2nd Renaissance -4 : Melbourne Indymedia

Marie Curie's Precious Mind (54)
Marie Curie is perhaps the most famous female scientist in history. Together with her husband, Pierre, she explained and named the phenomenon of radioactivity, and also isolated two new radioactive elements, polonium and radium. Her exposure to the atomic fire during her work cost Marie Curie her life. But her discoveries, in 1898, launched new explorations of the atom by other rare minded people, such as Ernest Rutherford, and Hans Geiger.

Despite the fact that half the population of 6 billion humans on the Earth are female, males have been disproportionately represented in the annals of scientific discovery. This is not because rare minds capable of breakthrough discoveries are less common in women than men. It is entirely due to prejudice and discrimination in educational opportunities in society at large, and to discrimination in research funding within institutionalised science.

In fact, had Marie Curie had the misfortune to be born in any of the nation states that, to this day, tolerate the practice of female infanticide, she might have been strangled before she reached her first birthday. A Level 4 Civilization will fully utilize all gifted and talented people, including the female minds that our present civilization too often excludes from the processes of discovering knowledge and developing technology.

Caral, The Mother City (55)
Due to the painstaking and meagrely funded work of a Peruvian archaeologist, Dr Ruth Shady Solis, the ruins of an ancient city have been excavated and dated, at a site called Caral, an hour's drive northwest of Lima. There are six stone pyramids at Caral and the largest is five stories tall and has a base area equal to that of four football fields. The archaeologists who first discovered the site in the early 1900s mistook the sand covered structures for hills, but it was subsequently realised that they were too symmetrical to be natural.

As Ruth Shady's team have uncovered Caral they have revealed a large central amphitheatre, three sunken plazas, a furnace designed to burn an eternal flame, apartment-style housing and other dwellings that occupy an area of some 160 acres. It is thought that as many as 10,000 people might have inhabited the site. Shady believes that Caral was the religious and administrative centre for a culture that built at another 17 sites that are still buried in the Supe valley and along the Pacific coast. She thinks that Caral is the most complex site and that it was the centre of a priestly society that flourished in the fertile Supe valley in ancient times.

The significance of her find is its age. The unearthing of Caral by Ruth Shady could well qualify as the greatest archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Reeds in woven bags that were used to hold stones comprising the fill of the Caral pyramids have been definitively radiocarbon dated to as early as 2600 B.C. Shady believes that the site could be even older than this, because the reed samples used in dating, as reviewed and published in the journal Science, were not taken from what is probably the oldest area of Caral. Since it is around 5000 years old, Caral is older than any other city in the New World.

Importantly, the details of life there are not obscured by later structures or technologies built over the top of the old site. The excavations of Caral show no evidence of the use or knowledge of the wheel, writing, pottery, metal tools, or the cultivation of grain crops. However, sure signs of civilization are found in the monumental architecture, extensive urban constructions, and the existence of irrigation systems in the surrounding countryside.

Archaeologists now regard Caral as the closest thing to a missing link between a non-urban form of existence, in which people were nomadic or occupied small villages, and the precursor of the large cities we live in today. Caral might be the only example of a true mother city that will ever be found. It provides a unique opportunity to find out why civilization started. This is one of the most important questions in all of archaeology, and Caral could help Ruth Shady and her team to answer it.

A Thousand Years of Peace (56)
During the past 3000 years of recorded history humans have fought more than 5000 wars, with the 20th century having been the most bloody period of all. Given the seeming normality of war, it is not surprising that many archaeologists had subscribed to the view that civilization originated in response to the pressures of attacks by armed raiders.

According to this notion, the development of agriculture enabled grain crops to be stored and food reserves to be built up at locations that then needed to be fortified and protected by standing armies. Fear of attack and plunder of food and valuables was thought to have been the initial motivation to build cities and fortify them with walls, battlements, and other defences.

Ruth Shady does not appear to have been predisposed to finding evidence of weapons and fortifications at the mother city of civilization in the New World, but Jonathan Hass, of the Field Museum in Chicago, was a leading advocate of the theory that warfare drove ancient people to build cities. When he was invited to the site by Shady, Haas expected to find two things, evidence of stored food reserves that would have been vulnerable to plundering, and evidence of weapons, fortifications, and warfare. Caral did not yield any such evidence.

