...just thinkin'...
This is neither the exciting conclusion to my labor/surgery/hospitalization story (said story is currently languishing on my external drive, waiting for one of my computers to rise from the dead and release it) nor is it a cute baby story (say sorry). Instead it's just me, thinking - and committing my thoughts to an electronic medium (since getting committed to a hospital medium tends to be a lot pricier).
There's a fundamental law of biology that states that an exponential growth rate cannot be maintained in nature. Eventually, you exhaust your resources, your predators catch up, or (most likely) both. A few people here would doubtless give the "rabbits in Australia" argument: but I would remind them that we never actually saw how that one played out. When it became obvious how badly we fucked things up, we introduced another invasive species to deal with the problem. Well, I guess it was more of us launching a biological weapon against rabbits then launching a new invasive species...but hey, same argument, different catchphrases.
Same argument for Guam, Hawaii, and anywhere else that humans screwed things up and tried various (and increasingly scary) methods to "fix" it. All of those conditions were artificially interfered with before we could actually watch how they concluded.
The best example for this is actually on the far Eastern side of the Indian subcontinent; where every 30-some years the massive bamboo forests bloom, drop fruits, and are suddenly overrun with millions of surplus rats. Also the ancestors of modern domestic chickens...but the rats actually bother people, so let's stick to them.
Bamboo doesn't often give fruit, but when it does...it does in spades. Enough to fill the bellies of far more rodents then their forests can usually support - which is why, for a few months, the rodent population goes [boom] - eating all the fruits, all the local fauna they normally would, all of the neatly planted fields of crops the humans in the area depend on to live, and occasionally houses and buildings. Then, just a they start to gnaw on concrete foundations...you start finding the piles of dead rats.
Note: I have nothing against tourism in SE Asia. Stop looking at me like that, I'm just making a point here from known data!!!
This entire population cycle lasts maybe a year until the majority of rats starve to death, die of disease, or are killed by predators (including humans, who have found quite a number of ways of cooking rats in that area). The population goes back to pre-bamboo-bloom levels, and those humans that didn't starve to death make with the replanting and rebuilding (most farming in that area is subsistence level, so the whole "plague of rats" thing is actually worse then I've made it sound here).
The conclusion? Yes, there was a sudden, exponential growth. But after the freaky growth conditions collapsed (trees stopped producing fruit), there was a sudden, exponential decline. This isn't odd, nor even unexpected: this is the norm in nature.
Now, for my point (which, curiously, has nothing to do with nature): technology has grown exponentially from the beginning of agriculture to this point, when one maps growth of technology against time. Yes, it's mostly a gradual curve...but once you hit "broadcast over radio frequencies," this shit takes off! Possibly earlier then that - no, I'm not getting dragged into that argument - but the shape of the curve is fairly obvious when the overall lifespan of human technology is taken together.
This fact occurred to me when I was trying to compare the growth of the information age to an age before it. The closest I got was either the Mongol expansion or the Age of Discovery/Conquest, depending on how you want to map it out. But in terms of time versus technological growth, there's really no comparison. We've grown more in the past 100 years then the technology of man has developed until that point. Or if not that much, very close to it. It's crazy. Never mind the whole Internet phenomena (which is nuts) we can fly to other planets. Heck, a journey that would have taken our very near ancestors months is an inconvenience of a few hours to us, and it only takes that long because most of us have to fly commercial.
But so far the only limiting factors I've found are cost and battery life. The cost issue really isn't (if you have something sufficiently advanced, you can find someone to pay for it). The battery issue is far more interesting: compare a battery to the processing power of the smart phone it powers, and you have something as efficient as climbing Everest with a unicycle.
Yes, yes I would pay to watch that.
I know all my uber-geeks out there are calling out words that sound a lot like "biobattery" and "microfusion" - but let's be honest, if it's not in the public eye I can't fairly count it as even existing (again, say sorry). No, for right here and now we're stuck with good ole lithium-ion and all it's cro magnun cousins. They're dangerous, inefficient, bulky, heavy...and the only factor currently limiting the growth of our technologies.
Really. That's the only one I've been able to find - and I keep up with this sort of thing.
Soooooooooooo........does this mean our technological growth is going to keep going at this rate? I mean, it's conceivable that some of the rumored replacements to chemical batteries are already powering military and Evil Corporation devices - and even if they're not, they'll get here sooner then you may think. Which makes me wonder if there's anything that we don't know we don't know about that will suddenly take our growth levels down a very steep, exponential decline.
