[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by JcP

you ever play civilization or any real time strategy games? There is a point where your country or army reaches a critical mass.

I'm going to use warcraft as an example, because it's an easy one:

when you start off, things go REALLY slow because you have 1 peon. So you send the peon to the gold mine. And he brings in 100G every 5 seconds. Once you have 400 gold (IE, 20 seconds) you train a second peon.

Now you have 2 peons collecting 100 gold every 5 seconds. Once you have 400 gold (10 seconds) you train another.

Now you have 3 peons collecting 100 gold every 5 seconds. Once you have 400 gold (a little over 5 seconds) you have another peon.

At a certain point, you will have more gold coming in than you can spend on more peons. Which means you've reached the critical mass of the gold-to-peon graph.

Change gold to technology and peon to scientists and hopefully this can be easily applied to your belief that the technological advancements of the last 100 years are fully explainable.

Which, when mapped on a graph, is called an exponential graph. One axis is a static climb (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) while the amount being counted increases exponentially.

This same principle applies to human evolution. Our culture started off slow, at at a certain point (namely, the renaissance) our "evolutionary graph" began to grow much faster than before. Now we're nearing an almost straight line upward on our graph.

While you can believe in aliens giving us technology, the logic to support simple evolution of ideas is there. Our population, technology, consuming levels, artistic expression, etc are all experiencing the same exponential growth.

So why you'd single out technological advancement as somehow different doesn't quite make sense to me.

I hope my analogy made sense. If not, I'll do it visually next post.

http://hotmath.com/images/gt/lessons...tial_graph.gif

think of the last 100 years as the increase in curvage from -2 to -1, compared to -1 to 0.

i get that....but if you take a step back, take a deep breath, i don't see us evolving in any other way but thechnologically.... we're commiting suicide very slowly, and are not going to leave anything for out ancestors...point: more wars and deaths because of wars have taken place i the last 30 years, than previous wars combined (vietnam included..) We are prodcing technology that we have nothing to compare too, cell phones weren't around 50 years ago, so we wont know the long term effect on our bodies, until another 20 or so years, when more data is available.....we are comsuming green-house gases, the ozone layer has a hole in it, and is bound to get worse, the de-forestation of lands like Brasil and Chile', is destroying the ecological balance in that area......but we magically got to bthis point slowly but surely?????????????? ?/

many people think Van Danikens a maniac, but he has alot of wild theories that may be truer than people think..