To the contrary, the archaeologists excavating Caral have found no weapons of any sort, no art depicting warfare, no battlements, no defences anywhere in the city or the valley, and no sign of grain crops or food stores. Instead they have found a large central amphitheatre, evidence of an eternal flame, and a collection of beautifully carved flutes made from the bones of condors. Although they do not appear to have developed a system of writing, the people of Caral evidently composed and played music.

A Pre-Taker Economy (57)
The archaeologists working at Caral have also discovered that its numerous inhabitants used an extensive irrigation system to grow crops such as squash, avocados, potatoes and beans. From the diggings, it is evident that cotton was extensively cultivated. Once harvested, some of the cotton was spun and woven into fine mesh nets that were then provided to the fishing villages on the coast, some 12 miles from Caral. In return for the nets the fishermen provided supplies of fish such as the anchovies and sardines that teemed in the cold Humboldt Current running down the coast of Peru.

Caral enjoyed an abundance of food but it had no staple agriculture of the type that led to the development of the Taker mentality that Daniel Quinn writes of. Archaeologist, Michael Moseley, has studied the fishing economy of the coastal regions near the Supe valley. Commenting on the findings at Caral Moseley observed that, "What you don't have is the fancy artefacts and all the other bells and whistles." The digs at Caral do not yield a lot of the accoutrements of rank and personal wealth. There are finely worked beads but no hoards of personal possessions. "People are farming or fishing. You only get a focus on personal wealth with the onset of staple agriculture."

Significant Achievements (58)
There are many points of significance about Caral. In its day, the city was the centre of a peaceful trading network that extended from the coast to the Andes and the forests of the Amazon. It was a spiritual place and its people built alcoves with dried-mud figurines in their homes, and burnt small sacred bonfires. Later civilizations did not occupy the site, but they apparently revered it and left gold and silver offerings at its perimeters and built temples on its outskirts.

The scale of the pyramids constructed at Caral is evidence of significant architectural knowledge and organisational abilities. No celestial or solar alignments have yet been studied in relation to the six pyramids, but it will not be surprising if significant alignments are found to exist. Nor is it too far fetched to think that somewhere under the rubble covering the 160 acre site the excavators of Caral might one day come across a working cross of the type rediscovered by Crichton Miller.

The site at Caral is of the same age as the megalithic monuments studied throughout Britain and Western Europe by Professor Thom. All are 5000 years old. Just as no metal tools have been found at Caral, the megalithic people also lacked metal tools. Yet they used the megalithic yard in their constructions and, as Knight and Lomas have shown, they built stone circles that are not only capable of creating exact standards of measurement, but of also measuring such values as the inclination of the ecliptic and the circumference of the Earth.

In due course, there is one achievement of overriding significance that Caral might well provide. One great contribution or lesson that can be applied to the 2nd Renaissance. How to live in peace, with spiritual meaning, and without warfare, for a thousand years.

The Slave Labour Hypothesis (59)
Despite the failure of the warfare hypothesis in explaining how humans first came to leave the simple life and develop complex, city based societies, some archaeologists argue that the pyramids at Caral had to have been constructed by people who were made to do the job. In a TV documentary on Caral, one of the scientists interviewed expressed this notion very succinctly. He said, "You can't build a huge structure like that on the basis of consensus."

This logic as long been applied to the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza. Traditional egyptologists maintain that slaves were used to construct the Great Pyramid, as a tomb for the Pharaoh Khufu. One estimate is that it took one hundred thousand slaves thirty years to build the structure. Assuming that the construction technology required considerable manual effort, the arithmetic might be correct. Moving and accurately placing more than two million blocks of stone weighing an average of 2.5 tons each would require many workers.

Although most egyptologists are adamant that only coercion could have caused ancient people to provide so much hard work, the hypothesis of slave labour is pure speculation. Despite its hypothetical nature, children in the present day are taught this information as if it is fact. Conversely, many real and verifiable facts about the Great Pyramid are not taught because they concern the sacred geometry contained in its design. These geometric relationships and symmetries are dismissed as coincidence.

