You have to love this picture that Wired.com used to illustrate a story about US surveillance of Russian nuclear weapons.
What tickles me is the fact that the launcher has not one, not two but three fire extinguishers fixed to the front – as though three would somehow offer more protection than one or two if this baby caught fire.
One imagines a grizzled colonel of artillery opining, “Look, Yuri, you can’t be too careful where nukes are concerned…”
The 2010 NATO Summit kicks off in Lisbon today. Source: NATO
1999. The year the euro was established. Gates’ personal fortune surpassed $100bn. Napster was born. Jay-Z delighted fans with lyrics such as “More money, more cash, more hoes (what)”. NATO intervened in Yugoslavia, attacking a sovereign country for the first time. It was also the year that NATO adopted its most recent “Strategic Concept”.
And how times have changed.
I’m here in Lisbon for the 2010 NATO summit (thanks to the Atlantic Council’s Young Atlanticist Summit), and there’s a buzz in town. Lauded as one of the most crucial in the organisation’s 61 year history, 28 Heads of State will arrive today to approve the alliance’s new mission statement for the next decade – the 2010 Strategic Concept.
This from Jon Turney’s excellent Rough Guide to The Future
Jim Dator, a futurist at the University of Hawaii, developed a classification system in the 1970s that he has used ever since to order discussion about possible futures. He argues that there are just four main visions underlying attempts to outline possible or preferable futures. Here’s an outline of his four “Generic Images of the Future”:
Continued growth: This is still the most common view, and certainly the “official” view of most political and academic discussion. Growth is desirable because it has made good things possible for some people already, and will bring more good things to more people in future. The idea that growth might falter is usually discussed only in terms of economic recession, and almost always assumed to be a “Bad Thing” – as a glance as any newspaper will confirm.
Collapse of economic structures: This is the family of futures which descend from Malthus via The Limits to Growth. It has a popular constituency, who believe that the carrying capacity of the planet has already been exceeded, and that growth cannot be sustained much longer. The last straw may be climate change, oil depletion or a variety of other things, but the consequences are similar.
Disciplined, sustainable society: This is the first addition to the simple Malthusian versus Cornucopian visions. It means trying to manage things to avoid the worst. The “third way” is outlined in many detailed plans for organizing a transition from the current social and economic system. The premise is that growth cannot go on forever, and avoiding collapse is overwhelmingly important. So these scenarios try to outline paths to a sustainable, steady state. What form the transition might take is controversial, partly because of the difficulty of designing a no-growth economy that works according to the currently dominant capitalist model and does not fall into depression.
Transformation: These kinds of visions are about transformation, not transition, because they embrace a radical, usually technologically driven, alteration of the conditions of human life, and possibly of humanity itself. Under this heading are filed the future pictures which see the next stage of evolution as involving the immensely powerful development of, for example, artificial intelligence, robotics, genetic engineering or nanotechnology. These are “post-human” futures that perhaps include moving to off-Earth environments – one pretty convincing way of escaping from a closed system.
[vimeo]http://www.vimeo.com/16885715[/vimeo]
Courtesy of the excellent English 50 Cent, who helpfully provides a running translation of 50 Cent’s tweets. More Global Dashboard hip-hop coverage here.