Customer Reviews

Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge

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What an awesome awesome book! I haven't enjoyed a new book that can plausibly be construed as sci-fi for a while. The book is basically a collection of essays by a number of experts in their respective fields. The subjects range from the significance of prime numbers vs. humor, extending human life span, and very very very far off future. The overall claim is that we will basically become aliens with god like abilities (that is unless we do ourselves in first). There are a number of references at the end of the book that are worth looking up.

This book stretches anyone's mind. No matter how much science fiction one has read, or futurist literature --there are new ideas contained within the pages of Year Million. Not all the writers are equal, some are better than others--but a few shine brilliantly. You can read and disagree, formulate your own ideas--or nod your head with the 'hmmm' moments when you agree. It is a fun book, I highly enjoyed it.

This is a book from several leading scientists/mathematicians/speculators, that for an inquiring mind of what the future holds, will keep you reading deep into the night. It is a very optimistically rounded off point of view of what the world may/ or may not be in a million years from now. No where will you find nuclear extinction or, cataclysmic astroid deaths. This is a book of mere speculation of the human race surviving to the year million; but a very creative read. Their are 13 contributing authors, and each essay has a different take on what the future holds. I found the first half of the book to be a completely awesome read. And I skipped a couple chapters in the middle, but the end was pretty good; talking about how the universe's infinite expansion could be met by human kind's or intelligent life's willingness to survive past the death of our sun, and the forever cold universe: stretching out and slowing down its life functions. Many times throughout the book, there are few hard facts on how some things can be done, and much of it is left up to a science fiction take on things. But, then again we are talking about life 1 million years from now. This is a very intriguing read for anyone curious about what life could hold 999,900 years after our generation's bones are all buried and dried up.

Having spent a whole lot of time thinking about the distant future (my novel `Twilight's Ashes' is set in 635,039AD), I found Broderick's compilation of fourteen essays exploring the topic to be too limited in scope for my liking. The vast majority of the discussions either stay so deadly cautious with their grounding in present reality as to be of little interest, or they leap headlong into the half-century-old Freeman Dyson visions of man as a plundering wave of barbarians hurtling clumsily across the cosmos, answering to some implicit call of `manifest destiny'.

Hello! There are just a few other basic paths we ought to be exploring! I took my own cue about the future from successful species on our planet. What will Year Million look like for sharks? For cockroaches? Well, unless the tech-drunken barbarians dismantle the whole planet in order to feed their insatiable, energy-gluttonous Matrioshka Brains, Year Million is going to be pretty much business as usual. I'm betting against the barbarians.

Yes, that is my biggest complaint: the lack of consideration of sustainablility is repeatedly rubbed in the reader's faces. There's Stephen B. Harris' concept of raping the universe to bring back deuterium for fusion fuel, or Robin Hanson's exploration of the escalating race to be the first to exploit new star systems, in which he explicitly refuses to consider what the settled culture behind the frontier might look like. Then there's this gem from Wil McCarthy: "It's hard to say exactly what our descendants will use their energy for, but it's a safe bet they'll use a lot of it, and will be hungry--always insatiably hungry--for more. Some things never change."

And what about the Dystopian and post-Apocalyptic alternatives in which the barbarians get their just deserts--totally missing from the discussion. My `Twilight's Ashes' could be considered a post-Apocalyptic solution with a generally serene outcome--that is, until the post-human rivals start stirring up trouble. So there's yet another topic entirely ignored: species radiation out of the parent human stock.

With all its shortcomings, the book does occasionally stretch one's mind. Everybody is likely to find something worth more thought. I learned a few useful things about simulated reality. It turns out that our reality is not likely to be a simulation in somebody's Matrioshka Brain Virtual Reality game - thanks, Rudy Rucker. Then there was the realization--extrapolated from Sean M. Carroll's essay on entropy--that "Complexity" always seems to be at its peak in the present moment. If this idea can be elevated to an axiom, it implies real truths about the symmetry of past and future and their roles in our perception of reality. Quantum uncertainty insists that the past is just as malleable as the future--we define them both based on what we choose to observe and on what we choose to ignore or fail to observe. Ultimately, the Year Million is not just something for idle armchair speculators to toy with--it's a full-contact, participatory sport.

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INVICTUS
The difficulty about this sort of essay collection is to get people with the necessary expertise to contribute, and to take the necessary time and trouble over their work. Looking at the CV 's, one has to some extent to take this on trust. But Broderick appears to be a responsible person and I am inclined to think he has carefully excluded phonies. With that minor reservation, I am impressed. Some folk with no or little knowledge of, for example, human evolution will if they read this (unlikely) be shaken by it. It is a short course in where we may be heading by reason of our collective scientific expertise. Those who have no notion of this topic may find much of it it hard to believe. But most of those inclined to get Broderick's book will find useful instruction in it.