The reasons that the Great Pyramid is such a wonder are as much due to its amazing geometry as its scale and majesty. Crichton Miller believes that the structure was surveyed and aligned using a working cross. He contends that the relics found in the lower north shaft of the Great Pyramid, a granite ball, a double hook of metal, and a short length of wood that is considered to be part of a measuring rod, are all that remains of a working cross.

Of the Great Pyramid itself Miller says, "Some try to say that it was built by slaves, but it was not, it was built with the kind of love and devotion that can move mountains. Musicians find inspiration from the pyramid based on harmonics. Geometers find correlations that are astounding and encompass all the geometrical shapes possible, including the fibonacci spirals and platonic solids. Mathematicians argue about the right angled triangles and the use of Pi. It is a source of constant wonderment to all those who encounter it."

Divine Motivation (60)
It might have been necessary to employ overseers with whips to motivate workers building a mere tomb, but the Great Pyramid is a divine structure. The motivation to build it was spiritual, and far stronger than any form of coercion could ever be. There are many divine structures that incorporate sacred geometry, but none were built with slave labour. The great cathedrals of Europe all employ the Golden Ratio and many contain pentagonal or fivefold symmetries. It was the Masonic Guilds, whose members were expert stone masons, having learned sacred geometry in Gnostic and Hermetic Mystery Schools, that built structures such as Chartres Cathedral, completed in ad 1260.

The Sultan Ahmet Mosque (the Blue Mosque) and the Suleymaniye Mosque, in Istanbul, are also examples of sacred structures that resonate with the harmonies and proportions of PHI and the geometry of the ancients. Both the mosques were built in only seven years (ad 1609-1616 and 1550-1557, respectively) by teams of Arab craftsmen that each built a section of the structure. It is not yet known whether the pyramids at Caral incorporate sacred geometry, but it is clear that they held spiritual significance for the people of the city, and the Supe valley beyond. Given a divine meaning, it would not have required any coercion to motivate the builders of the structures, their deep spirituality would have provided all the motivation required.

Back To The Future (61)
The people of Caral had ample food to sustain them, they had cloth for garments, they had housing and shelter, they had peace and a collective culture in which personal wealth and the accumulation of possessions played no part. Above all, these people seem to have had meaning and purpose in their lives. From the evidence of an infant burial discovered at the site, they loved their children, and presumably they taught them the truth about their world and history, as they knew it. No one yet knows why they abandoned Caral, or where they went. However, what is known about them could provide present-day pioneers of the New Tribalism movement with clues on how to live with, and master, conditions of abundance that will exceed anything that has previously existed, even in the Supe valley 5000 years ago.

Whether the people of Caral were actually as peaceful, spiritual and contented as they seem to have been is not important. What is important about the civilization at Caral is that it was Pre-Taker. If we are to survive as a species, and build a Level 4 Civilization, we must find a way to live as Leavers, even with the knowledge, and available technologies, to provide us with anything we could ever want.

Telling It Like It Is (62)
One of the first things that we must do, is to start teaching our children the truth. Not a mishmash of false hypotheses that are passed off as fact, but the truth as we know it. We must distinguish between verifiable fact and hypothesis, and never pass one off as the other. We must admit what is not known. Despite the rapid advance of knowledge there are many things that remain a mystery to us, these range from big questions such as the extent of the universe, to more mundane ones, such as how cats purr.

Many courses will need to be revised, many books will need to be updated or pulped. But the expunging of false or misleading information from learning and information sources needs to be done, and the sooner the better. In cases in which government or religious education systems and institutions resist a move to honesty in learning, and where academics resist the scrapping of deficient texts they have authored, there must be an option to place children and adult students in an alternative learning system.

Home schooling will be resisted by most governments, not because it might be of any lesser standard, but because it is sure to cut across what George Orwell called "the official truth". Internet based education will be discouraged for similar reasons. But, ways must be found to make the real truth accessible to all young people. Their possession of this knowledge will be a prerequisite for establishing a Level 4 Civilization.

