Sci-fi novelist David Brin has a new book out titled Existence (Amazon US and UK) which touches on a number of topics we enjoy discussing here, perhaps most prominently the possibility of alien contact. Here’s the trailer and short summary for those interested, following which I have a question for you all, and would love to hear your answers:
Gerald Livingston is an orbital garbage collector. For a hundred years, people have been abandoning things in space, and someone has to clean it up. But there’s something spinning a little bit higher than he expects, something that isn’t on the decades’ old orbital maps. An hour after he grabs it and brings it in, rumors fill Earth’s infomesh about an “alien artifact.”
Thrown into the maelstrom of worldwide shared experience, the Artifact is a game-changer. A message in a bottle; an alien capsule that wants to communicate. The world reacts as humans always do: with fear and hope and selfishness and love and violence. And insatiable curiosity.
This io9 write-up mentions some of the setting of Brin’s future world of the 2050s, including “the mesh, a virtual reality that exists on top of the real world and is viewable through glasses, contacts and eye implants collectively”. Reading about such ideas, and agreeing completely with things such as ‘the mesh’, prompted me to wonder what you all think we will be seeing in four decades (if we’re still alive)? Where will we be at technologically, spiritually, and politically? Tell me how *your* Earth of 2050 looks.
