Newtonian Follow: stays at-rest/in-motion unless acted upon; has an equivalent and appropriate reaction for each action.
Quantum Follow: there is a probabilistic distribution of what they might do but you don’t know what they’re going to do until they do it. Sometimes new moves appear as if from nowhere, especially if there is a vacuum of moves.
Relativistic Follow: time is relative, for one of you the dance is over almost as soon as it starts, for the other it seems to drag on forever.
Monday, April 14, 2014
Thursday, April 10, 2014
The world is not ending, it is still yet beginning
Life has been on Earth for perhaps the last 1/5th of the history of this rock, which has been around about 1/3rd of the age of the universe.
There has been life on Earth for a billion years and our most concerted efforts of nuclear war and climate change would not eliminate it and prevent another billion years of life on Earth.
Human civilization has been around only the tiniest blink of time in all that.
We may be hitting 'Peak Oil', but I think 'Peak Humanity' is a long time in the future.
We've done all this (look around you, there's this crazy big world of six billion people and sky scrapers and space ships and favelas and sweat shops and bullet trains and everything sacred and profane) in 20,000 years. And we're accelerating. Science fiction writers try to imagine what we might be like in 1000 years or 100 years or 10 years*. Look to the future! In our history of predicting our future we have fallen short in some areas ("where's my flying car? where's our moon base?") but done vastly better in unexpected areas (like that voice controlled supercomputer in your pocket that outstrips most gadgets in Star Trek).
Yeah, I'm an optimist. I think things are going to get better.
(* I think Asimov set a big chunk of his world perhaps 20,000 years in our future but I want to discount that. It was written in the 1950s, and I think newer scifi mostly reaches less far into the future. Also Asimov's world now seems insufficiently advanced compared to our own, or other proposed nearer futures. OR, there are fictional alien races with million year civilizations making the suggestion of what might happen to us that far out; and one story I like where we join them after we mature sufficiently over a similar time span.)
There has been life on Earth for a billion years and our most concerted efforts of nuclear war and climate change would not eliminate it and prevent another billion years of life on Earth.
Human civilization has been around only the tiniest blink of time in all that.
We may be hitting 'Peak Oil', but I think 'Peak Humanity' is a long time in the future.
We've done all this (look around you, there's this crazy big world of six billion people and sky scrapers and space ships and favelas and sweat shops and bullet trains and everything sacred and profane) in 20,000 years. And we're accelerating. Science fiction writers try to imagine what we might be like in 1000 years or 100 years or 10 years*. Look to the future! In our history of predicting our future we have fallen short in some areas ("where's my flying car? where's our moon base?") but done vastly better in unexpected areas (like that voice controlled supercomputer in your pocket that outstrips most gadgets in Star Trek).
Yeah, I'm an optimist. I think things are going to get better.
(* I think Asimov set a big chunk of his world perhaps 20,000 years in our future but I want to discount that. It was written in the 1950s, and I think newer scifi mostly reaches less far into the future. Also Asimov's world now seems insufficiently advanced compared to our own, or other proposed nearer futures. OR, there are fictional alien races with million year civilizations making the suggestion of what might happen to us that far out; and one story I like where we join them after we mature sufficiently over a similar time span.)
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