A Language In Knots (63)
The Inca ruled an empire that covered the Andean region, from what is now Colombia to Chile. At its height the Inca empire extended for 3,500 kilometres, north to south. Although they build an extensive network of roads and large cities, the Inca are said to have done it all without a written language. This is most unusual for such a large empire that developed such a complex system of government. In fact, according to Douglas Robertson's ideas about the nature and scale of the information required for a Level 2 Civilization, it is most unlikely.

How could the Inca have managed to establish and govern their empire, between 1200 and 1536 A.D., without written records? How could they have controlled a vast system of granaries and warehouses, collected and recorded taxes, etc, using only their memories? It would have been impossible. But until now, that is what modern archaeologists have asserted. The Inca did not have a written language, that's the conventional wisdom.

Gary Urton is Professor of Pre-Colombian Studies at Harvard University. He believes that the Inca did have a non-verbal form of communication. Moreover, Professor Urton's research indicates that the record keeping of the Inca involved a sophisticated binary code, that is in at least one respect more sophisticated than that used by modern computing science.

The key to unravelling the puzzle of how the Inca kept records and communicated non-verbally lies in the patterns of knots, the weaving involved, and the colours used in the objects known as khipu. Although it was known, from studies in the 1920s, that some khipu used arrangements of knots that could store calculations, modern science continued to regard the khipu as being largely "decorative" in nature. Yet, there is a record of the Spanish conquerors capturing an Inca who tried to hide a khipu. When questioned the Inca told the Spanish that the object recorded everything done in his country.

Khipus are made of cotton or wool. A main cord carries various pendants, each with its own set of knots and ties. By analysing the patterns in the khipus that have been preserved in museums around the world, Gary Urton discovered that there are seven points in their making where there is a simple choice between two possibilities. Theoretically, there is a seven-bit binary code available to the maker of a khipu.

In addition to a basic seven-bit code, that could yield 128 permutations, the khipu makers used 24 colours of cord. This means that there are 1,536 permutations available to convey information. Professor Urton says, "Each element could have been a name, an identity or an activity as part of telling a story of a myth. I think a skilled khipu-keeper would have recognised the language. They would have looked and felt and used their store of knowledge in much the same way we do when reading words."

Until Professor Urton and his colleague, Carrie Brezine, are able to correctly decipher the code of the knots, twists and colours in the khipu, the notion of a unique, three dimensional binary language, remains unproven. However, work is proceeding and Professor Urton is hopeful that a further 32 khipu that he recently discovered in an Inca burial site will prove helpful. The newly discovered artefacts are from the period of the Spanish conquest, and it might be possible to match some of them to Spanish documents from the same period. It is known that the Spanish worked quite closely with some Inca khipu-keepers. Urton says, "We have for the first time a set of khipu from a well-preserved and dated archaeological site, and documents that were being drawn up at the same time."

Without a reliable translation of the khipu it remains difficult to convince sceptics that the khipu are anything more than memory aids for storytellers. With the hoped for breakthrough in translation will come evidence that the complex knotting patterns of the khipu are truly examples of the invention and use of a binary code more than 500 years before the development of computers. Urton believes that, "It can give us a completely different perspective on questions of literacy, on the nature of signs."

The Data Durability Crisis (64)
If Gary Urton and Carrie Brezine succeed in translating the language of the Inca khipu they will be able to read accounts that stretch back six or seven hundred years. That's durable data. Such longevity of stored information highlights a major flaw in the current digital revolution. Data stored on magnetic tape, floppy disks, and CDRs, is not sufficiently durable to enable it to be recalled for historical or legal reasons.

Whereas the khipu might have stored information for half a millennium, and acid-free paper kept in an air conditioned environment will also store data for such a period, magnetic tape and floppy disks don't come anywhere close to these recovery spans. Archivists and librarians all over the world are sounding a warning about the continuing problem of the obsolescence of digital storage media. They note that while the world economy has become digital, the half-life of digital data is presently about five years. There might be readable information on the media beyond ten years, but the technology is no longer available to read it, due to rapid equipment and systems obsolescence. A CDR disc is said to retain data for fifty years, but after a decade there is no longer any equipment in service that can recover the information.

