Dear Futurists,

I have a few quick announcements and questions:

1.) This Saturday’s event “The Burning Question: Climate Change in Context”

Futurists like to plan ahead, and take note of roadblocks (and rail-blocks), right…?

Well, please bear in mind that the Northern Tube line is part-closed this weekend: http://www.tfl.gov.uk/tfl/livetravelnews/realtime/track.aspx?offset=weekend.

People who’ll be attending this Saturday’s event, please take note, and plan to arrive at a tube station other than Goodge St. (Consider Warren St or Euston or Russell Square.)

I urge as many of you as possible to attend this event, in view of the importance of the subject matter. There’s a near-future scenario in which extreme weather conditions of all sorts (floods, hurricanes, droughts, heatwaves, artic vortices) become increasingly common, and commentators are likely to put more attention onto the correlation with global warming. (See, as an example, “David Cameron ‘very much suspects’ climate change causing abnormal weather such as floods”.) The debate this Saturday will equip you to take a more informed role in these increasingly common discussions.

The meeting will be open for registration from 6pm, onwards, in room 541, on the 5th floor of Birkbeck College.

If you’d like to read some more, ahead of the meetup, take a look at my recent blogpost, “Six steps to climate catastrophe”, along with the comments posted in response.

2.) Marketing assistance – outreach to media, etc.

Does anyone in this meetup have experience in marketing an event to key outreach channels such as press, well-read bloggers, etc?

Registrations for Anticipating 2025 have passed 60, but there’s still room for many more to attend.

I’m hoping that someone will have some spare personal bandwidth, plus good connections to the likes of Wired, the Guardian, etc, and can help to obtain for Anticipating 2025the kind of advance publicity which I believe it deserves. (But I confess I’m biased!)

If you can help with this particular set of tasks, or can recommend someone else who can, please get in touch.

NB If you haven’t seen them, a couple of new preview videos have recently been released for Anticipating 2025:

• “Helping human enhancement tech start-ups achieve acceptance & funding” – featuring speaker Riva-Melissa Tez
• “Why our systems are failing us and what will replace them” – featuring speaker Mark Stevenson.

3.) Some recommended reading

The Internet is full of streams of news about new technologies. There’s no shortage of places to look. But it’s a harder task to find news sources that have a good ratio of really-interesting “signal” to comparatively-mundane “noise”.

Recently I’ve found a lot of fascinating news stories on the Facebook group “Stanford Transhumanist Association”. Why not give it a try, to see if it’s to your liking too?

And why let me know what your own favourite sources are, for futurist news and discussion?

4.) For Californians

Finally a note to London Futurists who happen to be within striking distance of East Bay, Piedmont, California.

You should take a look at the Brighter Brains website to find details of the “Transhuman Visions 2.0” event they’re organising, for 1st March. Quote:

Max More and Natasha Vita-More are the Keynote Speakers of TRANSHUMAN VISIONS 2.0 – EAST BAY, plus there’s 15 other luminaries: John Smart, Zoltan Istvan, Monica Anderson, Brian Wang, Linda M. Glenn, Nikola Danaylov, Michael Anissimov, Grace Walcott, Hank Pellissier, Gray Scott, Dr. Egil Asprem, Kevin Russell, Brad Carmack, Abelard Lindsay, Andre Watson, Gennady Stolyarov II, Wendy Stolyarov, Andrez Gomez Emilsson, and the Terra Nova Robotics Club of Pacifica.

This posse of futurists will pontificate on topics like Nootropics, Artificial Intelligence, Radical Life Extension, Psychedelics, Polygamy, Existential Risks, Bioethics, Cryonics, Mormonism, Positive Futurism, The Singularity, Nanotechnology, and Robotics.

That’s a lot to cram into just one day. (But it is a long day…)

// David W. Wood
Chair, London Futurists