In article <c119i9$aim$1@grapevine.wam.umd.edu>,
Andrew Arensburger <arensb.no-bloody-spam@umd.edu> wrote:
> In talk.origins Seppo Pietikainen <s.pietikainen@kolumbus.fi> wrote:
> > Uncle Davey wrote:
> >> Why didn't things go right or wrong millions of years ago? Why did we not
> >> kill each other and destroy the world or attain to perfection? Why this
> >> stuck in the middle existance, if we have been around so long?
> [...]
> > What in the weirdest do you mean by "middle existance" in human context?
>
> I think he means that, given that people have existed forever
> (the difference between "a few million years" and "forever" being
> negligible), why hasn't everything happened already?
Same question for the Christian perspective why did G-D wait so long to
send Jesus? Or show up at Abraham's door for dinner, for that matter?
> Aside from what you said about how, until recently, we didn't
> have the means of destroying the planet (in "Beyond Fear", Bruce
> Schneier mentions a metric of technology: at any given point in
> history, how much damage could ten determined people do before they
> were stopped?), I'll also add that technological progress is
> exponential.
> If you plot an exponential curve, you'll see that it contines
> to negative infinity, but never reaches zero. The point of this
> analogy is that it's possible for humanity to be ancient, and yet
> still be at our current level of technology. All you need is long
> stretches of time without any inventions.
w
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