I guess that may be me looking for trouble where it most likely doesn't exist, but the scientist in me is genuinely curious for an answer. Can the development of the artificial follow the same growth laws of Nature? If so, what's going to be the hand that smacks us down, and how far down would we be smacked?
Something to chew on...
Peace Out.
There's a fundamental law of biology that states that an exponential growth rate cannot be maintained in nature. Eventually, you exhaust your resources, your predators catch up, or (most likely) both. A few people here would doubtless give the "rabbits in Australia" argument: but I would remind them that we never actually saw how that one played out. When it became obvious how badly we fucked things up, we introduced another invasive species to deal with the problem. Well, I guess it was more of us launching a biological weapon against rabbits then launching a new invasive species...but hey, same argument, different catchphrases.
Same argument for Guam, Hawaii, and anywhere else that humans screwed things up and tried various (and increasingly scary) methods to "fix" it. All of those conditions were artificially interfered with before we could actually watch how they concluded.
The best example for this is actually on the far Eastern side of the Indian subcontinent; where every 30-some years the massive bamboo forests bloom, drop fruits, and are suddenly overrun with millions of surplus rats. Also the ancestors of modern domestic chickens...but the rats actually bother people, so let's stick to them.
Bamboo doesn't often give fruit, but when it does...it does in spades. Enough to fill the bellies of far more rodents then their forests can usually support - which is why, for a few months, the rodent population goes [boom] - eating all the fruits, all the local fauna they normally would, all of the neatly planted fields of crops the humans in the area depend on to live, and occasionally houses and buildings. Then, just a they start to gnaw on concrete foundations...you start finding the piles of dead rats.
Note: I have nothing against tourism in SE Asia. Stop looking at me like that, I'm just making a point here from known data!!!
This entire population cycle lasts maybe a year until the majority of rats starve to death, die of disease, or are killed by predators (including humans, who have found quite a number of ways of cooking rats in that area). The population goes back to pre-bamboo-bloom levels, and those humans that didn't starve to death make with the replanting and rebuilding (most farming in that area is subsistence level, so the whole "plague of rats" thing is actually worse then I've made it sound here).
The conclusion? Yes, there was a sudden, exponential growth. But after the freaky growth conditions collapsed (trees stopped producing fruit), there was a sudden, exponential decline. This isn't odd, nor even unexpected: this is the norm in nature.
Now, for my point (which, curiously, has nothing to do with nature): technology has grown exponentially from the beginning of agriculture to this point, when one maps growth of technology against time. Yes, it's mostly a gradual curve...but once you hit "broadcast over radio frequencies," this shit takes off! Possibly earlier then that - no, I'm not getting dragged into that argument - but the shape of the curve is fairly obvious when the overall lifespan of human technology is taken together.
This fact occurred to me when I was trying to compare the growth of the information age to an age before it. The closest I got was either the Mongol expansion or the Age of Discovery/Conquest, depending on how you want to map it out. But in terms of time versus technological growth, there's really no comparison. We've grown more in the past 100 years then the technology of man has developed until that point. Or if not that much, very close to it. It's crazy. Never mind the whole Internet phenomena (which is nuts) we can fly to other planets. Heck, a journey that would have taken our very near ancestors months is an inconvenience of a few hours to us, and it only takes that long because most of us have to fly commercial.
But so far the only limiting factors I've found are cost and battery life. The cost issue really isn't (if you have something sufficiently advanced, you can find someone to pay for it). The battery issue is far more interesting: compare a battery to the processing power of the smart phone it powers, and you have something as efficient as climbing Everest with a unicycle.
Yes, yes I would pay to watch that.
I know all my uber-geeks out there are calling out words that sound a lot like "biobattery" and "microfusion" - but let's be honest, if it's not in the public eye I can't fairly count it as even existing (again, say sorry). No, for right here and now we're stuck with good ole lithium-ion and all it's cro magnun cousins. They're dangerous, inefficient, bulky, heavy...and the only factor currently limiting the growth of our technologies.
Really. That's the only one I've been able to find - and I keep up with this sort of thing.
Soooooooooooo........does this mean our technological growth is going to keep going at this rate? I mean, it's conceivable that some of the rumored replacements to chemical batteries are already powering military and Evil Corporation devices - and even if they're not, they'll get here sooner then you may think. Which makes me wonder if there's anything that we don't know we don't know about that will suddenly take our growth levels down a very steep, exponential decline.
I guess that may be me looking for trouble where it most likely doesn't exist, but the scientist in me is genuinely curious for an answer. Can the development of the artificial follow the same growth laws of Nature? If so, what's going to be the hand that smacks us down, and how far down would we be smacked?
Something to chew on...
Peace Out.