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We are on the verge of crossing a line
-- from born to made, from created to built. Sometime in
the next few years, a scientist will reprogram a human egg
or sperm cell, spawning a genetic change that will be passed
down into eternity. We are sleepwalking toward the future,
and it's time to open our eyes.
Nearly fifteen years ago, in The End of Nature, Bill
McKibben demonstrated that humanity had begun to irrevocably
alter -- and endanger -- our environment on a global scale.
Now he turns his eye to a new and equally urgent issue:
the dangers inherent in an array of technologies that threaten
not just our survival, but our identity.
Imagine a future where lab workers can reprogram
human embryos to make our children "smarter" or
"more sociable" or "happier." Some researchers
are doing more than imagining the future; having worked
such changes on a wide range of other animals, they've begun
to plan for what they see as the inevitable transformation
of our species. They are joined by other engineers, working
in fields like advanced robotics and nanotechnology, who
foresee a not-very-distant day when people merge with machines
to create a "posthuman" world.
Enough examines such possibilities, and explains
how we can avoid their worst consequences while still enjoying
the fruits of our new scientific understandings. More, it
confronts the most basic questions that our technological
society faces: Will we ever decide that we've grown powerful
enough? Can we draw a line and say this far and no farther?
McKibben answers yes, and argues that only
by staying human can we find true meaning in our lives.
A warning against the gravest dangers humans have ever faced,
this wise and eloquent book is also a passionate defense
of the world we were born into, and a celebration of our
ability to say, "Enough."
Bill McKibben writes regularly for The
New York Review of Books, The New York Times,
The Atlantic, Outside, and many other publications.
His first book, The End of Nature, was published
in 1989 after being excerpted in The New Yorker;
it was a national bestseller and appeared in twenty foreign
editions. His other books include The Age of Missing
Information, Maybe One, and Long Distance:
A Year of Living Strenuously. A scholar in residence
at Middlebury College, he lives with his wife, the writer
Sue Halpern, and daughter in the mountains above Lake Champlain.
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