Wow....

Talks Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo

TED | Talks | Blaise Aguera y Arcas: Photosynth demo (video)

Do not be put off by the fact he now works for Microsoft.  Watch the demo...

Stand on where?

Many years ago, 8 I suspect, I was speaking to the late John Brunner at the Preston SF Group.  John was on his way to the Glasgow Worldcon and stopped off in Preston with his wife, an elderly van and two extremely elderly dogs.  We did worry at the time if the dogs would survive the trip - sadly, as history records, the dogs weren't the problem.

Anyway, we were talking about errors he felt he had made.  He had two.  Firstly was the concept of an FTL enabled Starship being able to make planetfall, the second was the idea that any caucasians would end up colonising space.  Space, he opined was for the Chinese and the Indians.  He didn't know what the future held for Western civilisation, but he was pretty sure we weren't going anywhere.

Having got back from China, I really do see what he was saying.  I really do.

Apart from a small set of largely Libertarian free thinkers I just don't see any Western civilisation having the drive to colonise space.  I also suspect that the last few centuries of European and, by extension, American ascendance have been something of a blip in the trend of the last 4000 or so years.

I'll write more later.