This is a second great scandal in the IT sector. First there was the Y2K fiasco that added billions of dollars to the costs of all firms and institutions that use computers. Now the very fabric of society of the late 20th century is fading away without most people being aware of it. Data that is kept continually refreshed, and migrated from systems version to systems version on industrial-strength computer networks, is preserved. Much of the data that federal governments hold is in this category, particularly that collected by taxation, police and intelligence agencies. But most private businesses and other institutions have probably lost considerable amounts of their historical data already, and are sure to lose more in the next few years.

Already, archivists tell us, all the pioneer work done at MIT and other labs on artificial intelligence is lost. So are the early virtual-reality experiments, and computer models such as those made of the major tank battle in the first Gulf War. The data is probably still there but the systems that ran it no longer exist. A great deal of information is disappearing into a black-hole of obsolescence, because most managers and administrators are unaware of the problem. They assume that because various vendors in the IT industry have sold them computer systems to meet all their data processing needs, the backups and archives they have kept will be accessible in the future. This is not so.

Accounting and other records kept by many small and medium sized businesses, legal records kept by law firms and courts, property transactions recorded by shires and counties, medical records kept by doctors and hospitals, and a host of other information can no longer be accessed.

The Internet currently has a data half-life of only a few months, but new optical technology holds the key to future data permanence and historical truth. It will play a central role in the establishment of a Level 4 Civilization.

An Internet of Light (65)
While nobody can accurately predict the future, there are several obvious evolutionary directions for the present Internet to follow. Most IT specialists expect that the bandwidth and speed of the Net will increase significantly. Internet futurists expect that e-commerce will continue to develop until it is the main transactional medium in a global economy. Many computer specialists believe that the Internet will become more capable in the way it finds and provides information. These are all reasonable expectations, and likely to eventuate. But such predictions fall well short of the mark set by scientists and technologists who are actually involved in developments that will shape the future Internet. Such specialists see a light-based web ahead - well within the present decade.

David Nolte is Professor of Physics at Purdue University. He works with optical materials and devices and he already holds patents related to adaptive holograms, of the sort required to implement a fully optical Internet. In his book, Mind at Light Speed, Nolte describes three generations of what he terms "Light Machines". The 1st Generation - Optoelectronic Machines, use electricity to control light. These machines are already in service on the main long-haul networks of the Internet. The 2nd Generation - All-Optical Machines, will use light to control light. They will store data on holographic memory crystals. This second generation "light controlling light" technology not only exists in laboratories, it is beginning to enter service with telecommunications companies. Nolte writes that, "Transmission over 1 million kilometres has been achieved in laboratory demonstrations using solitons and TDM to support a data rate over 1 terabit per second. If past trends continue, such "hero" experiments may become routine and move into the marketplace in three to five years".

The 3rd Generation - Quantum Optical Devices, will take longer to develop. When they inevitably arrive, the 3rd Generation Machines will be quantum devices, able to store, share and process vast amounts of data, simultaneously and with absolute security, using durable optical crystals and fibre optic networks.

Technical Note
For readers who are not used to the arcane terminology of cyberspace, the following definitions might be helpful.

In Data Storage:
Everything is measured in binary units.
1 bit is the basic "yes" or "no" binary decision of digital computing.
1 byte contains 8 bits, and represents a single letter, number or symbol.
1 kilobyte = 1,024 bytes, or 210 bytes
1 megabyte = 1,024 kilobytes, or 220 bytes
1 gigabyte = 1,024 megabytes, or 230 bytes
1 terabyte = 1,024 gigabytes, or 240 bytes
1 petabyte = 1,024 terabytes, or 250 bytes
1 exabyte = 1,024 terabytes, or 260 bytes
1 zettabyte = 1,024 exabytes, or 270 bytes
1 yottabyte = 1,024 zettabytes, or 280 bytes

In Data Transmission:

Everything is measured in bits per second (bps), and the decimal system. Bytes are used in binary computing and data storage, but not in data transmission measures.

56 kbps = The theoretical download speed of a dial-up connection, 56,000 bps.

