Space weaponry, satellite surveillance and communications, and private space travel are all means in which outer space is being humanized: incorporated into society’s projects. But what are the political implications of society not only being globalized, but becoming ‘cosmic’?Our ideas about society have long affected, and been affected by, our understanding of the universe: large sections of our economy and society are now organized around humanity’s use of outer space. Our view o...

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our livesWhere does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And is it really a cipher for state violence?To answer these questions, the anthropologist David Graeber—one of our most important and provocative thinkers—traces the...

A scientist known for unraveling the complexities of the universe over millions of years, Sir Martin Rees now warns that humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise -- and that of the cosmos. Though the twenty-first century could be the critical era in which life on Earth spreads beyond our solar system, it is just as likely that we have endangered the future of the entire universe. With clarity and precision, Rees maps out the ways technology could destroy our species and thereby...

Fear: The public, media and politicians are told the planet is warming at an "accelerated" rate, that humans are the principal cause of this warming, and the results will be 'oblivion'. Fact: The planet hasn't warmed appreciably since 1998 (apart from the El Nino warming of 2014-15), humanity's role in warming is less than natural variation, and past warming has even been called 'paradise'. False Alarm is for readers who want to go beyond fears to the facts about global warming--all the fa...

Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before 'the wakened giant'.The emergence of a conscious creature capable of using technology to bring about a rupture in the Earth's geochronology is an event of monumental significance, on a par with the arrival ...

Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpo...

Contemporary Futurist Thought describes recent thinking about the future, dealing with both the hopes and the fears expressed in modern times concerning what potentially lies ahead. There are many such hopes and fears perhaps an overpowering number, competing with each other and swirling about in the collective mind of humanity. Psychologist and futurist Tom Lombardo describes this mental universe of inspiring dreams and threatening premonitions regarding the future.The bo...

Who owns your genes? What does climate science imply for policy? Do corporations conduct honest research? Should we teach intelligent design? Humans are creating a new world through science. The kind of world we are creating will not simply be decided by expanding scientific knowledge, but will depend on views about good and bad, right and wrong. These visions, in turn, depend on critical thinking, cogent argument and informed judgement. In this book, Adam Briggle and Carl Mitcham help rea...

"A wide-ranging and dazzlingly informed book about the science of interactions. I can promise you'll be amazed." —Bill Bryson, chair of the 2005 Aventis General Prize Judging PanelWinner of the Aventis Prize for Science BooksAre there any "laws of nature" that influence the ways in which humans behave and organize themselves? In the seventeenth century, tired of the civil war ravaging England, Thomas Hobbes decided that he would work out wh...

In this major theoretical statement, the author offers a new and provocative interpretation of the institutional transformations associated with modernity. We do not as yet, he argues, live in a post-modern world. Rather the distinctive characteristics of our major social institutions in the closing period of the twentieth century express the emergence of a period of 'high modernity,' in which prior trends are radicalised rather than undermined. A post-modern social universe may eventually...

Feminist, educator, Quaker, and physicist, Ursula Franklin has long been considered one of Canada’s foremost advocates and practitioners of pacifism. The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacifism as a Map is a comprehensive collection of her work, and demonstrates subtle, yet critical, linkages across a range of subjects: the pursuit of peace and social justice, theology, feminism, environmental protection, education, government, and citizen activism. This thoughtful collection, drawn from...

The growth of technological and scientific knowledge in the past two centuries has been the overriding dynamic element in the economic and social history of the world. Its result is now often called the knowledge economy. But what are the historical origins of this revolution and what have been its mechanisms? In The Gifts of Athena, Joel Mokyr constructs an original framework to analyze the concept of "useful" knowledge. He argues that the growth explosion in the modern West in t...