glyph 360: book ... technology, nanotechnology, building with atoms, rapidly, minutely, massively ... resource limitations, growth limits ... convergence of technologies, singlularity, artificial intelligence, computers, computing ... managing unpredictable change ... network of knowledge ... environmental remediation, ecology & machines ... science forums ... how to produce enough foresight to make the survival of humanity possible ... founding work leading to creation of The Foresight Institute ... review by Ray Kurzweil

Engines of Creation, first published in 1986, is worth reading today. It investigates deep principles having to do with the emergence of a world fit for explorers and of a people fit to inhabit and sustain such a world. Engines of Creation is a superb book about technology and potential human systems of communication, knowledge discovery, and assessment that offer hope of survival in a coming era of astonishingly rapid change. Essential reading for weavers of freeorder. —leif smith

New Edition, Feb 07, free download from WOWIO - free books, free minds:
http://www.wowio.com/users/product.asp?BookId=503

A review from above site:

"Some seminal works stand out like beacons in the history of science. Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica" and Watson and Crick's "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid" come quickly to mind. In recent decades we can add Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation," which established the revolutionary new field of nanotechnology. In the twenty years since this seminal work was published, its premises and analyses have been confirmed and we are starting to apply precise molecular assembly to a wide variety of early applications from blood cell sized devices that can target cancer cells to a new generation of efficient solar panels. We can now see clearly the roadmap over the next couple of decades to the full realization of Drexler's concept of the inexpensive assembly of macro objects constructed at the nanoscale controlled by massively parallel information processes, the fulfillment of which will enable us to solve problems -- energy, environmental degradation, poverty, and disease to name a few -- that have plagued humankind for eons."

—Ray Kurzweil, inventor, and author of The Singularity is Near, When Humans Transcend Biology

http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Cover.html
http://www.e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Table_of_Contents.html (access to the entire book)

Table of Contents

COVER PAGE & links to non-English versions
FOREWORD - by Marvin Minsky
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART ONE - THE FOUNDATIONS OF FORESIGHT

1 - Engines of Construction
2 - The Principles of Change
3 - Predicting and Projecting

PART TWO - PROFILES OF THE POSSIBLE

4 - Engines of Abundance
5 - Thinking Machines
6 - The World Beyond Earth
7 - Engines of Healing
8 - Long Life in an Open World
9 - A Door to the Future
10 - The Limits to Growth

PART THREE - DANGERS AND HOPES

11 - Engines of Destruction
12 - Strategies and Survival
13 - Finding the Facts
14 - The Network of Knowledge
15 - Worlds Enough, and Time

AFTERWORD
GLOSSARY
NOTES AND REFERENCES

https://explorersfoundation.org/glyphery/360.html
December 9, 2006; edited/updated November 26, 2015