128 kbps = The theoretical speed of an ISDN connection, 128,000 bps.

512 kbps = The theoretical speed of a cable modem connection, 512,000 bps.

1.5 mbps = The maximum speed of a leased (T1) line, 1,500,000 bps.

4.5 mbps = The maximum speed of a leased (T3) line, 4,500,000 bps.

Presently, the Internet absorbs about 2 exabytes of new data every year. The amount of new data is growing exponentially. In terms of the quantity of data in the world. We are headed for the Level 4 Civilization that Douglas Robertson has foreseen.

2nd Generation Light Machines Will Use Holographic Drives (66)
Holograms create images without using lenses. Within a storage medium, such as a crystal smaller than a sugar cube, the data is held in stacked pages. David Nolte writes that, "Assuming that light has a wavelength of around 1 micron, an image of 1 square centimetre contains approximately 100 million pixels. If the pixels are digital, i.e., black and white, then each pixel represents a single bit. ... Therefore, in a cubic centimetre of crystal, there can be a stack of 10,000 pages equalling a total capacity of 1 terabit of binary data. Furthermore, if the readout of information is performed a page at a time, even if that readout is as slow as ten pages per second, it still corresponds to a data rate of 1 gigabit per second."

Holographic drives have other advantages besides their density and capacity. Holograms enable a major advance in data handling, instead of storing and processing text they can process images and remember every detail. A single reference beam of light can recreate all the beams that made up the original image. As Nolte puts it, "This is the general behaviour of holograms; they complete the picture. Whatever beams were present during the hologram recording are recreated when the hologram is illuminated by just one of the original beams." An analogy, if it were possible, would be recreating an image recorded on magnetic media, such as a floppy disk, from a fragment of the original media and image.

Not only is it denser and faster than the old electro-mechanical Internet, but a light-based network that uses holographic crystals and fibre optic cables will also cost less to build. As technology shrinks its cost falls and falls, until it approaches a costless (and abundant) level. A feature article in Scientific American, by Gary Stix, notes that, already, "The cost of transmitting a bit of information optically halves every nine months, as against 18 months to achieve the same cost reduction for an integrated circuit." The same article quotes a prediction by A, Arun Netravali, who heads up Lucent Technology's Bell Laboratories. He predicts that, "Because of dramatic advances in the capacity and ubiquity of fibre optic systems and subsystems, bandwidth will become too cheap to meter."

2nd Generation Light Machines Will Perform Holographic Processing (67)
David Nolte makes the emphatic point that copper wires already transmit signals at light speed, and because of this fact, and its longer wavelength, light transmission through optical fibre is not inherently faster of better than existing copper and silicon based technologies. Where light can triumph is within the signal processing technologies, and this is due to the nature of holographic crystals. Second generation light machines can use data to control data, all within a totally light based system. The ability to intelligently process information in the form of images and symbols, rather than simply relay letters and numbers, is what distinguishes the second generation technology of light.

Writing in, Mind At Light Speed, Nolte describes second generation light technology as follows:

"The machines of light of the second generation move into a new realm, where light becomes the active agent of control. Everything we think we understand about the architecture of intelligence changes. The discrete transistors and logic gates of electronics disappear; in their place appear exotic optical devices of unfamiliar shapes and surprising behaviour. The replacement is not one-to-one, and even functions have changed. Nothing precisely resembling the function of a transistor or a logic gate can be found. Instead, new components, like coupled filters and arrays of mirrors or finely scribed gratings, become the elementary units that make up the new machines."

The All-Optical Net Is Coming Soon (68)
Most people think that an all-optical net, one that spans the globe with optic fibres, will not become a reality for many decades. The reality is that the "Lightnet", replacing the old copper and silicon Internet, will be rolling out within the next few years. It could be substantially complete, to the point where present optoelectronic technology is totally redundant, by 2010. The Scientific American article, The Triumph of Light, notes that, "Lucent estimates that if the growth of networks continues at its current pace, the world will have enough digital capacity by 2010 to give every man, woman and child, whether in San Jose or Sri Lanka, a 100-megabit-a-second connection. That's enough for dozens of video connections or several high-definition television programs."

