10-10-10: Look Before You Leap

More and more people are becoming convinced that we are perched on a precipice, a tipping point, a convergence, an approaching singularity, a break from the old into the new. Back at the start of the year I posted this poll question: "With which prediction do you more agree? 1. 10/10/10 (October 10th 2010) is going to be a very significant date for our planet. Or 2. 10/10/10 will be an unremarkable day."

In March we discussed the results of this poll in an entry called "Will 10-10-10 Be Significant?".

Now, as we're only ten days away from this curious date, I'd like you to think about setting aside a moment at the tenth hour, tenth minute, tenth second, on the tenth day of the tenth month in the tenth year of the century, to contemplate how much has changed, and how different our lives are now from ten years ago. Is your life better or worse now? Regardless of your evaluation, change is a significant part of our lives, more so all the time.

Nova Spivack has been talking lately about "The Now" becoming an increasingly dense and increasingly narrow focus in our collective experience. I've talked before about Nova's groundbreaking work in the semantic web and providing tools to help us navigate through the potentially overwhelming Stream of information entering our lives. Is the amount of information in the world really doubling at an exponential rate? Read this article featuring Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who says we are currently creating an amount of information every two days that equals the entirety of information created from the dawn of civilization until 2003!

How much longer can we keep up this acceleration? Where is this acceleration taking us? My song "The End of the World" suggests that people have always been suggesting that something significant is just about to happen, and in my book and this blog I've played with the idea that Everett's Many Worlds allows for the possibility that there are parallel worlds where those people turned out to be right, they're just not the version of the universe we currently happen to find ourselves in.

What do you think?

Do you believe we're approaching a tipping point? As more and more people become connected together like a gigantic "hive mind" of a tightly focused Great Big Now (as Nova Spivack calls it), will we collectively ascend to something greater? I would say that's the hope we all have to share. On 10-10-10, take a moment to think about whether you're helping to move this world to be better or worse than it was before you got here. And enjoy the journey!


A direct link to the above video is at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

Rob Bryanton

P.S.: The picture we saw at the start of this entry is part of a collection called "(Really) Stunning Pictures and Photos", check them all out at Smashing Magazine. The description attached to the picture when it was posted at Pixdaus says the shot was taken on Norway’s cliff Prekestolen (also known as Preacher’s Pulpit), but according to other people commenting on the picture it's actually found at Odda, Norway, and it's called Trolltunga (The Troll's Tongue). Either way, people insist this is not photoshopped, and is an actual geological formation found in Norway. How far out on the Troll's Tongue would most of us be willing to go?

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