Visiting Scholars

What are we here to learn?

Geisel Library by Michael Muraz

I sometimes think that we are visitors to this Earthly experience, seeds of consciousness, here to learn… all of it. The full spectrum of the human experience. Maybe I’m an alien from another dimension, taking on this meat suit to learn and teach. I’m pretty sure some of you reading this (you know who you are) are aliens too.

What do I want to learn and teach?

• Seeing the unseen then not being able to unsee it.

• Frames of thinking that can unlock potential.

• Technical and complex concepts and issues in an accessible way.

• Imagination.

It seems as though imagination is limitless, and anything that can imagined, can eventually be manifested, so tuning that instrument properly is critical. What is anything in this reality other than a manifestation of a collective and divine imagination?

Sir Arthur C. Clarke was a pioneer of imagination.

Clarke’s Three Laws are:

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Science fiction thinkers are wizards and witches of a new age. Magicians.

Clarke began publishing a series of magazine essays in 1958, which eventually became his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. Some of the time frames are slightly off, after all humans are master procrastinators, but his predictions from sixty years ago are pretty uncanny.

Science fiction has hit the mainstream. When I was a kid, being into comic books, science fiction, and computers was intensely not cool. Today, our entire entertainment industry has been enraptured by science fiction, fantasy, and magic. The collective imagination engine has been ignited.

The Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination seeks to understand, enhance and enact the gift of human imagination by bringing together the inventive power of science and technology, with the critical analysis of the humanities, and the expressive insight of the arts.

Into the Impossible. Visiting scholars. Let’s go.

Day 10: Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination #GivingChristmas