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To: Neville72
I don't believe the chart is interesting. I think it's largely a trick of perspective.

What are the important events in my life? Well, as time goes on, the significance of any given event decreases. Hence, for any past time period, the density of "significant events" over that period will decrease as time marches away from that period. It's not that the events have changed, it's that our judgment is myopic.

Look at the second entry: "Eukaryotic cells, multicellular organisms". Is that an "event"? There are a huge number of absolutely critical developments lumped in there, and who knows when they occurred? When and how did mitochondria develop? How did the Krebs cycle arise? When and how did ribosomes develop? When and how did chloroplasts develop? (I could go on for a long while.) All of these were critical events in the history and expansion of life on Earth, but from the perspective of a billion years or more, it all gets lumped into a single development, "the cell".

The fact that those things fall on a straight line (just below 1 year per year) reflects human psychology, and not anything intrinsic about the nature of reality. We ask ourselves, "what was the most important event in the last two billion years", and then "what was the most important event in the last billion years", and then "what was the most important event in the last half-billion years", etc., up to "what was the most important event this week" (my wife made a really good meatloaf), and those events qualify for inclusion.

That said, I do believe that the pace of technological development is increasing exponentially. Unlike that graph, Moore's Law really is an objective measure.

12 posted on 04/14/2006 8:56:20 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Neville72
I said: What are the important events in my life?

I forgot to finish that thought. If I were to make a list of them, they'd be likely to fall along that same line. But that would remain true all through my life: the listed events would just change. Close to the time my kids were born, I'd have listed their births individually. Decades from now, they might get compressed into "my kids were born". At age 18, high school graduation loomed as a critically important thing; from my perspective at age 41, it's just another marker of normal development, like puberty.

13 posted on 04/14/2006 9:03:14 AM PDT by Physicist
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To: Physicist; Neville72
Kurzweill's book, or any other making claims based in a prognostic historicism, should probably be read after reading Von Mises's Theory and History, in order to put such claims into both a realistic and realist perspective.
17 posted on 04/14/2006 9:53:01 AM PDT by RightWingAtheist (Creationism is to conservatism what Howard Dean is to liberalism)
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