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Quote by: SoylentGreen Now i have you, define a clear and well-planned government. |
The Constitution of the United States.
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Quote by: SoylentGreen Complex is relative, It has only been a hundred years since the first cars came into existence. My own mother can still remember horses and carriages. My kids communicate through cyber space. The industrial revolution isn't finished, the technology is opening new doors of possibilities and if we survive, the prediction is it will lead to anarchism. |
Fascinating observation!
This may be way off the subject, Soylent, but I can't help it. You've touched on a concept that has had a HUGE influence on my political thinking for many, many years... beginning when I was first introduced to the mathematical construct in Jr. High School.
The hyperbolic curve.
Specifically, the chart representing the growth of the world's human population.
Well, it seems that not only population but every aspect of human society is following the same path. Where the Stone Age lasted 10,000 years, the Bronze Age lasted about 2,500, Iron Age lasted about 1,500 years, the Middle Age about 1,000 years, the Age of Sail & Eploration about 500 years... etc. etc. with technology and cultural innovation piling up on top of each other at an exponentially eploding rate... the Enlightenment, the Steam Industrial Age, the Automobile Age, the Jet Age, the Nuclear Age, the Computer Age.
Advances that once took thousand of years now occur in a generation, just as the doubling of the population once took thousands of years and has now occured within two generations.
It's the reason I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that Man-made Global Warming is real, once Al Gore pointed out the obvious in his book 20 years ago. Our capacity to pillage and pollute the planet has exploded exponentially right along with everything else, so that it's now at the peak of that hyperbolic curve, beyond the average person's capacity to comprehend the enormity of how we're capable of affecting the planet.
500 years ago, the average person was lucky if they ever traveled further than 10 miles from the village in which they were born, and few could read a letter even if they received one. 200 years ago you had to sail across an ocean, and an international letter could take months. 100 years later, a letter might still take weeks. Today we can be anywhere in the world within a day, and communicate with anyone anywhere
instantaneously. Our overwhelmingly large planet has shrunk to nothing in a generation.
You say complexity is relative. It's not relative, it's downright
mathematical. What's the conventional wisdom now on the increase in computing power?
Moore's Law... that computer power will increase
exponentially every two years?
Life and it's complexities has gotten beyond that capacity of most average people to comprehend, like counting stars. Agriculture, economics, medicine, warfare, science... name anything that hasn't become exponentially more complex in the last 100 years. Leonardo da Vince could be a Renaissance Man, a Master of many sciences as well as art. Thomas Jefferson could be an architect, a scientist, an inventor and a statesman.
Who could
possibly do that today?
No, Americans are going to need government more and more, just to help them keep up and make sense of a world that's moving faster than most of us can keep up.
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