LightEye
04-28-2007, 11:38 AM
Dear Friends,
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/SoundsTrue2012.php
Be Well, Be Love.
David
A Singularity in Time
The pace of life is forever speeding up. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries. Calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes. Communication that used to take months happens in seconds. In almost every area of life, change is occurring faster and faster.
Yet, this acceleration is not confined to modern times. Medieval architecture and agriculture, for instance, varied very little over the period of a century. But even then change occurred much faster than it did in prehistoric times. Stone Age tools remained unchanged for thousands of years.
Nor is this quickening confined to humanity; it is a pattern that stretches back to the dawn of life on Earth. The first simple lifeforms evolved nearly four billion years ago. Multicellular life appeared a billion or so years ago. Vertebrates with central nervous systems, several hundred million years ago. Mammals appeared tens of millions of years ago. The first hominids stood on the planet a couple of million years ago; homo sapiens, a few hundred thousand years ago. Language and tool-use emerged tens of thousands of years ago. Civilization, the movement into towns and cities, started a few thousand years ago. The Industrial Revolution began three centuries ago. Finally, the Information Revolution is but a few decades old.
http://www.peterussell.com/Odds/SoundsTrue2012.php
Be Well, Be Love.
David
A Singularity in Time
The pace of life is forever speeding up. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries. Calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes. Communication that used to take months happens in seconds. In almost every area of life, change is occurring faster and faster.
Yet, this acceleration is not confined to modern times. Medieval architecture and agriculture, for instance, varied very little over the period of a century. But even then change occurred much faster than it did in prehistoric times. Stone Age tools remained unchanged for thousands of years.
Nor is this quickening confined to humanity; it is a pattern that stretches back to the dawn of life on Earth. The first simple lifeforms evolved nearly four billion years ago. Multicellular life appeared a billion or so years ago. Vertebrates with central nervous systems, several hundred million years ago. Mammals appeared tens of millions of years ago. The first hominids stood on the planet a couple of million years ago; homo sapiens, a few hundred thousand years ago. Language and tool-use emerged tens of thousands of years ago. Civilization, the movement into towns and cities, started a few thousand years ago. The Industrial Revolution began three centuries ago. Finally, the Information Revolution is but a few decades old.