I'm sitting here late at night gazing at my unread books, having
finished Zubrin's "Entering Space" (very good in those areas where
Zubrin confines himself to aerospace engineering, interesting
when he crosses over into anthropology or psychology and poor
when he gets into areas of the evolution of civilizations --
mainly due to the sloppy or minimal treatment of nanotech and AI).
I've picked up Energies by Vaclav Smil, MIT Press, 1999, and have
been thumbing through it. It strikes me as a book that most
Extropians should read. Sources, uses and applications of energy
are areas that come up frequently for discussion in the list.
Fundamentally extropianism must be about the creation and application
of energy in controlled ways to combat entropy.
Energies is short (~200 pages), contains many interesting tables
and graphs and covers a wide range of topics:
1) Sun and Earth
2) Plants and Animals
3) People and Food
4) Preindustrial Societies
5) Fossil-Fueled Civilization
6) Transportation and Information
In short it serves as a book that provides you with a lot of
information in an easily accessed format that allows you to
think creatively about the topics.
Interestingly, it is dedicated to Philip and Phylis Morrison.
Robert
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