The mayan calender?

[PhAtBoYMr2]

You may like this book:
http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Ne...4667161&sr=8-1

It is all about how given technology's rapid and ever increasing pace of improvements there will come a point where we as a race transcend our own biology to move on to something else. Ridiculously technical, but an interesting read.

i read the summary of the book and it is pretty interesting. Basically it says with the rapid growth of technology that humans will surpass there limits in mortality.

So in the next decade or century or whatever we will have enough information and science to make us immortal.

[Brett]

i read the summary of the book and it is pretty interesting. Basically it says with the rapid growth of technology that humans will surpass there limits in mortality.

So in the next decade or century or whatever we will have enough information and science to make us immortal.

What is really ironic is how in the past 100 years how humanity all the sudden has jumped so much. We went from the dawn of man till the end of the 1800's with no real major adavancements, then just shy of 1900 mankind has come up with things like electricity, Flight, Cars, Space Travel, Computers, Clones, etc....

We have advanced in the past 100 years faster than anyother time frame in human history.

[Ran]

What is really ironic is how in the past 100 years how humanity all the sudden has jumped so much. We went from the dawn of man till the end of the 1800's with no real major adavancements, then just shy of 1900 mankind has come up with things like electricity, Flight, Cars, Space Travel, Computers, Clones, etc....

We have advanced in the past 100 years faster than anyother time frame in human history.

Yeah, but primarily due to the fact that technology is cumulative. The more we gain, the faster it grows. I'm sure that future generations will look back and go, "D*mn, those guys were slow as hell."

[SniperJoe]

What is really ironic is how in the past 100 years how humanity all the sudden has jumped so much. We went from the dawn of man till the end of the 1800's with no real major adavancements, then just shy of 1900 mankind has come up with things like electricity, Flight, Cars, Space Travel, Computers, Clones, etc....

We have advanced in the past 100 years faster than anyother time frame in human history.

Exactly. The rate of advancements is high itself, but also the rate is climbing exponentially as well.



Kurzweil asked a bunch of scholars what the greatest shifts in human history were and made this graph. What this shows is that the rate is ever increasing. Because it is an exponential scale, as time (bottom) moves to the right, it speeds up. And as time to next shift (side) moves down, the time to the next shift is faster as well. What this looks like on a normal graph is this:



Kurzweil proposed that we are in that knee section right now, about to undergo a series of massive improvements in an ever shortening time frame.