Ebook: Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: Science Slightly over the Edge

"Enter the gray area between overheated imagination and overheated reality, and meet a network of scientists bent on creating artificial life forms, building time machines, hatching plans for dismantling the sun, enclosing the solar system in a cosmic eggshell, and faxing human minds to the far side of the galaxy. With Ed Regis as your guide, walk the fine line between science fact and fiction on this freewheeling and riotously funny tour through some of the most serious science there is.

Ed Regis, a frequent contributor to Omni magazine, is College Scholar at Western Maryland College. He is at work on a new book about extremely advanced science and technology."

"What is a great mambo chicken? Well, it’s what you get when you spin a chicken around in a centrifuge so it lives its life at two-and-a-half times the Earth’s gravitational pull. Because they have a greater amount of gravity to work against, the chickens develop stronger and larger muscles and bones. Why would anyone do this to a chicken? To find out what would happen to humans if they lived at greater-than-earth gravity, of course. Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition is full of stories like this: it’s the Tom Wolfe version of science, quirky, fun, and just plain weird. This isn’t like William Hartston’s Drunken Goldfish and Other Irrelevant Scientific Research, which recounted the layman’s view of what scientists get up to alone in their labs, like studying whether rats are attracted to tennis balls. Instead, this is an account of what Regis calls ‘fin-de-siecle hubris’, scientists who genuinely believe that nothing is impossible.
...Some of these people are amateurs, like the Hensons, the Arizona couple whose idea of a good time was to go out in the canyon and set off fire-bombs. They were the guiding force behind a movement to create space settlements. Keith Henson later went on to become a force in the cryonics movement; he was the one who proposed a party at the end of the Universe, to be attended by all the recalled cryonicists and their backup copies.

Others became accepted as professionals. For example, Bob Truax, who built rockets in his garage out of odds and ends from local junk heaps until one day NASA, which had laughed at him for years, bought one of his rockets, made, ironically enough, out of its own junked spare parts, for $750 million. Nanotechnology enters the story, too: if we can generate tiny machines, much like bacteria, which can create anything we want, atom by atom, we can use those machines to repair the damage to cryonically frozen bodies, ruptured cell by ruptured cell."

"Reviewed by Howard Rheingold

Whole Earth Review has been a hotbed of technological hubris for a long time: what else would you call "We are as gods and we might as well get good at it?" The core beliefs of several different technology cults Ñ immortality via cryonics, space colonies, biospheres, Dyson spheres, nanotechnology, artificial life, downloading minds into computers -- were gleefully seeded by Catalogs and Co-Evs of years past. There are people behind all of these notions: people who want to freeze their heads in liquid nitrogen and store their brains until future scientists figure out how to reconstitute them, people who are worried about the fate of the galaxy because they plan to live that long, people who worry about the heat-death of the universe billions of years from now and start brainstorming ways to escape the End of Everything.

Ed Regis, often funny but never condescending to his subjects, plays the role of an anthropologist on an ethnographic expedition to the subcircles of American culture where cryogenic re-animation, galactic-scale engineering, and homebrew space travel are commonplace objects of conversation. Regis doesn't make fun of the people he describes, but he does show how the grandiosity of their ideas -- dismantling the outer planets to capture enough of the sun's energy to fuel a population of trillions, for example -- reflects that immensely confident view of our own capacities that has distinguished the human race. We're bigger than ameba, smaller than planets, our ancestors were swinging in the trees very recently, we're good with tools, and we've already started tinkering with the forces that light the stars. Regis evokes humor, awe, and continued reflection on the sheer chutzpah of Homo sapiens in this informal but well-informed joyride through the territory of the high-tech, high-hubrists."