yougene said:
Mayans saw time differently than we do in the west. To us time is a straight line that moves forwards. To them time was cycles.
Despite having names for longer periods of time like
1 pictun = 20 baktun = 2,880,000 days = approx. 7885 years
1 calabtun = 20 pictun = 57,600,000 days = approx. 158,000 years
1 kinchiltun = 20 calabtun = 1,152,000,000 days = approx. 3 million years
1 alautun = 20 kinchiltun = 23,040,000,000 days = approx. 63 million years
If time cycles, why bother naming things which are longer than a cycle? Infact, according to
here the "alautun" is the larger period of finite time which has a name in any calender.
yougene said:
As for the details, I see many possibilities, many of them having some common ground with each other.
Thats because many of the new theories are based on the Mayan calender, so they all that a common theme.
As for things like technological singularities, put it in context. Imagine if you'd brought someone from 1450 to 1650 Western society, with books, newspapers and the beginnings of a global civilisation, what would they have thought? "How can you possible keep track of everything? Things more so fast, you have so much information at your fingertips!". To someone native to 1650, it wouldn't have seemed too bad. Now consider bringing that person 1650 native to 1850, post industrial revolution. New faster ways to travel, the new invention of the telephone gives instant communication across thousands of miles, access to dozens of cultures histories in libraries, foreigners everywhere, even more newspapers, journals, leaflets. Then bring them to 2005. Global travel in under 36 hours, instant video communication anywhere on Earth, the entire collection of human knowledge accessible anywhere on Earth via the internet, early space travel, cars, seemingly "thinking" machines (to them anyway). To the person from 1450, it would seem even more inconceivably bewildering than someone from 1850.
Compared to them we probable receive millions of times the information they did each day, how do we cope? Simple, we ignore most of it. There are now so many areas of human thought noone can keep up with all of them. No "all rounder" has existed in science since 1600, and even physics since 1850. Instead, our population is large enough for there to be enough people interested in enough small sections of our culture to cover everything, and if they aren't interested, that section doesn't grow, it remains dormant, so its not like its running away from people.
Yes, if you try to take everything in, its too much, but who tries to keep agrasp of
all world events along with
all new technologies,
all cultural developments? Noone. Why? Because you can't. Instead we filter it out, we learn new ways to summarise and get what information we want. Even now its too much for most people. I like physics, but there's always something I've never heard of before, despite it being "old news", when I read New Scientist or browse websites. In the future it'll just be more of the same.
Governments won't be swamped, how fast do entire countries change? Right now we have the ability to instantly contact anyone across a continent, so information can't move much quicker than present, so a sweeping change cannot be faster than it is at present.
If a person were to "drown" in a sea of information too much for them to handle, it would have happened long ago. Instead we've adapted and will continue to do so. What else do you expect to happen? People to throw their hands into the air and say "I have access to too much information about the 1975 NFL season, and the latest developments in wheat farming in Nebraska due to all this high speed technology, someone stop the Internet, I want to get off!" ? No, they'll just not bother trying to learn that information and just access what is relevant to their little world. As the information increases, they'll redefine what is relevant to them.
