"A long December and there's reason to believe / Maybe this year will be better than the last."
Counting Crows
We have reached another inflection point for modern man, a turning point what will be beyond our comprehension or imagination. Change has always happened in population, politics, culture, computing and climate. Change was slow and plodding, almost linear for the longest of times. Eons. Slow population change, for example, caught up with modern medicine, hygiene and science and then exploded. The world population in 1800 was 1 billion, until then it doubled every 10,000 years but then reached 2 billion in 1900 and 8 billion in 2000. The population of the United States went from 5 million to 75 million to 300 million in that time frame and the population of Utah went from roughly 30,000 to 300,000 to 3 million over that same period. These are the intrinsic integers, the changes or Delta, that drive the essence of everything we do. Necessity is the mother.
In the 1970’s Alvin Toffler wrote a book called Future Shock indicating that culture change was accelerating exponentially, from the industrial to the information age, and It was causing stress and disorientation. My grandfather was born when there were no cars or airplanes, computers or other galaxies besides our own. He died after splitting atoms won the war, men walked on the moon and there are billions of galaxies and alternative quantum universes.
Hippies replaced the Flappers and Zoot Suits, skirts got short and hair got
long, peace, love and rock and roll replaced wars, depressions and revolutions. Malls replaced Main Street and Wall Street
replaced Route 66. Sinatra replaced Rudy
Valley and the Beatles replaced Elvis. The
Dead replaced Disco and Taylor Swift replaced Grunge. Now we have Snoop Dogg doing the Olympics with
Martha Stewart, ex-convicts exchanging greed with weed. Politics, they say, follows culture. God help
us.
The biggest worry in 1900 was that city’s would be 10 feet deep in horse manure by now. Our biggest worry now is that we won’t have enough electricity to power, or water to cool, our Ai and Bitcoin data centers. After staring at campfires and the stars for eons, singing, dancing and telling stories, we learned to sit in front of the wireless radio, listening to live national broadcasts on a stand-up radio, and now we can watch any movie ever made at any time we want on huge, cheap LED TVs. Jimmy Carter was the fist President born in a hospital and Chuck Yeager was the first man to go faster than sound. Now we can go Mach 10.
The 1964 World’s
Fair in NYC showed television telephones, self-driving cars and instant
micro-wave meals, in their Future-Rama pavilion. It was the age of the Jetsons. The future was so bright we had to wear
shades. Then we invented the PC and
laptops, Internet and Email, Google and Amazon, Facebook and Twitter, bringing
all that computer power to the masses. Our
culture followed with our obsession with the Web, communication, searches, shopping
and social media. Technology provided
solutions but compounded our problems with unintended consequences, so the
changes became exponential.
Now with the advent of General Artificial Intelligence and Quantum computing we are preparing for change that is faster than linear, geometric or exponential. We have introduced a change faster change than Factorial and even Tetration where the change of the change is accelerating exponentially. Remember from school that Linear change is (Y=mX+b) or 2,3,4,5,6,7, while Exponential is (eX) or 2, 4, 8, 16, 32. Factorial sequence (n!) is a multiplicative series of preceding integers, down to two, used for calculating unique combinations or 4x3x2=24. Factorial progression is 2, 6, 24, 120, 720 and 10 factorial is already 3,628,800. Tetration succession is iterated exponents of exponents and is 2, 4, 16, 65536, 219,728. Really big, wicked fast.
These are the speeds and the capabilities
that we will be able to compute with Ai and future Quantum computers doing everything,
all at once, mimicking our metaphysical collective energy and interconnected unconsciousness. This will be done using photons instead of electrons
with no heat, cooling or water needs, going faster than the speed of
light. Millions-billions-trillions times
faster than we have today and almost as fast and as good as the human brain. Hold on to your shorts.
We will need this computing power to keep up with a
population of over 10 billion people and complex world where all knowledge,
history and calculations are available to everyone instantaneous. Imagine; computers coordinating all our
personal transport drones in three-dimensional space, freeing up the roads for
walking, bikes, gardens and parks, or cellular implants or USB ports in your
head to connect you to Ai and the world for communication, calculation, data
and downloadable memory. This is not the
deconstruction dream of John and Yoko, it is the future.
In the same light there has been a rise in the global temperatures
over 1 degree F* sneaking up on us since the industrial revolution but
really taking off after in the. Drill
baby dill. Now we are close to rising 1
degree a decade, in certain places, during certain seasons and we are still
caught up in denial and inaction. What
is alarming is not the natural cyclical change in weather but the compounding
rate of change in the change of the climate, which is unprecedented over the
past million years. Natural disasters
have increased in both frequency and ferocity. The
years 2023, 2024, and 2025 now rank as the three highest on record
for the number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United
States. Globally, the number of
climate-related disasters has tripled over the last 30 years.
This is the existential change our generation has to face, threatening our individual agency and collective sustainability. They say that economics also follows culture and but we have mostly denied this change because it is inconvenient, especially now. If we ignore it, knowing it is happening, we will be The Worst Generation. Can this be solved with people, politics, culture or computers? There is already miserable mass migration and rampant repulsive immigration spurred by this change. The fight for food and water, living space and clean air will lead to conflict and wars between the haves and the have-nots.
The have-nots will shoulder most of the burden of change, as usual. The haves will gain from it as we privatize profits and socialize climate costs again, as we do in wars, disasters and trade. Certain places will become unlivable and maybe our entire planet will become a sweltering hell hole.
The rich and the
famous are already looking for ways out on Space X or NASA missions. The question is if we can react and respond with
resilience and results or will we continue to kick the can down the road until it
melts. They say that a change is as good
as a rest but we don’t have time to rest.
Change is not resting, its accelerating.
Matthew Lindon, PE. Hydrologist.
Park City, Utah
Waterandwhatever.blogspot.com
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