(I consider the novel “Marooned…” itself to perhaps be the best SF novel ever written, BTW.)

However, in answer to your claim, I recall explaining the singularity to people in the mid-80′s, using that term as such, borrowing it from a forward or afterward to the Peace War which I think was only published in one edition. There were the separate novels and novella – “The Ungoverned” – and then there was a single book which was a trilogy in one edition but dropped the “Ungoverned” in another edition. I believe the divide was between the hardback and paperback editions, but in any case, in one of them Vinge explicitly discusses his use of the bobbles as a way to slow down the approach to the singularity. He made them up on the belief that we would never last long enough as mere homo-sapiens for his – or any other actually realistic hard sf – novel to work. Hard science dictates the singularity and that ends any realistic portrayal past that point.

Like an ant trying to write a novel about a human, Vinge introduced the bobbles in the Marooned series and the “zones of thought” in his later work, “A Fire Upon the Deep,” “A Deepness in the Sky,” and the recent “Children of the Sky,” all of which are written from the same explicit introduction of artificial barriers to the Singularity. You cited 1993, but even “A Fire Upon the Deep” is listed in the wiki as 1992, while the Peace War is 1984.

Thanks very much for the Ulam reference. BTW, rereading my earlier post again, I don’t see that I ever claimed that Vinge’s use of the term started with “Rainbows End.” I’m trying to recall if he used it at all, in fact – at least explicitly, in RE. Implicitly, it’s all over the place, and one of the central characters may be the first of our inheritors.

In Marooned, to illustrate how deeply the Singularity is woven into the novel, there is a charcter who survives from the Peace War, somehow, by accident, finds herself on the other side of the Singulary, essentially alone, and decides to use the leftover scraps of near-Singularity tech lieing about in the wreckage to further enhance herself, and then go a viking to nearby star systems, having all the time in the world. At one “landing” she instantly finds herself in a war with the non-sentient (but very smart) guards of a previous non-human civilization from eons past, and spends the next 50,000 years in a tooth and nail struggle – ultimately defeating them, all to illustrate the fact that the disjunction of the Singularity from our own primitive world of today is more extreme than we can even imagine.

The scarier option would be for the state to come in and regulate the options in the name of fairness, meaning that perhaps the really hot advances would never be financed, due to the state-imposed lid on medical costs. Fueling that, one could imagine a society in which some people can afford options such as individualized therapies based on intensive DNA/RNA modeling, taking into account the metagenetics involved with individual biospecs, a process that might involve thousands of dollars of computer analysis and intelligent human-judgement – perhaps a lot more – to yeild worthwhile results. A few people could afford to acheive major age reversals, which might not make the masses on the other end of a perhaps poorer economy particularly pleased.

A key here might be a focus on changing the perspective of today’s kids, who have heard a lot of gloom and doom and how capitalism and science are destroying a mythical Eden. If they saw the possibilities of positive progress and saw themselves as participating, then that might defuse a potential problem at the start.

On that note, I recommend a book by the man who invented the term “singularity” as applied to human progress, Vernor Vinge. The book is “Rainbows End” which does a remarkably good job of picturing a near-term future in awesomely great detail. Not everything in the RE world is utopian, but there is genuine objectively-based hope, and it provides a concrete model to refer to. Perhaps even better, since RE won the Hugo Award in 2007, several of the technical predictions in the book have come to pass or are well on their way – the Google Car and Google Glasses, just for a couple…

In a different vein altogether, I recall in the ’70′s almost literally stumbling accross a collection of papers by an Italian medical researcher in the 1930′s, who claimed to have demonstrated that cells in the body organized and communicated with each other using pulses of very low level visable light. I did nothing to follow up on this and don’t even know if I still have the papers, which included a number of photomicrographs allegedly demostrating this effect. Probably nothing there, but I am curious if there has been anything further published along this line.