I have found no better way of illustrating this mental quantum-jumping than some statistics developed by French economist Georges Anderla for the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD) in 1973.
Anderla took as his unit of measurement the known scientific facts of the year 1 A.D. For vividness, I call this unit “one jesus,” using the name of the celebrated philosopher born that year. (I am here following the physical sciences where basic units are named after important individuals – e.g., the ohm, the volt, the farad, the ampere, etc.)
How long did it take to double this accumulation of knowledge, to achieve two jesuses? According to Anderla’s estimates, it required 1500 years – until 1500 A.D.
Before going any further, let us ask how long it took to arrive at one jesus. One way of estimating is to take the estimated age of homo sapiens, in which case it took 40,000 to 100,000 years (depending on which estimates one accepts – i.e., how one differentiates homo sap. from his closer relatives).
How long did it take to double again and obtain four jesuses? According to Anderla, it took 250 years, and we had four jesuses in our larder by 1750.
Note also that, very shortly after 1750 A.D., the American Revolution occurred; the French Revolution occurred; the Mexican Revolution occurred; and all the “radical ideas” still being debated (democracy, the free market, socialism, communism, even anarchism) entered the intellectual scene. Monarchy began to collapse; the witch-hunts ended; the church declined; industrialism came to the fore. Circa 1780 both Benjamin Franklin in America and Condorcet in France proposed that science would eventually cure every disease and vanquish death – the first time in history anybody had thought of that.
Obviously, the quadrupling of knowledge between one A.D. and 1750 A.D. had unleashed a great deal of intellectual creativity and even some wild imagination. This seems inevitable to me. When educated persons have 100 facts for every 25 facts they had previously, they are bound to get some new ideas too.
To continue with Georges Anderla’s statistics, the next doubling took only 150 years, and by 1900 A.D. humanity had eight jesuses in our information account.
The next doubling took 50 years, and by 1950 we had 16 jesuses. (Between 1900 and 1950, there were two World Wars, fascism came and went, communism took over one-third of the world, a revolution in sexual behavior occurred according to Kinsey, the majority of intellectuals became overt atheists in the communist countries and covert atheists in the Christian countries, the age of radio drama came and went, cars replaced buggies and planes created “one world” travel-wise . . .)
The next doubling took only ten years, and by 1960 we had 32 jesuses.
A so-called Youth Revolution then occurred, happening simultaneously in all parts of the world.
The next doubling took seven years, and by 1967 we had 64 jesuses.
And the next doubling too six years; by 1973 (when Anderla completed his study) we have 128 jesuses.
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There is no reason to expect the acceleration stopped with the last estimate made by Anderla in 1973. All objective evidence (patents granted, scientific papers published, etc.) indicates the process is continuing. Thus, we almost certainly reached 256 j around 1978-79 and will be reaching 512 j in 1982, about the time this text hits the bookstores.
In short, we are living in a mental transform space – Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere . . . – that is, an omnidimensional halo expanding toward infinity in all directions.