which I see coming is the expansion of life's habitat from Earth into the solar system and beyond. This revolution may take a little longer than the other two. Perhaps it may take as long as a hundred years from now. In charting a possible course for this revolution, I take as my guide Ben Finney, an anthropologist at the University of Hawaii who has made a detailed study of the Polynesian navigators and their voyages of colonization from island to island ac...

 The Future History of Uplift

The active pursuit of uplift really took hold as a scientific field during the great flowering of transhuman culture, an era that also gave us the widespread settlement of space, extensive human genetic modification, nanotech, cognitive science, and the digital emulation of consciousness. It is in fact the convergence of these fields, and the feedback loops spawned between them, that enabled the uplift project to make so much headway so quickly. It’s easy to see uplift as a breathtaking cult...