In “Human+: forecasting our future” (New Scientist, 15 April 2011), Cormac Sheridan takes us on a tour of metro retro speculation about the human future:
The premise underlying Human+, the exhibition that opens today at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, is that the future is knowable – even though everyone knows it’s not. As a species, we seem to be hard-wired to speculate on what’s going to happen next. Science Gallery director Michael John Gorman and his team have tapped into this tendency to put together a fascinating array of objects, creations and schemes, each of which explores some aspect of our engineered future. Gorman’s catalogue essay aptly describes the show as “an Alice-in-Wonderland world of pills, promises and prosthetics”. It’s a provocative exploration of the possible ways in which we may change what it means to be human.
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But many of the schemes set out in the exhibition are deliberately fanciful. It would be surprising if Julijonas Urbonas’s Euthanasia Coaster, a detailed design for a euphoric death by the mother of all roller coaster rides, ever came to fruition. But the likelihood of such things is beside the point – our very human sense of play is the thing. One leaves HUMAN+ not with any real insights into how the future will actually play out but with a bracing sense that, whatever happens, we, as a species, will be ready.
Someone had enough sense to ask the coffee gal: How’s that again? We don’t know what will happen, but we’ll be ready? How does that differ from: We don’t know what will happen but we won’t be ready?
Twee+