Tomorrow is already here PDF Download

Author: Robert Jungk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages : 239

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Author: Robert Jungk
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : United States
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Author: Dale Carter
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789607477
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Stunned by the news of Sputnik in 1957, the American public were to be treated over the next dozen years to the spectacle of an all-out national crusade: the race to beat the Russians to the moon. What few understood at the time - and what has largely been obscured in popular representations of this episode in movies and bestsellers - was the key economic and technical role played by manned space exploration in post-war US capitalist expansion. From Potsdam to Cape Canaveral, the yellow brick road twisted and turned, but its ultimate goal remained clear: the Oz of global American economic and political domination. Taking off from that masterpiece of American fiction, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, Dale Carter tells the lurid tale of the postwar boom, through the history of the manned space program. Salvaged from the ashes of Nazi Germany (Pynchon's 'Oven State'), as US officials rounded up the Third Reich's leading V-2 scientists, the American Rocket State embarked on an upward path that would culminate in the epochal voyage of Apollo XI in 1969. Following this path, Carter gives an innovative, brilliant account of American culture and society during the Cold War. He charts the ideological and political significance of a range of phenomena, from films like High Society, Destination Moon and When Worlds Collide to John F. Kennedy's rise to power, from the emergence of a new high-tech economy fueled by the NASA-led transformation of the aerospace industry to the last flight of the space shuttle Challenger. His highly original account of the star-spangled space age sets a new standard for the study of American culture.

Author: Kenneth Weisbrode
Publisher: Viking Adult
ISBN: 0670016845
Category : Nineteen forty-six, A.D.
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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The Year of Indecision: 1946 overturns the image of U.S. president Harry Truman as a can-do leader and shows instead his presidency as troubled. In 1946 Relations broke down with the Soviet Union, and nearly did with the British. The U.S. suffered shortages and strikes of a magnitude it had not seen in years. In November 1946, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress. The tension between fear and optimism expressed itself too in popular culture. Through a vivid portrait of Truman anda single year, Ken Weisbride offers an alternative perspective on history.

Author: Benjamin Beil
Publisher: transcript Verlag
ISBN: 3839462002
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405

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Game culture and material culture have always been closely linked. Analog forms of rule-based play (ludus) would hardly be conceivable without dice, cards, and game boards. In the act of free play (paidia), children as well as adults transform simple objects into multifaceted toys in an almost magical way. Even digital play is suffused with material culture: Games are not only mediated by technical interfaces, which we access via hardware and tangible peripherals. They are also subject to material hybridization, paratextual framing, and processes of de-, and re-materialization.

Author: Edward Cornish
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 9781412839259
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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This unique reference work - the companion volume to The Study of the Future- is designed to make the tools of future studies accessible to the general public as well as to professional futurists. Here for the first time in a single, convenient format are the organizations, individuals, books and periodicals, current research projects, educational programs, films, audio-tapes, and other resources that can help anyone concerned with exploring alternatives for the future.

Author: Laurel Sefton MacDowell
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442617349
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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In the twenty-first century, nuclear energy has become a hotly contested issue. In the face of climate change, and the search for alternative forms of energy, nuclear power continues to affect the lives of communities around the world. In Nuclear Portraits, scholars from Europe, North America, and Asia demonstrate the complexity, controversy, contradictions, and dangers that surround many aspects of the nuclear industry. The resulting local, regional, national, and international concerns that arise, such as the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima, call into question the optimism espoused by the nuclear industry. We live in a world with more nuclear nations than ever before and energy policy is central to the mounting global concern about climate change. The innovative essays found in Nuclear Portraits will open your eyes to the realities of nuclear energy, thereby allowing you to decide for yourself whose side you are on.

Author: Dick van Lente
Publisher: Morgan & Claypool
ISBN: 1450398189
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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When electronic digital computers first appeared after World War II, they appeared as a revolutionary force. Business management, the world of work, administrative life, the nation state, and soon enough everyday life were expected to change dramatically with these machines’ use. Ever since, diverse prophecies of computing have continually emerged, through to the present day. As computing spread beyond the US and UK, such prophecies emerged from strikingly different economic, political, and cultural conditions. This volume explores how these expectations differed, assesses unexpected commonalities, and suggests ways to understand the divergences and convergences. This book examines thirteen countries, based on source material in ten different languages—the effort of an international team of scholars. In addition to analyses of debates, political changes, and popular speculations, we also show a wide range of pictorial representations of "the future with computers."

Author: Cathryn Carson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521821703
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 559

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The end of the Second World War opened a new era for science in public life. Heisenberg in the Atomic Age explores the transformations of science's public presence in the postwar Federal Republic of Germany. It shows how Heisenberg's philosophical commentaries, circulating in the mass media, secured his role as science's public philosopher, and it reflects on his policy engagements and public political stands, which helped redefine the relationship between science and the state. With deep archival grounding, the book tracks Heisenberg's interactions with intellectuals from Heidegger to Habermas and political leaders from Adenauer to Brandt. It also traces his evolving statements about his wartime research on nuclear fission for the National Socialist regime. Working between the history of science and German history, the book's central theme is the place of scientific rationality in public life - after the atomic bomb, in the wake of the Third Reich.

Author: Sean F. Johnston
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0228002044
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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This is the story of a seductive idea. Over the past century, the potential of new technology to solve social dilemmas has captivated modern culture. From apps that encourage physical activity to airport scanners meant to prevent terrorism, the concept that clever innovation can improve society is irresistible, but faith in such technological fixes is seldom questioned. Where did this idea come from, what makes it so appealing, and how does it endanger our future? Techno-Fixers traces the source of modern confidence in technology to engineering hubris, radical utopian movements, science fiction fanzines, policy-makers' soundbites, corporate marketing, and optimistic consumer culture from the turn of the twentieth century until today. Sean Johnston demonstrates that, through the promotion of prominent government scientists, technocrats, entrepreneurs, and popular media, modern invention became the favourite tool for addressing human problems and society's ills. Nonetheless, when it comes to assessing the success of cigarette filters as the solution to safe smoking, or DDT as the answer for agricultural productivity, the evidence is sobering. Cautioning that the rhetoric of technological fixes seldom matches reality, Johnston examines how employing innovation to bypass traditional methods can foster as many problems as it solves. A critical examination of modern faith in technology, Techno-Fixers evaluates past mistakes, present implications, and future opportunities for innovating societies.