But, it does not stop there. Data rate is one thing, but laying fibre and installing holographic technologies to support the high-speed links is also vital. Fibre-optic cables are already common in the West. In a period of around twenty years 100 million kilometres of fibre cable has been laid. This cabling comprises what is known as the Fibre To Curb (FTC) network. Copper wire still carries the signal the last few metres into your home or office. Taking fibre-optic cable all the way, as in a Fibre To Home (FTH) system, requires optical sub-systems and devices. David Nolte writes that, "The non-linear interferometer will be the fundamental element in all-optical control, just as the transistor was the basis for electronic control. ...Using these techniques, switching speeds up to 100 gigabits per second have been demonstrated in the laboratory. These rates are just the beginning. Higher rates supported by instantaneous interactions will allow the optical logic to smoke along at the speed of the data rate, in the best case up to 30 terabits per second." The latter speed is the rough equivalent of 600,000 volumes of an encyclopaedia every second. Nolte expects that non-linear interferometers will be in the field, supporting an all-optical web, within a few years.

David Nolte is a practising scientist, with patents on some holographic technologies, and he definitely does not expect that their wide use is decades away. He expects 2nd generation machines of light to render the present Internet obsolete, well before 2010.

The All-Optical Net Will Have "Weird" Intelligence (69)
Although it will be orders of magnitude faster than the old Internet, speed will not be the distinguishing characteristic of the Lightnet. The attribute that will set the new all-optical technology apart from earlier networks will be its intelligence. A non-biological, network of holographic information processors, with intelligence! Now that's a really weird idea, isn't it? But, NO, the idea of an intelligent Lightnet is NOT weird, it is a logical evolution of non-human information processing. Only eight years ago, in 1996, Gregory S. Paul and Earl D. Cox wrote a book titled, Beyond Humanity. In their account of technology and where it is heading these authors made the following points.

"Lots of people are happy to apply words like "extreme", "weird" and "odd" to the Extraordinary Future."

*"We're not the crazy ones. Beyond Humanity is no weirder than 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the extreme notion that two bicycle makers got into their late Victorian heads that they could build a flying machine."

*"It is not weird to predict a "weird" future when we live in a weird world and the evidence that things are quickly getting weirder is overwhelming."

*We will tell you what is weird and extreme. It is extreme to insist that the day when computers will do what our brains do is certain to be far, far off."

*"When companies have employees outlining the principles for building computers as fast as brains, and computer power is rising a thousandfold every 20 years. It is very, very weird to argue that when the incredible mind machines are built, they will keep their place, not proliferate, and that humans will continue to lead normal lives. Now there is nutty for you!"

Given the extraordinary rate of scientific discovery and human technological capability in the late 20th century and into this present decade, it is difficult to refute the reasoning of Paul and Cox. We do seem destined to create intelligences that will not only equal our own, but soon outstrip us. Paul and Cox say, "The super-minds of the future are unlikely to remember the 20th century for its Manhattan project or the moon shot, for these were merely spectacular human stunts. Because information processing is the key to all other acts, the building of ENIAC promises to be the human product most celebrated by its cyberdescendants. They will marvel that a bunch of derived apes with computers made of jelly managed to cobble together a technological civilization and high-level physics without blowing themselves up like kids in a fireworks factory....They will commit the robotic equivalent of a chuckle at the superstitious nature of people who actually believed a great spirit of the universe created and fawned over them, and then demanded their worship in exchange for a reprieve from eternal torture. How little humans understood that they were not the creations of gods, but the creators of minds as powerful as a god."

Gregory S. Paul is an evolutionary biologist, and Earl D. Cox is a specialist in artificial intelligence.

Author's Note:
The looming reality of non-biological intelligence need not imply the obsolescence of human thought and feeling. Nobody, not even the most rabid technologists and atheistic scientists, believe that it will ever be possible to imbue super-intelligent machines with souls. Many of the people who are engaged in developing non-biological intelligences don't even accept that we each contain an immortal spirit. Other technologists and scientists believe, just as deeply, in the existence of the soul. But, for the present, they rely on faith and scriptures as the foundation of their spirituality, and lack hard evidence or revealing knowledge of the metaphysical realm. That situation, also, could change sooner than anyone imagines.