This book was quite interesting...and it will likely stretch any reader's mind. As one reviewer noted earlier, "human" life will, essentially, be unrecognizable in Year Million relative to today's humans (assuming, of course, humans survive that long). I think the word used by the reviewer was that humans will be like we might imagine "aliens" to be like (only much, much stranger).

One striking characteristic of this book is that the various authors' speculations about Year Million seem so plausible.

The disturbing aspect of this book is that Year Million human life will be, well, unrecognizable! Pretty much every human activity done today will likely not be done by Year Million humans (or humans' progeny). None of the many and various things humans do for entertainment today will likely be done by Year Million humans (at least not in the same recognizable form). Camping, music, sports, boating, horseback riding, photography, reading, computer games, sewing...pretty much everything a person can imagine for a pastime today will likely be no longer done in Year Million.

To future humans, the world will seem "normal," I'm sure. But a modern-day human would likely find the Year Million frightening, foreign, and incomprehensible. All of the things we find fun or entertaining and all of the things we find interesting or important (religion, for example) will likely no longer exist.

So, while the book is disturbing (or at least I found it so), it is also intriguing and fascinating.

I recommend it.

[...]

Year Million is a collection of essays, ostensibly describing what life will be like a million years from now. It's an excellent source ideas for the writer looking for stimulus. For the reader interested in the future, there are a lot of thought experiments that involve the reader in the process of extrapolation. Ultimately, though, the book falls victim to its incredibly long view of the future: given enough years, anything that is not forbidden will happen. And that's what we get when the contributors (mostly Analog authors and PhDs) start extrapolating too far into the future.

I was hooked when I found fascinating ideas that are broadly applicable in the first two essays. And for the most part, the essays maintained my interest and kept me reading through to the end. But at some point, it simply becomes a travelogue of all the wonders that may be, rather than extrapolation of how we get from here to there, and what will happen as we go.

Right off the bat, Jim Holt (in "The Laughter of Copernicus") grabbed me with his simple version of the Copernican Principle, which I found myself applying everywhere I could. His explanation, that "you're not special," says the odds are that nothing we see has just started or is about to end (the odds of not seeing the first 2.5% or the last 2.5% are, by definition, 39-to-1). And the book is even littered with throaway lines that will keep you thinking (for instance, Catherine Asaro's "The progress of the human race could be described as the history of how we didn't know what we didn't know"). Wil McCarthy scoffs at Star Trek's transporters, but offers an alternative possibility: sending ourselves all over the galaxy via fax. Robert Bradbury moves on to redesigning the solar system more to our liking (or to a form we can more easily make use of). Rudy Rucker's "The Great Awakening" talks of technological telepathy, which may be simply a by-product of ubiquitous nanotechnology, and he makes it sound good.

Broderick has divided the fourteen essays into four sections ("The Expanding Human Universe", "Deep Space in Deep Time", "The Mind/Body in Year Million", and "Into the Very Deepest Future"), but I see it as simply moving from more concrete extrapolations ("How will the human body evolve?" "How will we live among the stars?") to more abstract blue-skying ("Is the universe open or closed?" and "What form will intelligence take in a run-down universe?").

Most of the contributors to this collection should be well known to Analog readers. They include: Jim Holt, Dougal Dixon, Steven B. Harris, Lisa Kaltenegger, Catherine Asaro, Wil McCarthy, Robert Bradbury, Robin Hanson, Pamela Sargent & Anne Corwin, Amara D. Angelica, Rudy Rucker, Sean M. Carroll, Gregory Benford, and George Zebrowski.

Utterly mind-blowing look into what the human race might become. Read this book, then meditate on it, and you will find yourself wrestling with questions like "How is a sufficiently advanced civilization different from God?" and "If we can all connect to each other using some future version of the internet to the point where we can experience each other's thoughts and feelings instantaneously and expand our intellect to the point of processing all of those experiences and understandings simultaneously, what need is there for a self?" The first chapter is a bit math heavy, but don't let that discourage you - follow it as best you can, because the reward of reading this book is as incalculable as some of the stuff our descendants will be doing.

This book is simply the best existing summary of current, cutting-edge hypotheses, projections and estrapolations concerning our distant future, having regard both to posthuman changes and to a more cosmological scale.

The subject is attacked from very different angles by a diverse set of contributors who mix vision, technicalities, and - why not? - a poetic sense of what our presence and possible long-term survival in this universe may imply.

A fascinating scenario indeed, and a transhumanist challenge to old biases...

I was very disappointed in this book. The concept is extremely interesting, but the execution was not. Most of the writers in the book tried to extrapolate what the Year 1 Million would be like by looking at current technology and projecting forward. The problem with that is we are talking about the year 1,000,000, not the year 2080. People were not thinking big enough.

Those who did think big often rehashed already-existing ideas about the far future. I believe 4 of the essays talked about Dyson spheres or some version of them. Not exactly that imaginative.

This concept could have worked (could still work) with better, more imaginative writers. I can only guess that the editor did not have enough contacts in the science fiction world, or did not try hard enough to get the best people for the book.

Thumbs down!