A collection of essays by various scientists and mathematicians on the subject of what life will be like in the year One Million. I admit to skimming a few of the essays, but some of them were really interesting. ( )

This book is a compilation of essays on ponderings of what lies in the future for us, like a million years or so. My first reaction was we can barely imagine what is in store in 100 years. Think back to 1913 or so and our state of technology and what we thought we knew was right.

Many of these essays are truly thought provoking and fascinating. Taking on aspects of technology, exploration, and the ultimate fate of universe boggles the imagination. The book goes a long way in bringing many of these incredible factors to light. Many agree that at this point in our understanding the universe eventually comes to a stopped void where nothing much happens. Ultimately I believe many of our principles of physics and other sciences will be proven wrong. ( )

Having spent a whole lot of time thinking about the distant future (my novel ‘Twilight’s Ashes’ is set in 635,039AD), I found Broderick’s compilation of fourteen essays exploring the topic to be too limited in scope for my liking. The vast majority of the discussions either stay so deadly cautious with their grounding in present reality as to be of little interest, or they leap headlong into the half-century-old Freeman Dyson visions of man as a plundering wave of barbarians hurtling clumsily across the cosmos, answering to some implicit call of ‘manifest destiny’.

Hello! There are just a few other basic paths we ought to be exploring! I took my own cue about the future from successful species on our planet. What will Year Million look like for sharks? For cockroaches? Well, unless the tech-drunken barbarians dismantle the whole planet in order to feed their insatiable, energy-gluttonous Matrioshka Brains, Year Million is going to be pretty much business as usual. I’m betting against the barbarians.

Yes, that is my biggest complaint: the lack of consideration of sustainablility is repeatedly rubbed in the reader’s faces. There’s Stephen B. Harris’ concept of raping the universe to bring back deuterium for fusion fuel, or Robin Hanson’s exploration of the escalating race to be the first to exploit new star systems, in which he explicitly refuses to consider what the settled culture behind the frontier might look like. Then there’s this gem from Wil McCarthy: “It’s hard to say exactly what our descendants will use their energy for, but it’s a safe bet they’ll use a lot of it, and will be hungry—always insatiably hungry—for more. Some things never change.”

And what about the Dystopian and post-Apocalyptic alternatives in which the barbarians get their just deserts—totally missing from the discussion. My ‘Twilight’s Ashes’ could be considered a post-Apocalyptic solution with a generally serene outcome—that is, until the post-human rivals start stirring up trouble. So there’s yet another topic entirely ignored: species radiation out of the parent human stock.

With all its shortcomings, the book does occasionally stretch one’s mind. Everybody is likely to find something worth more thought. I learned a few useful things about simulated reality. It turns out that our reality is not likely to be a simulation in somebody’s Matrioshka Brain Virtual Reality game – thanks, Rudy Rucker. Then there was the realization—extrapolated from Sean M. Carroll’s essay on entropy—that “Complexity” always seems to be at its peak in the present moment. If this idea can be elevated to an axiom, it implies real truths about the symmetry of past and future and their roles in our perception of reality. Quantum uncertainty insists that the past is just as malleable as the future—we define them both based on what we choose to observe and on what we choose to ignore or fail to observe. Ultimately, the Year Million is not just something for idle armchair speculators to toy with—it’s a full-contact, participatory sport. ( )

Mind-blowing collection of essays on some possibilities for the *really* far future. An example: "Matrioshka brains" -- nested, sun-orbiting, spherical shells of advanced material ("computronium") constructed from the original orbiting bodies of the suns' solar systems, and housing those systems' intelligent minds in a virtual, uploaded form.