Sunday, July 3, 2011

Saluting Futurists!

I'd like to take this opportunity to recognize and celebrate those men of vision who helped shape the world of today. Some names you may know, some you might not:
Gene Roddenberry- The Creator and Producer of Star Trek (TOS) and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His inspiration and vision of the future inspired many future engineers and scientists to create the reality of the technology his programs only played at.










Jack Kirby- Artist & creator. Back in the forties, he helped create superheroes like Captain America, kid gangs like the Newsboy Legion and the Kid Commandos. He drew western, romance and big monster comics. With Stan Lee at Marvel, he had a hand in creating most of their stable of characters, like the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor...
At DC comics, he created the Challengers of the Unknown, Kamandi, the Demon, OMAC, and his Fourth World saga...
Speaking of which...
In his Fourth World saga, the characters are all supposedly the next generation of gods that survived after a Ragnarok type event, leaving two worlds; Apokolips and New Genesis. Unlike the gods of myth, these characters came from  highly technologic societies that opposed each other for the fate of Earth..
Certain of these characters carried a device called "Mother Box".





As you can see, these were small, portable devices, often used as computers or communicators, as well as having multiple apps beyond...
One character, Scott Free, aka Mister Miracle ,
used a device called a "multi cube", which was a high tech multi tool in the same vein as a Leatherman or Swiss Army knife. You can thank Jack for the iPad...




Alvin Toffler is the writer and professional futurist who wrote Future Shock, which detailed how technology was progressing in such ways that humanity will suffer from too much change too soon.
He also wrote The Third Wave which was a synopsis of how civilization had progressed and predicted how it would continue to progress in the coming years.. The Third Wave supposedly was used by the Clinton administration to guide setting policies on emergent technologies...







Ian Fleming- Original Author of the James Bond thrillers, also author of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. In his novel Goldfinger, MI 5 Agent James Bond is issued two tracking devices, one the size of a packet of cigarettes, the other small enough to fit in his shoe heel... If you see the movie version of the story, the display of the location tracker looks eerily similar to a GPS map. Thank Ian for LoJack, and GPS tracing..

During the late 1930s and early 40s,   Lester Dent wrote the Doc Savage series under the nom de plume "Kenneth Robeson". In addition, Dent himself was an adventurer of sorts, being a sailor and world traveler. He also was a great reader and gadgeteer. Among the gadgets he thought up for his hero  to use or oppose were: Telephone answering machines, heat seeking cruise missiles, Ultraviolet light projectors, stun grenades, radio controlled drone planes, zeppelins, autogyros & helicopters, an Artic exploration submarine designed to go under the ice pack, collapsible boats, automatic machine pistols, non-lethal ammunition...


All these men are personal heroes of mine, of one sort or another.  They not only imagined great things, but lived extraordinary lives...

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