Starship and Canoe

Notes

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Dyson is a man much concerned with human destiny, and his attention soon ranged beyond his own solar system and his own lifespan. Immortality for the human race requires colonization of the stars, he believes, or at the very least, of the comets. He sketched out plans for a gargantuan ark, a starship the size of a city and powered by hydrogen bombs. Riding a monstrous concatenation of explosions, thundering silently through the void, leaving behind a trail brighter than a thousand suns, this vessel would centuries hence take his descendants, frozen if necessary, to Alpha Centauri or another star.

George Dyson, Freeman’s only son, has a mother idea. George wants to build a canoe, a great ocean-going kayak. 

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http://www.amazon.com/The-Starship-Canoe-Kenneth-Brower/dp/0060910305

Kenneth Brower's The Starship and the Canoe brings together some Whole-Earth relevant ideas. It's a narrative non-fiction account following father and son Freeman and George Dyson, physicist and science historian respectively. Among many other projects and threads of his work (including important early computer work at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study) Freeman Dyson was involved and obsessed with Project Orion, a plan to design and build a nuclear-powered spaceship.

George Dyson was his drop-out son, whose own obsession as a young man was building and perfecting a huge seagoing canoe adhering to Native American design principles. While Kenneth Brower was writing about him, George was living in a treehouse in British Columbia and taking extensive kayaking trips; later in his life he went on to be a science historian - his book Turing's Cathedral is about scientists (including his father) building the foundations of the digital world after WWII, and it's really good!

http://www.amazon.com/Turings-Cathedral-Origins-Digital-Universe/dp/1400075998

Both George and Freeman Dyson's books are included in Stewart Brand's "Manual For Civilization" collection of books at the Long Now foundation:
http://blog.longnow.org/02014/03/04/stewart-brand-book-list-for-manual/

The family connection really emphasizes the uneasiness with which George Dyson's generation viewed the kind of pioneering and sophisticated WWII-era technology, notably nuclear technology, that Freeman Dyson was involved with. Despite his outsider-ness, George Dyson comes across as, like his dad, extremely scientifically-minded and technically astute; they're using similar principles very differently.

also, Kenneth Brower's father was the founder of the Sierra Club.

George Dyson in Scholar Mode

George Dyson in Treehouse