Great Mambo Chicken And The Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly Over The Edge

by Edward Regis

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780201567519
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	09/18/1991
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)
Lexile:	1250L (what's this?)

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.

Editorial Reviews

Author of the delightful Who Got Einstein's Office? , Regis here presents a hilarious but nevertheless sympathetic look at practitioners of ``fin-de-siecle hubristic mania.'' These are the scientific visionaries who are plotting ``post-biological man,'' scheming to build giant space colony/stations to orbit around the Earth, use microscopic robots (nanotechnology) to resurrect humans frozen in liquid nitrogen, raise chickens in higher gravity fields and project human minds via energy beams to distant galaxies. Readers learn about artificial life, bioinfomatic bumblebees, human minds instilled in ``bush robots'' and how to enclose the Sun within a man-made sphere. In the future everything will be possible and humans will be able to redesign themselves and the universe to meet higher technical standards than mere nature has achieved. This is a wonderful romp on the cutting edge of science. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

After reading this book, you will regard tabloid-style headlines such as ``Super Chicken Bred in Double Gravity'' or ``Human Heads Frozen for Future Revival'' with far less skepticism. These, as well as other seemingly bizarre technological feats, are being done or planned today by scientists who are either brilliant and visionary or dangerous and eccentric, depending on your point of view. Regis, a frequent contributor to Omni, writes with wit and humor as he describes the off-the-wall exploits of several scientists and engineers whose credentials are solid but whose objectives are, to say the least, a bit odd. Downloading a human mind into a computer? It's not only possible, it's the subject of Hans Moravec's Mind Children (Harvard Univ. Pr., 1988). Molecular robots capable of re-creating matter? It's on the drawing board now. Some scientists are even brazen enough to suggest that humankind can arrest the expansion of the universe. This delightful book reveals that the cutting edge is not far from the lunatic fringe. Recommended.-- Gregg Sapp, Montana State Univ. Lib., Bozeman

Library Journal