"Ghostwritten" sights its stories through an eschatological eye, as if gods and ghosts were observing present-day humanity and contending over what should be done with it.
The series' famous opening invocation — "Space, the final frontier" — could sometimes seem contrived, since present-day humanity was its favorite quarry.
It is the plaintive present-day humanity of George Smith, and the deflected horse-humanity of Boxer, that connect us to the grotesque futures of Orwell's "Nineteen Eighty-four" and "Animal Farm".
Intergenerational ethics, also called obligations to future generations, branch of ethics that considers if present-day humanity has a moral obligation to future generations to aim for environmental sustainability.
Their prophet is US futurologist and Google engineering director Ray Kurzweil, who argues that so rapid have been developments in the biosciences and informatics that by the mid-century a "singularity" will result through which a genetically engineered and neurally enhanced post-human species will emerge, incomparably stronger, wiser, more moral and longer-lived than present-day humanity.
Five present-day human genomes.
On that weekly holiday observed by all "present-day civilized humanity" (Ferenczi was writing in 1919, when Sunday was still sacred, even in Budapest, his very cosmopolitan hometown), not only did drudgery give way to festivity, family gatherings and occasionally worship, but the machinery of self-censorship shut down, too, stilling the eternal inner murmur of self-reproach.
The patriarch is supposed to have left the cradle of civilisation for a new land, Canaan, a country that would fascinate and obsess humanity right down to the present day.
Fast forward to present day Japan, and hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors) continue to warn humanity about the horrors of nuclear war.
Her influence continues to the present day.
