fractalnavel

yuri gagarin, alan shepherd, neil armstrong - and michael melvill.  i haven't seen much on this latest space pioneer's personal history, but i'm sure it's coming as the media catches up to this historic event.

but i'll be more impressed when they manage an orbital flight.  maybe we need a “y” prize for that.  and then a “z” prize for actually visiting an extraterrestrial body, whether moon, planet, asteroid, whatever.  of course, there are eva's to look forward to, and eventually orbital stations.

interesting to see that a lot of this stuff is on the same schedule as a lot of potential global catastrophes - global warming, fossil fuel supplies, population growth, and so on.  and perhaps along with some of the good stuff - nanotech, genomics, quantum computing, and all that these technologies imply.  surely there will be attendant socio-political-economic upheavals as well. (here's an odd example - what happens when microsoft's original founders die off ?)

so maybe there is an impending techno-social singularity, speculated about by many.  but what form this “singularity” takes is still an open question.  it might be best to think of such things in terms of “relative singularities” only - they are only characterized as such in terms of our current context.  seen from that perspective, previous historical “singularities” are readily recognized.  which leaves open the possibility for preparation and engineering.  this, in turn, belies the original characterization as a singularity.  the mere existence of a mathematical description does not imply physical reality.  anyone familiar with physics will recognize that this last statement is not at all held to be an obvious truth, often quite the contrary.

it seems that those who talk in terms of phase transitions rather than singularities will have a more useful adaptive toolbox at their disposal.

so, that's been decided then. to really have fun, one should attempt to look beyond that critical point for what comes after.  the problem is that such transitions tend to be opaque.  but there are fundamental constraints and absolutes that will remain in place, and other universal principals that enable useful inferences to be drawn about what lies on the other side.  this is the same metaprocess used by cosmologists in their endeavours to understand the nature of the early universe.

so, what can we infer ?  nahh, _you_ tell _me_ - it's more fun that way ;-)