Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge by Edward Regis (PDF)

Description

Enter the gray area between overheated imagination and overheated reality, and meet a network of scientists bent on creating artificial life forms, building time machines, hatching plans for dismantling the sun, enclosing the solar system in a cosmic eggshell, and faxing human minds to the far side of the galaxy. With Ed Regis as your guide, walk the fine line between science fact and fiction on this freewheeling and riotously funny tour through some of the most serious science there is.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: From the Back Cover Enter the gray area between overheated imagination and overheated reality, and meet a network of scientists bent on creating artificial life forms, building time machines, hatching plans for dismantling the sun, enclosing the solar system in a cosmic eggshell, and faxing human minds to the far side of the galaxy. With Ed Regis as as your guide, walk the fine line between science fact and fiction this free-wheeling and riotously funny tour through some of the most serious science there is. About the Author Ed Regis, a frequent contributor to Omni magazine, is College Scholar at Western Maryland College. He is at work on a new book about extremely advanced science and technology.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This book made quite a stir among people I know in the cryonics and early transhumanist subcultures when the hardcover came out in 1990. (Yeah, I know: A tiny group of geeks, hardly enough for a good poker game.) How does it look in our mysterious, far-future year 2012?Basically it describes a whole bunch of failures, or at best stagnated situations.We don’t have space colonization, and I say this as a disappointed L-5er who first met Keith Henson at Washington University (St. Louis, MO) in the late 1970’s.We don’t have “nanotechnology,” apparently because Eric Drexler got the physics wrong. I have the impression that Drexler in 2012 lives hand to mouth as a visiting policy wonk at various universities, and he manages somehow to run on the fumes of his failed nanotech vision from the 1980’s instead of doing something which adds to the GDP. Ed Regis himself, in an interview he gave about “nanotechnology” back in 2001, indicated that he began to see something wrong with the whole idea because his coverage of it as a science writer over a decade showed him a lot of speculation but no progress towards nanomachines .The manned space age has basically failed, despite the recurring “future porn” in magazines like Popular Science about private space ventures and missions to Mars.Robert Truax died a few years ago with his dreams of space travel unfulfilled.Timothy Leary, who pops up in the book in a few places, died without getting cryosuspended.Alcor moved from Riverside, CA, to Scottsdale, AZ, in 1994, to find a friendlier regulatory climate. But the cryonics movement, which I know something about, seems to have stagnated since a brief burst of energy and growth circa 1990, apparently caused by enthusiasm for Drexler’s ideas. I submit that these people might have signed up for cryosuspension for bad reasons. I leave it to them whether they should reconsider. Despite my lack of status in the cryonics community, I’ve tried to make cryonicists form new neural pathways in their aging brains to see that we have some serious problems and that we can’t keep depending on bad futurology from the late 20th Century to justify our efforts. But I seem to have little or no effect so far.On the whole, nothing of substance Regis described in his book has come to fruition in the past 22 years. I can remember when we used to call stories set in the year 2012 “science fiction.” Now we look at the calendar and sigh, “Jeez, tax time again!” Something has gone wrong with “progress,” perhaps for the reasons economist Tyler Cowen describes in his book,

⭐Some of these people are still alive and I know and know of a few who are mentioned. “Wizard” still lives in Tucson and is still digging and I have been down that winding under earth realm. This book is an interesting read of mildly technical information and the drive of certain individuals to figure out why people age and how to undo that. Most of these people are a bit eccentric, driven by their curiosity and belief that they can figure it out. How they meet and collude, and go off to jobs and family. How to uncover the mysteries of genetics while raising kids and earning a living. The mambo chicken is only a paragraph describing a genetic research project, but there is plenty else going on in research that needs to reach a mainstream audience, and this book does that.

⭐In Great Mambo Chicken, Regis takes you on a sort of side-show tour of scientifistic cargo cults that persist to this day. The images flit by kaleidoscopically: Evel Kneivel riding Traux’s rocket; the Hensons, who co-founded the L5 society, digging tunnels under their house and setting off bombs in the Arizona desert; an illustration of a fractal “bush robot” as ultimate apotheosis of the human form; and of course the muscular centrifuge-raised chickens from the book’s title, who manage to occupy a paragraph or two. The book’s people, like characters from a Hitchcock movie, are deeply flawed but utterly engaging: “Hans Moravec once complained about *matter itself* that it wasn’t really *doing* anything! Things will be different in *his* universe…”It’s an engaging yarn told by a half-believer. Yet hints of a bigger story poke through from time to time. Regis does not leave this to chance but pulls it together near the very end of the book. Delving deeper into history, he shows that there’s good reason why these techno-cults have persisted over the years. If you want deeper insight into the mythical longings that drive much of our modern technocracy, Great Mambo Chicken is well worth the read.

⭐Though it’s written over two decades ago, it presents proposals and scientifically-achievable fantasies that will blow your mind.How many people can earth sustainably pack while providing enough food? If you think it’s a few dozen billion? You’re wrong by order of magnitudes you can’t fathom!Musing about living in space? Some serious scientists have made careful calculations about what can be achieved with reasonable effort – it’s stellar ;)How quickly can humans pollinate the galaxy? How long would it take and how small would the rockets need to be? How nano-scale can we make things? Read the book!You’ll learn that NASA is doing it wrong – they could put more stuff into orbit for far less cost. You’ll learn about a process to make nano-scale machines that is brilliant, intuitive, and seems totally doable!Awesome fun – buy and read 😉

⭐This is a great and funny book. Yesterday and today, there were articles on the web about Ted William’s body at Alcor, having the head severed and both the head and body frozen. In this book’s funniest chapter, titled, “Heads will roll”. One of the book’s characters takes his poor sick mother to Alcor, and they sever her head as she’s about to die. The ensuing legal and criminal implications are a riot as they first start to attempt to get a death certificate to get her body buried. The coroner is highly suspicious that a body without a head, “died of pneumonia.” Criminal charges and other problems erupt. Hard to believe that similar issues have surfaced again 12 years after this book first appeared. If you like science and seeing the amusing side of it, then you will enjoy this book.

⭐This was a funny read 15yrs ago when I first got it as a gift. Now I’m realizing how dead-on prophetic it was! These are the issues we are discussing at university as cutting edge in ethics and engineering TODAY. can’t recommend it enough. I gave this copy to my Physical Anthropology professor.

⭐Read this when it first came out. This copy was a present

⭐fast – good value, great!

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