an interesting time to be alive

[JcP]

Originally Posted by matthewmunari

it was within the last 100 - 200 years my man...... we just went from dr's writing ads in magazine for heroin to a highly athoritative computer now being implanted in our skin (within next 100 years)...

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.

[farmergiles]

While some factors are growth factors others are limiting factors.

Just as a crude example compare the no. of factories manufacturing goods (used among other things to expand economies thereby furthering the markets for the above goods as well as producing materials to build more factories) to the profitability of obtaining finite fossil fuels and raw materials (used in those factories as well as for other things). The first will increase exponentially until the logarithmic decay of the second limits it. Nature as well as economics is a series of checks and balances.

Computer games tend to be unrealistic and fail to be open ended.

[Vertigo]

10 years - dead

worlds gonna end my friends

[JcP]

Originally Posted by farmergiles

While some factors are growth factors others are limiting factors.

Just as a crude example compare the no. of factories manufacturing goods (used among other things to expand economies thereby furthering the markets for the above goods as well as producing materials to build more factories) to the profitability of obtaining finite fossil fuels and raw materials (used in those factories as well as for other things). The first will increase exponentially until the logarithmic decay of the second limits it. Nature as well as economics is a series of checks and balances.

Computer games tend to be unrealistic and fail to be open ended.

I was trying to make a point...and it wasn't that computer games are realistic.

[Man in Black]

Originally Posted by Vertigo

worlds gonna end my friends

I don't believe you.

[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..

[farmergiles]

Originally Posted by JcP

I was trying to make a point...and it wasn't that computer games are realistic.

I know that wasn`t your point.

I thought your point about exponential growth was a good one.

What I was trying to say was that other factors will tend to check the exponential nature of growth in the situations like you describe in reality.

For example the classic foxes and rabbits algorithm (see graph below).
The number of rabbits starts out increasing exponentially but is then slowed by the increasing no. of foxes (who increase because of abundant food) until it decreases, starving the foxes who then decrease resulting in a pair of sine like curves.

The checks may be abrupt or more likely cyclical rather than logarithmic (as other people have pointed out in this thread) no- one knows for sure. We seem to have been on a period of exponential growth of rate of increase of technology since the second world war (which ties in with Ted`s argument) but something is going to check this- probably lack of oil.

The fact that we write stuff down for future generations means technology tends to keep increasing on the whole rather than staying static on average like the foxes and rabbits example.

Writing is relatively recent which explains why ancient civilizations like the Egyptians created stuff like batteries but then lost them without building on those technologies. I know the Egyptians had hieroglyphics but not all the knowledge they had was passed on to their immediate successors- hieroglyphics were a limited form of writing and until the Rosetta stone was found we couldn`t translate them. Civilzations like the Egyptians and ancient South Americans worked by monopolizing technology. I don`t think we need to explain their seemingly advanced technologies by means of aliens or other deus ex machina- these technologies were simply lost for a while.

[JcP]

Originally Posted by matthewmunari

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..

what does the technological death-march we seem to be on have anything to do with whether or not those technological advances are because of aliens?

[JcP]

Originally Posted by farmergiles

I know that wasn`t your point.

I thought your point about exponential growth was a good one.

What I was trying to say was that other factors will tend to check the exponential nature of growth in the situations like you describe in reality.

For example the classic foxes and rabbits algorithm (see graph below).
The number of rabbits starts out increasing exponentially but is then slowed by the increasing no. of foxes (who increase because of abundant food) until it decreases, starving the foxes who then decrease resulting in a pair of sine like curves.

The checks may be abrupt or more likely cyclical rather than logarithmic (as other people have pointed out in this thread) no- one knows for sure. We seem to have been on a period of exponential growth of rate of increase of technology since the second world war (which ties in with Ted`s argument) but something is going to check this- probably lack of oil.

The fact that we write stuff down for future generations means technology tends to keep increasing on the whole rather than staying static on average like the foxes and rabbits example.

Writing is relatively recent which explains why ancient civilizations like the Egyptians created stuff like batteries but then lost them without building on those technologies. I know the Egyptians had hieroglyphics but not all the knowledge they had was passed on to their immediate successors- hieroglyphics were a limited form of writing and until the Rosetta stone was found we couldn`t translate them. Civilzations like the Egyptians and ancient South Americans worked by monopolizing technology. I don`t think we need to explain their seemingly advanced technologies by means of aliens or other deus ex machina- these technologies were simply lost for a while.

lol, check out the reason I edited my first post.

In order to make it make it clearer, I changed bell-curve to exponential curve.

I agree with you.

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by JcP

what does the technological death-march we seem to be on have anything to do with whether or not those technological advances are because of aliens?

aliens have provided us with technology possible...soon it will be possible to do what was previously thought to be impossible, travel the speed of light, and warp space and time like a piece of paper being folded...

[Vertigo]

Originally Posted by Man in Black

I don't believe you.

u best believe, yo

[matthewmunari]

okay, now where do we go from here????

we agree on the unavoidable future, but that isnt in our lifetime, unless Jesus comes back in 2012, this is going to effect our offspring hundreds of years from now, when instant death is ALWAYS breathing down your neck....It has started, we just live too far away to realize its REAL.....we're disconnected......th ings are quickening...look from decade to decade.., you can tell which is from what.....if we only wouldnt kill ourselves with nukes, we could have gone a far way as a race..that time travel thiing is cool....but you can oonly travel to the point you turned it on.............:1pea ce:

[JcP]

I don't know what you're smoking matt, but I want some.

damn.

[matthewmunari]

Originally Posted by JcP

I don't know what you're smoking matt, but I want some.

damn.

i posted the name of what i had in a diff forum, but seriously, we are so detached from the flash points <land thats been in dispute thousands of years> going off, to getting your kid ready for school...We have it too easy, and we're gonna be in for a HUGE suprise.........I saw the future in my coma, it was in the form of a parable.........


a fighter trains and trains, but in the fight he suffers an injury


he rehabs, and rehabs, this time he steps in the ring, instead of getting hurt bad, he's killed.............. .

I saw that vision as I lay comatose in Desert Springs hospital on 8 - 1 - 05 , i saw people drowning, 2 weeks l8r Hurricane Katrina hits, so I don't know...I know we need to help our fellow man out more, and not be so selfish,...

[verklingen]

^ any vision of the future you see is only a possible future filtered through your own beliefs and expectations. there is no future except as you create it to be.