When would you say the present became futuristic?

Maybe around 1990?

This same theory applies to the Mayan Calendar and why each "age" and cycle becomes shorter as you approach the end date. Many civilizations (Sumerians comes to mind first) understood how time progressed and sped up as it went along.

Amazing that with all of our science we are finally realizing this when the antiquated civilizations, without any advanced technology to speak of, already knew it.

Art Bell always used to talk about this idea too, his phrase for it was "The Quickening", I see it most myself in computers, it doesn't really seem that long ago I was working with just a few megahertz, not even a megabyte of ram, and no internet.

Could it possibly be that the timewave maps out the progress of biological life in terms of Novelty, and that the Zero 'endpoint' is the end of biological forms being dominant/having the most novelty? Along those same lines, the zero point may well be what we refer to as the technological singularity.

The exponential series of Moores law is part of a larger exponential series: Evolution.

Singel celled to multicelled
Single sense to multiple sense.
Asexual to sexual.

Evolution builds on what it already has. Each progressive step makes the next step multiple times better / faster / more capable. Evolution is an exponential series.

Imagine a cell-type, as a result of evolution, which was not hard-coded, but could be programmed / adapted in realtime to suit the requirements at hand. This is a braincell, and it has been proven to be a most advantageous trait. But now these new 'braincell' animals have a problem: other animals have brains too... So now the braincells need to adapt faster, learn more quickly. And it is also important WHAT they learn. Suddenly evolution is no longer just bound to the DNA, it becomes an evolution of IDEAS. An idea is a soft form of evolution; You don't need a dozen generations to adapt to a simple change; the whole population can adapt to a change just by communication of an IDEA. And the ideas become more and more complex, in the same evolutionary exponential series.

Until...

The creatures who have the brains, which house the ideas, discover how to modify their own DNA. And this is the point we are at. But this is not the end of evolution, this is simply the NEXT STEP in the exponential series. Creatures which modify their OWN GENETIC CODE and supplement their biology with technology are climbing the vertical part of the exponential series.


All this taken into account, exactly who or what are YOU? Your ego, your 'self'... what is it? Well it's an evolving software program -- a set of ideas -- running on a machine (your body). You are essentially a cascade of evolutionary developments. But that's OK, because, for the first time ever, you don't have to cease to exist (die). You will be able to be transfered to a new body, in the future, and heres how:

Imagine a new cyborg technology is released into the market. This new technology is like having more mental and physical capacity... like a second body. It simply plugs in to your existing system, and you expand onto it the same way you learned to walk, speak, and ride a bike. Once you are comfortable in your new body, you expand it some more; Add a few exabytes of visual memory, additional sound processing capability, maybe infrared vision, ultrasonic hearing, etc etc. Pretty soon you have more extras than you do original parts, and, having expanded your existence onto this new hardware, you feel that it is time to get rid of some of the old clunky hardware you previously called a body -- it's giving out on you anyway, being almost 200 years old. Eventually -- and this is how I envision it actually happening -- people will have all new parts but in the existence sense, it will still be you -- because you have not been copied across and the original killed. You have migrated across as an electrical or wave entity.

I envision people will not like silicon hardware. So the body parts which are silicion will be hidden, and all visually exposed body parts will be biological, but genetically engineered and grown in a tank, or in your own body under the supervision of nanorobots.

Yeah. There's such a huge gap between someone who had a Teddy Ruxpin as a kid and someone who had a Tickle Me Elmo!

what caught my eye was when it said that by 2013 the computational power of a computer will exceed that of the brain, than then it went on the say it would exceed the power of the entire population.

i disagree with this.

If one is to believe any man made object can exceed the infinite creative and therefore computational power of the mind they are sadly mistaken.

I think a better way to put it would be like this:

"by 2013 the computational power of a computer will exceed the computational power of the conscious dulled down mind."

Excellent post, star and flag my friend. I enjoyed this video very much. It is hard to wrap our brain around all the information that is in the video at one glance so I watched it twice. Still unbelievable. Thanks!

I think the digital revolution will bust within the next 10 years, mark my words.

I would say that while technology has accelerated in the time since 1989, pop culture has stagnated.

How different are 1997 and 2009 really? Both have the same subcultures, similar music styles, similar fashion. Both have digital technology, today just has much better tech.