It seems to me that the literature about “the future” we have access to suffers from cultural & linguistic biases. From what I’ve read, for example, Russia has an independent tradition of transhumanist-sounding speculation going back to the late 19th Century, yet language barriers and the lack of diligence in translating it have kept much of it from entering the West. Russia has its own cryonics movement, for example, which Mike Darwin has written about on his website. Mike even claims to notice spooky similarities to what he witnessed in the American cryonics movement back in the late 1960′s:
Maybe it is a good idea to have a cross-language inquiry threads once in a while… Some things of transhumanism type seem to be represented in the so-widely-known-it-is-considered-trivial science fiction in Russian.
Also, in Russia it seems to be typical to have read a lot of Stanislaw Lem (as translated from Polish to Russian in Soviet Union times).
It seems to me that the literature about “the future” we have access to suffers from cultural & linguistic biases. From what I’ve read, for example, Russia has an independent tradition of transhumanist-sounding speculation going back to the late 19th Century, yet language barriers and the lack of diligence in translating it have kept much of it from entering the West. Russia has its own cryonics movement, for example, which Mike Darwin has written about on his website. Mike even claims to notice spooky similarities to what he witnessed in the American cryonics movement back in the late 1960′s:
http://chronopause.com/index.php/2011/03/17/1968-ad-cryonics-reboot/
So I have to wonder what Russian transhumanists, or that society’s equivalents, have written about the future of humanity 100,000 years from now.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2011/07/federovs-rapture.html
Maybe it is a good idea to have a cross-language inquiry threads once in a while… Some things of transhumanism type seem to be represented in the so-widely-known-it-is-considered-trivial science fiction in Russian.
Also, in Russia it seems to be typical to have read a lot of Stanislaw Lem (as translated from Polish to Russian in Soviet Union times).
Unfortunately, Lem’s most thought provoking book, Summa Technologiae (1964), was never (completely) translated into English.
There is only a partial translation into English: http://web.archive.org/web/20041012053805/http://wwwnlds.physik.tu-berlin.de/~prengel/Lem/contents.htm
Russian translation: http://lib.ru/LEM/summa/summtitl.htm