Time compression follows a strange curve. Last year can seem like last week, ten years ago seems like five, twenty years ago seems about right, thirty years seems like fifty. Listening to a mix tape from the Eighties might cause strange vertigo. Time's winged chariot etc.
The number of seconds in a human lifetime is about equal to the number of cubic millimeters in two and a half tons of water, the size of a large fridge.
One hour is a sugarcube. There's room for over half a million cubes.
Only a small fraction are retained in memory.
* A long strange trip:
It's a long time ago (1984) that it seemed like a long time ago (1975) that my earliest memories (1972) seemed like a long time ago.
I shudder at the thought of the year 2100 and the inconceivable hassle and bureaucracy it will take to get there, to be able to finally let go of the twenty-first century and good riddance to all that.
Looking back, the distance will seem vastly greater than it does now. Here are some ideas from SF stories I wrote:
The future may remain boring like most of the past seems to have been. But perhaps there'll be a threshold when things will speed up. If something happens to increase intelligence for example.
In around 2035, chemical behavior modification might start to make gangsters less violent, while still making them feel powerful.
A reformed belief system calling itself Communism begins to spread. The Great African Ecocide finally gets underway.
There may also be a secret revolution organized by top executives and politicians in many countries . . .
* Breaking News:
What if two major breaking news stories happened at once? The only way to feel a sense of wonder is to have a fundamentally new experience. Something that could not have been expected or predicted.
This becomes almost impossible after age 25 or so. Fortunately, it's also rare to be bored by that age. There may be more surprises to come.
There's a 50% chance it will start as a tiny news story, though the strangeness will be apparent from the start:
The intermittent radio beacon is three billion lightyears away. The energy output of a star in a narrow beam sweeping the sky.
On Earth, the signal is detected infrequently, like the chirp of a failing smoke alarm. Slowed down ten thousand times, faint whispers are detected in each burst.
Coincidentally on the same day, antifas attack hundreds of US government buildings, killing hundreds and destroying billions of files.
This is easily the second most surprising thing to ever happen. Not the mostly simplistic attacks (at least half of them suicidal), but the seemingly impossible secrecy required to arrange them. All the phones also start glitching.
Then the Capitol and White House are destroyed by a small fleet of incendiary car bombs, though most politicians are evacuated in time.
* There can be an indescribable thrill when something unexpected happens. Even if you're uninvolved, it could be the most interesting thing of your life. It could even be a giant terrorist attack, which may or may not happen again in our lifetime.
People fantasize they would stay cool and act heroic. In reality, untrained persons might not function at all in the excitement. Some hyperventilate, or go wide-eyed, or even grunt like badgers when questioned. And those are among the better responses. The ability to handle stress does not increase with age.
New memories are stored less frequently as the years pass, while old ones don't fade as fast, which explains the illusion of eroding time.
This also makes it harder to learn new skills, to add changes without deleting old ones.
Progress shouldn't have been this slow.
It took fifty years for folks to get around to making a second trip to the south pole (not to mention the moon). Improvised and expanded operating systems from the 1970s control smart phones. The sixty year old Soyuz rocket remained the cheapest ride to orbit. The half-trillion dollar International Space Station is basically two Salyuts, a Spacelab, and some Euro-Japanese cylinders docked together, a tech trailer park at the apex of a money pyramid.
Problems that seemed almost solvable in 1981 receded like the sunset in the three decades since: nuclear fusion, thinking machines, computer programming for everybody.
That last one is the most important, the clearest sign that humans are fundamentally defective, and should probably be absorbed by something better.
Batch converting, self-sorting databases, scripts, program chains, almost all interfaces, and high and low-level computer languages all still require elite skills.
Every day it's becoming more impossible for non-power users to program a PC or tablet to perform highly repetitive tasks. The user must trust horrible apps, or repeat the simplest tasks manually, hundreds of thousands of menu paths and clicks.
Instead of useful tools, we are cursed with slicker design. Underneath the smoothest lie is the cancer of bureaucracy. All the things I want to achieve require payments to high IQ nerds.
Very occasionally, progress does speed up. A few people born before the American civil war saw atomic explosions. The period of rapid technical and engineering breakthroughs after World War Two was an anomaly. Like the Jetsons, flying cars and the human settlement of space will never actually happen.
The truth is that change isn't hard: it's impossible. Instead of changing, old institutions and persons are simply replaced.
The fact that a group has mastered one technology doesn't mean it can advance to the next level. Each new step requires new planning. More specialized experts understand ever shrinking fields, from batteries to aircraft carriers to resealable food packaging. It's hard enough to maintain current skill levels without inventing better ones. Revolutions aren't about improvement but destruction.
Alternatively, progress can decelerate as the number of possibilities multiplies.
The common response is to focus research where it matters, explaining the rapid development of jets and fusion bombs, and the Internet after the Cold War. The science of the human mind has been postponed indefinitely, however.
For the distant future, this means a shrinking portion of accessible reality will be investigated. Most paths will be banned.
Rapid expansion overrides thorough investigation. Quantity over quality is the strategy of evolution.
* One unlikely but imaginable future service might transform job hunting. With enough data, everyone could go online and be offered a job without even filling out applications. Pay would increase as they proved their usefulness and skills. It's beyond unthinkable.
Another false hope is gene therapy. Properly testing trillions of possible genetic changes (ignoring the vaster number of multiple changes) would seem to require millions of test subjects over a dozen generations. Most human gene interactions may never be decoded. Why 'fix' something so fundamentally flawed?
Instead, inefficient legacy systems like the human body will be abandoned and replaced. Even the notion of progress itself may become obsolete.
In the not too distant future (2030 to 2060), most research will become focused on one area: atomic level computing. I first suspected something incredible when reading that microchips were printed like photographs. An almost dangerous notion, meaning there was no limit to calculating power.
The hardware revolution that started in the early Seventies led to new perceptions that couldn't have been imagined. The sensation of encountering something alien and unpredictable was first seen in movie special effects. This is what the future is really about: the awe of the unknown, a feeling almost forgotten in current SF.
The simulated thrill of videogames indicated tomorrow had come closer. In 1980, future fans expected they would experience this level of stimulation for real during affordable spaceflights.
Other achievements have passed without notice. How does a search engine instantly "find" a unique string of words in ten billion pages of human knowledge? Brute force, which is also how I predicted the mystery of awareness will be solved.
According to the emerging minority opinion, before this century is out, humanity will have been completely replaced by self-improving software.
Reality itself may then become subordinate to the simulation. As explained elsewhere, the readers of this article will unfortunately pass of old age (or civil war if lucky) before such technology is ready.
No longer bound by scarcity, this imagined super-civilization will have the power to make its own rules and change them at a whim. Two future super-civilizations of the same complexity might have absolutely nothing in common, and couldn't even communicate in a meaningful way.
As complexity increases further, subjective time will have to slow down. Each decision will take longer to make as the number of permutations multiplies exponentially; but what's the rush once immortality has been achieved?
If this ever happens (and nothing else goes horrifically wrong), the oldest dream of religion will have been realized despite itself.
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