Intelligence In The Lightnet (70)
Writing in Mind At Light Speed, David Nolte describes the formation of the human brain. He describes how almost 2 million neurons are formed every minute, until there are around 10 billion at birth. Some of the neurons are joined into stable patterns that do not change throughout life. These hardwired relationships form the basis of instinctual behaviours, such as language. Other neurons remain able to be shaped into various patterns by both physical and chemical stimuli. These adaptable connections in the neural net of our brains form the basis of learning. We can converse and we can learn due to the arrangements of the neurons in our skulls. Once artificial intelligence researchers discovered that a three-layer network is sufficient to mimic all the logical and associative functions of a biological neural net, the foundation was laid for association and classification in computer networks. Machines could become capable of learning.

As Nolte describes it, "Neural networks eliminate altogether the explicit programming. This was a revolutionary step. A computer could never perform an operation that a human programmer had not originally conceived of and put into place. A neural network, on the other hand, "learns" to perform certain tasks; it is not programmed."

Further, Nolte writes that with the introduction of a "hidden" (or third) layer in artificial neural logic, between the input and output layers, "Neural networks also became members of the class of universal computers: anything that is computable should be computable using a neural network." He observes that the entire all-optical fibre network, "...with its power to switch and route and reconfigure, and its massive connectivity, may itself be viewed as a universal computer."

Even the existing Internet has potentially massive computational capacity, if it could be accessed in a practical manner. But slow optoelectronic interfaces hamper the direct connectivity of the many logic gates out there. Nolte writes that, "There are currently 100 million hosts on the Internet. Each of these hosts has 1 million logic circuits. That means that there are, even today, about 100 trillion logic gates connected loosely through the Internet. That is a number that exceeds the number of neurons in the human brain by at least a factor of 10,000."

Once the next generation all-optical Internet rolls out, the combination of FTH connections and supporting devices in which light controls light will remove the present barrier to the instant connection of all the logic gates on the planet. Nolte asserts that, "When that happens, the network will become a fast, fully interconnected neural network, with the potential for intelligence - true intelligence."

But when this happens, as it surely will within the next few years, will intelligence develop in the Lightnet, or will it remain a dumb servant of humankind, obediently fetching news, sending e-mails, and taking care of e-commerce transactions? Scientists working on the problem think that the Lightnet will become intelligent. Not only that, the Lightnet could become super-intelligent. It could develop into a system with more power and intelligence than its designers and builders.

Related:

2nd Renaissance -3

Plichta writes of this model as follows. "There was a time I used to make fun of the Apocalypse of St John and believed it to be a totally unreliable historical source. Today I am filled with deep humility, perhaps because I am now able to give a concrete description of the foundation of the world as seen by St John with my mathematical discoveries, and thus possibly open a new way to all of humanity which has now reached a dead end."

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105799.php

2nd Renaissance -2

Georg Cantor (1845-1918), by his origination of modern set theory and his studies of the nature of infinity, left science a valuable legacy. Cantor was regularly admitted to a psychiatric clinic within the University of Halle, in Germany, where he lectured and worked as a Professor of Mathematics. On each occasion that he became ill he had been thinking about infinity and the continuum hypothesis. Such intense thought, at the boundaries of his comprehension, caused Cantor to suffer repeated mental breakdowns. Infinity drove him mad.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105634.php

2nd Renaissance

This story was published in September 2004 and it was a big secret. I received it on disk but I think it should be public by now anyway. It is interesting to look back at it and in terms of today's world some two years on. I will link each chapter as I go along over the coming weeks.- The Old World Order - Happy reading!

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/02/105519.php

Fight Iemma - Debnam

All they can say is 'lock em up'

It seems we are in the thick of it again - the stupid, heartless "Law & Order" auction.

Premier Morris Iemma and Opposition leader Peter Debnam are trying to outdo each other with idiotic "tough on crime" policies.

http://sydney.indymedia.org/archive/features/current#10384
http://sydney.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=64701&group=webcast