From: fly@acsu.buffalo.edu (Paul D. Fly)
Newsgroups: alt.society.futures
Subject: Re: FAR future programs
Date: 17 Nov 92 22:07:28 GMT
Organization: UB

In article <83331@ut-emx.uucp> wolfone@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Patrick Chester) writes:
>It's sad to see that hardly anybody has mentioned expansion into the rest of
>the solar system as a goal for the Future. Not very farseeing.

Okay, here my thoughts on this.  Lets see if I can put it into a tangible
readable form :)

It doesn't take much perception to see that "things are speeding up".  You
see all these graphs of "progress" or some such that look violently 
exponential.  Like the graph of "the speed one can travel at", begining
with running, going to horse, and train, and car, and plane, etc etc.  Each
increase in magnitude occurs in a magnitude less of time.  And then the graph
goes to infinity in the near future.  Same for population of the world: 
goes to inifinity.  You see these all over.  Its hard not to see that there
is an increase in the rate of change.

Now there are some who say this "and now it goes to infinity" is ignored,
when *that* is what we should be looking at.  Terrance McKenna has plotted
this "infinity of novelty" to be Dec. 23, 2012, for example.  I don't know
much about the extropians, but I heard say they have a Singularity of some
sort apparently occuring in the near future.  Well, at any rate, there are
a few ways to look at this.  You can say we're going to reach that infinity,
and that some kind of world-shattering Change is going to occur.  Or, on
one of the other hands, you can look to "typical dynamic systems" that
exhibit a growth pattern of this sort.  What you usually find there is that
there is an exponential growth, and then an inverse exponential "leveling
off" (I don't know the `proper' terms for these geometrical things...).  If
you predict this kind of scenario, then, in the *near* future, the trends 
of change that have existed over the whole of history will reach this
"joint" and begin a new pattern.  Recently, I've been tending toward this
idea.  

I don't think its unrealistic to say this "joint" will be reached in our
lifetimes.  In fact, I would not be surprised if its already been reached,
although I can't see any evidence for it.  But I think it is unreasonable 
to think that Things can continue as they are for much longer before some
kind of Major Change happening.  Does anyone disagree?  Some say the Major
Change is a really Major Change, such as infinity of novelty, a pretty
paradigm shattering concept.  On the other hand, if a "leveling off"
begins to occur, the "things" and changes in the "way things are done" that
will be required will not be trivial.  I simply can't see how a Major
Change, of a nature we can't really predict, cannot happen within the very
near future.  Near enough, that I don't see any "route of escape" (given
we even want to escape, who knows?), including space colonization, the
timeframe required being very great when compared to the timeframe of the
Impending Crisis.

Does this make sense?  Given this way of looking into the future, prediction
beyond a decade or two is nothing but an exercise of the imagination.

Paul

-- 
Paul Fly                      | "Thinking is more interesting than knowing,
fly@acsu.buffalo.edu          |  but less interesting than looking."
v092pxca@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu |    --Goethe