Free Republic

Earlier this week, multi-hyphenate billionaire Elon Musk endorsed a tweet suggesting Black students at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have lower IQs and shouldn't become pilots."It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE," he tweeted, intentionally mixing up the letters of the acronym for "diversity, equity, and inclusion."Civil rights groups were understandably horrified at the billionaire's racist comments."The only thing anyone needs to hear from Musk about diversity in the workplace is an apology," Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, told NBC News,...

The Black Hole of Organizational DysfunctionDystopia Note: When this book was prepared, the terms Dystopia and Utopia were widely used to describe the two complementary but opposite categories of the social system. As progress continued, we evolved away from those popular, but vaguely-defined terms. When you encounter “dystopia,” think organizational dysfunction. When you encounter “Utopia,” think happy prosperity. General Remarks Book 1 of the Pilgrimage to Utopia (P2U), “Philosophy,” presented the purpose of the pilgrimage. It is assumed the reason you’re here is that you are interested in joining one. Following along with the derivation of the paradigm of the...

THE SPACEX starstip is reported to have had a near miss with a UFO - with astronauts on board told to buckle up and prepare for a crash, Nasa has revealed. While en route to the International Space Station after a successful launch in Florida, the four crew members were notified they could soon collide with an unknown object. There was no time to perform an avoidance manoeuvre and instead the astronauts on board SpaceX's recycled Crew Dragon capsule, the Endeavour, were told to put on their pressurized suits in case of a collision, reports Futurism. "The NASA/SpaceX team was...

Turning to the future, Brown said technological change and the development of artificial intelligence would transform the concept of the divine. "We will start to find our spiritual experiences through our interconnections with each other," he said, forecasting the emergence of "some form of global consciousness that we perceive and that becomes our divine". "Our need for that exterior god, that sits up there and judges us ... will diminish and eventually disappear."

When you spend a lot of time thinking about emerging technology, you begin to notice certain things that are naturally just assumed to be true about the future, as if everyone just knows them. These ideas are so widespread and infrequently challenged that they come to seem inevitable. These are also things that a lot of people really want to be true. What a coincidence. So we take for granted that electric cars are the future, and the internal combustion engine is on the way out. That we're going to power everything with renewable energy, especially solar, and oil is...

Alvin Toffler, the far-seeing futurist who predicted humanity's rising anxiety with digital and technological progress in his hugely influential 1970 book "Future Shock," has died at the age of 87, his consulting company confirmed Wednesday. Toffler — who is also credited with having coined the term "information overload" to describe people's struggle to keep up with exponentially expanding data — died Monday night at his home in Los Angeles, Toffler Associates said in a statement it released at the request of Toffler's widow, Heidi Toffler. No cause of death was given. Alvin Toffler during a talk at the Astrobiology Roadmap...

Gurr test-driving an early prototype of his Autopia vehicle in 1955.George Clooney may get top billing in his new film, Tomorrowland, but design visionary Gurr is the real star.In his 27 years as a Disney Imagineer, Bob Gurr was known for doing the impossible: He designed a submarine fleet, the cars of Autopia, and the Monorail that soars above the park on a single beam. With the opening of Tomorrowland in 1955, Gurr shaped a vision of the future (1986 to be exact) that still feels out of reach. Six decades after Gurr began creating ride vehicles for the theme...

It’s a wild request to ask a nation to consider electing you as their president, especially when you’re a transhumanist—someone who advocates for using science and technology to radically change and improve the human species. But I’m doing it. Last October, I declared my 2016 US candidacy under the newly formed Transhumanist Party, which I founded, and promised my community of techno-optimists I’d do everything I could to use my campaign as a way to speed up the arrival of robotic hearts, brain implants, artificial limbs, exoskeleton suits, and indefinite lifespans—all of which are just a small part of the...

"Last year, NASA’s advanced propulsion research wing made headlines by announcing the successful test of a physics-defying electromagnetic drive, or EM drive. Now, this futuristic engine, which could in theory propel objects to near-relativistic speeds, has been shown to work inside a space-like vacuum. NASA Eagleworks made the announcement quite unassumingly via NASASpaceFlight.com. There’s also a major discussion going on about the engine and the physics that drives it at the site’s forum." ... "The NASASpaceflight.com group has given consideration to whether the experimental measurements of thrust force were the result of an artifact. Despite considerable effort within the NASASpaceflight.com...

Some of us remember America of fifty years ago. Vastly, vastly different than what we see now. In your opinion, what will America be in another fifty years?

Tech pioneers in the US are advocating a new data-based approach to governance – 'algorithmic regulation'. But if technology provides the answers to society's problems, what happens to governments?... Compared with the impressive police gear of today – automatic number plate recognition, CCTV cameras, GPS trackers – Operation Corral looks quaint. And the possibilities for control will only expand. European officials have considered requiring all cars entering the European market to feature a built-in mechanism that allows the police to stop vehicles remotely. Speaking earlier this year, Jim Farley, a senior Ford executive, acknowledged that "we know everyone who breaks...

