Recommend your favorite Science or Technology book.

Don't know if it's been mentioned but, because he recently passed away...

'A Step Farther Out' by Jerry Pournelle. Optimistic look at space exploration, and very informative.

See:
https://www.amazon.com/Step-Farther...1508224465&sr=8-1&keywords=a+step+farther+out

 

"The High Frontier" Gerard K O'Neill

It was written in the 1970's but his case for, how, and why to make space settlement work is even more valid and doable now

 

Life 3.0 by Max Tegmark.

About the last invention that man need ever make and how we should prepare ourselves for it and the changes it will bring.

 

And what is this great amazing invention?

 

ASI.

If you want to join the conversation, this book is a definite must-read.

 

ASI is a most interesting thing isn't it?

But when we get them will they be a shackled AI or free roaming?

 

Book explores the possibilities and encourages us to chime in at the Future of Life institute website. It says the onus is on us today to shape that future, to decide what we want and how we want it. Through AI technology research and AI safety research we have to lay the foundations to get things right the first time, as getting it wrong even once could be too late.

 

From a scifi POV what if we are all just wandering AI's let loose on this planet to see what happens next?

 

the Gnostics basically thought that 2000 years ago.

 

I did not know that, in what way?

 

Gnosticsm more or less taught that the world was a deliberately malformed construct on which souls dwelled in ignorance of the fact. Only certain persons, the elect, could obtain the wisdom of gnosis to comprehend the true nature of reality beyond one's perceptions.

or something like that. not entirely all that different from advaita vedanta's concept of maya. anyway, I guess humans have been thinking "Why the hell does the world suck so bad" for a long time, and coming up with hypotheses.

 

Not so different from The Matrix either, or Plato's shadows on the wall.

 

The Perfectionists by Simon Winchester is a history of precision engineering is an outstanding read.

 

The Day the Universe Changed by James Burke, a companion book to the 1980s PBS series of the same name.

edited to add:
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World by Lincoln Paine, which focuses on humanity being a river- and seafaring species (an aspect of history that is often overlooked.)

 

I loved Burke's old Connections series

 

I do too, I just don't happen to have a book for that series.

 

Burke's series was phenomenal as were the Connections series.

 

The Making Of The Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes is a classic. It is the history of nuclear physics from Ernest Rutherford's experiments up to the Manhattan Project and Hiroshima/Nagasaki. It is a very well-written story.

 

Another of my favorite books in the Science & Technology genre is The Greatest Show On Earth by Richard Dawkins. The subject is evolution. To quote Dawson -
This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the 'theory' of evolution is actually a fact—as incontrovertible a fact as any in science.

— Richard Dawkins, The Greatest Show on Earth, p. vii

 

Two books of interest:
“A Furious Sky” by Dolin (hurricane history)
Leading Through A Pandemic
by Dowling