EXTRO4: Timeline to 2020 Project

GBurch1@aol.com
Sun, 27 Jun 1999 17:28:20 EDT

Billy and Jocelyn Brown, I and other members of the Texas extropians group
(a/k/a the "TEXtropians") are working on a project for Extropy Institute's
(www.extropy.org) EXTRO4 conference (www.extropy.org/ex4/e4main.htm), to be
held August 6-8 at the Joseph Wood Krutch Theater, University of California, Berkeley.

After dinner Saturday night, August 7, we will be hosting a broad discussion of near term (2000-2020) developments. The first phase of this project is intended to be interactive with diverse sources of input from throughout the transhumanist community. We are creating a web page for the purpose of collecting commentary on developments in science, technology and society over the next two decades. This web page will be available some time over the July 4 weekend and will serve as an anchor to which comments can be appended using the Foresight Crit system.

After two weeks, we will shut down the web page for commentary and try to collate the input we've received into one or more timelines. While material that follows the general format suggested by the scenario anchor page will be most welcome, comments of any form through the Crit system would be helpful and we'll try to incorporate as much as possible into this project.

The material generated from the web site will be available for review and more commentary in the public areas of the conference throughout the EXTRO conference leading up to the discussion Saturday night. Our presentation will commence with some commentary on the project up to that time and then moderated discussion with interested audience members making up the substance of the time we spend focusing on the ideas that have been developed.

Following EXTRO4, we will create as complete a synthesis of all of the foregoing efforts as we can and make the result into a hypertext installation available through Extropy Institute's web site.

We'd like to get as much input as possible in the time available, so please be thinking about how you think technologies and issues in which you are interested will develop over the next twenty years and stop by the scenario development page next weekend and help us develop the clearest possible vision of the near future.

     Greg Burch     <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
     Attorney  :::  Vice President, Extropy Institute  :::  Wilderness Guide
      http://users.aol.com/gburch1   -or-   http://members.aol.com/gburch1
                         "Civilization is protest against nature; 
                  progress requires us to take control of evolution."
                                      -- Thomas Huxley