Real Doomsday: Earth Dead in 2.8 Billion Years The Rolling Stones’ Mick Jaggar crooned “Time Is On My Side” in the 1964 classic rock hit of the same title. Sadly, that’s not the case for habitable planets orbiting sun-like stars according to a recent computer simulation by astrobiologist Jack O’Malley-James of the University of St Andrews in the United Kingdom. “A combination of slow and rapid environmental changes will result in the extinction of all species on Earth, with the last inhabitants disappearing within 2.8 billion years from now,” O’Malley-James predicts. He says that we’ve got about 2 billion years...

What futurists in 1988 imagined Los Angeles would be like in 2013 With the year 2013 a quarter of a century away, the Los Angeles Times in 1988 asked 30 futurists and other experts what they thought life in their city would look like in 2013. They may have overshot the sophistication of our robots, but many of those predictions for 2013 have come true—or at least come close. Reporter Nicole Yorkin wrote the futurism pieces for the April 3, 1988 issue of the Los Angeles Times Magazine, compiling the information from her various interviews. The articles include illustrations by...

Real-life Futurama tube-transport will catapult you from New York to Beijing in 2 hours The Simpsons have the monorail. Futurama has the Tube Transport System. The difference is that tube-transport is a fantasy — at least for now. The folks at ET3 want to make what they call "Evacuated Tube Transport" a reality. Their proposed maglev system would be capable of propelling six-person-capacity cylinders to speeds of over 4000 miles per hour, making it possible for people to travel from New York to L.A. in just 45 minutes, or from New York to Beijing in two hours. What's more, ET3...

On December 31, 1979, Smith told those who had gathered on the last day of that year that the rapture would take place before the end of 1981. He went on to say that because of ozone depletion Revelation 16:8 would be fulfilled during the tribulation period: “And the fourth angel poured out his bowl upon the sun; and it was given to it to scorch men with fire.” In addition, Halley’s Comet would pass near earth in 1986 and would wreak havoc on those left behind as debris from its million-mile-long tail pummeled the planet.[5] Here’s how Smith explained...

How is it possible that most evangelical critics of Harold Camping are more dangerous than the failed prognosticator? For the simple reason that it’s no longer May 21, 2011, and Harold Camping will be relegated to the dust bin of prophetic history, but prophecy prognosticators will continue to abound by claiming that Jesus is still coming “soon” even if we don’t know the “day and hour.” In nearly every article I’ve read by evangelicals denouncing Camping, they still claim that all the signs are in place for Jesus’ “soon” return. Here are some examples: Even though Tim LaHaye denounced Camping’s...

I’m beginning to see that prophetic speculation is taking place on the fringes of the Christian publishing industry. Of course, you will still find the occasional prophetic pot-boiler. Mark Hitchcock writes a couple of prophecy books a year. They are mostly exercises in “newspaper exegesis,” driven more by current events than the Bible. Consider these three, all to be published in 2009: The Late Great United States (Multnomah), 2012, the Bible, and the End of the World (Harvest House), and Cashless: Bible Prophecy, Economic Chaos, and the Future Financial Order (Harvest House). How do you go from The Late Great...

Mark Hitchcock, a contemporary prophecy writer, references Smith’s calculation that “there are approximately 250 verses in the Old Testament that, at the time they were given, were prophecies of events yet to take place in Egypt.”[2] Nothing is said about any verses from the New Testament that deal with Egypt’s end-time place in prophecy. In fact, there is not a single verse in the New Testament that mentions anything about a prophetic role for any mid-eastern nation, including Israel! This means that the burden of proof is on the futurist to prove that Old Testament prophetic passages related to Egypt...

I knew it would happen. The latest incident in Israel has brought out the prophetic speculators again. “A council of rabbis in Israel says their nation’s conflict with Turkey over a flotilla of ‘aid’ ships headed for the blockaded Gaza Strip controlled by the terrorist Hamas organization just may be the beginning of the ‘Gog and Magog process where the world is against us, but which ends with the third and final redemption’” (see here ). Picking up on the story, Christian prophecy speculator Joel Rosenberg takes a similar position but with some caution: There is growing interest in the...

Jesus informs John that Gentile pagans will have their diabolical way in Jerusalem for the last half (42 months divided by 12 equals three-and-a-half years) of the about-seven year Tribulation period, the latter closing out the Church Age. The Church Age began with the First Coming of Christ. The Church Age will conclude with the Second Coming of Christ. The “trampling” includes the AntiChrist desecrating the next Temple to be constructed as well as laying low by his armies’ might the city of Jerusalem.