Explore Quotes by Jamais Cascio

Carbon dioxide isn't the only greenhouse gas out there. Other substances, such as water vapor and nitrous oxide, also trap heat to varying degrees.

You need to recognize that the copyright date on a book reflects when it came out, not when it was written - assume that the information in the book is at least a year older than the copyright date, and possibly two.

In a Photoshopped world, only the skeptical eye prevails.

Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it.

The Internet is not kind to established institutions.

Much as Cold War nuclear strategists could argue about winning a nuclear war by having more survivors, advocates of a Global Warming War might see the United States, Western Europe, or Russia as better able to ride out climate disruption and manipulation than, say, China or the countries of the Middle East.

Greed, accident, or malice may have harmful results, but, barring something truly apocalyptic, a resilient system can absorb such results without its overall health being threatened.

Future forecasting is all about testing strategies - it's like a wind tunnel.

In entertainment, zombies are so played out. I have a gut sense that people are getting tired of apocalyptic scenarios.

Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control.

Participatory complexity may well be the key descriptor of the 21st century - in our economies, in our politics, and in our everyday lives.

Entrepreneurs need to recognize that, especially in the digital domain, they are unlikely to come up with something that is going to be permanently on top, that impermanence and ephemerality is the nature of the beast.

Futures thinking is hard work. Fortunately, you do get better at it with practice. It's worth the effort.

Even if we were to stop putting out greenhouse gases right now, we'd still face decades of warming.

Foresight turns out to be a critical adaptive strategy for times of great stress.

Human civilization has been changing the Earth's environment for millennia, often to our detriment. Dams, deforestation and urbanization can alter water cycles and wind patterns, occasionally triggering droughts or even creating deserts.

A good scenario doesn't make a good science fiction story - but it's a setting within which a good science fiction story might be told.

Everything we think about regarding sustainability - from energy to agriculture to manufacturing to population - has a water footprint. Almost all of the water on Earth is salt water, and the remaining freshwater supplies are split between agricultural use and human use - as well as maintaining the existing natural environment.

The cloud computing model may be a wonderful system when it works, but it's a nightmare when it fails. And the more people who come to depend upon it, the bigger the nightmare.

Thinking about the future is fundamentally important to dealing with the challenges of today.

Blended-reality technology could play in a limited, walled-garden world, but history suggests that it won't really take off until it offers broad freedom of use.