Timewave ZeroI have a copy of the Time Wave Zero program and periodically like to poke around the graphs. For instance, the last few months of 2008 saw a huge decent into novelty. These graphs were originally calculated in the 1970's, set to software in 1987, and last updated in 1996. So to see such a huge novelty decent marked in the graphs coinciding with Western civilization's first black President and a world wide economic collapse was, well, novel.
Timewave zero is a theory that purports to calculate the ebb and flow of novelty in the universe as an inherent quality of time. It is an idea conceived of and discussed at length by Terence McKenna from the early 1970s until his death in the year 2000. Novelty, in this context, can be thought of as newness, density of complexification, and dynamic change as opposed to static habituation.
One of the factors McKenna often talked about were resonance points on the graphs. Portions of history have similar novelty graphs to other periods. Today I discovered a rather interesting resonance.
Forgive the images. Due to the age of the software the only way I can get screenshots is to actually take a snapshot of the screen using my camera. Not ideal, but it gets the job done.
Here is a graph of our current year, 2009.
I found a resonance period in the years 1755-1827. This period sees the American Revolution, French Revolution, Napoleonic Wars and the gradual collapse of British and French imperialism.
How can a period approximately three quarters of a century long get condensed down into one year? It's like Moore's Law.
Moore's law describes a long-term trend in the history of computing hardware. Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. The trend was first observed by Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in a 1965 paper. It has continued for almost half of a century and is not expected to stop for another decade at least and perhaps much longer.Today's date resonates with the year 1766, the year the Stamp Act was repealed. This slowed the impending American Revolution for another ten years before the Declaration of Independence. That event resonates with April 15th. Let's see what happens.
I might be making my own connections, but one could say the outrage over corrupt imperialism resonates with current outrage over corrupt globalization. Maybe.
*McKenna always set the zero date for Time Wave Zero at December 21, 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar. He did not believe it was the end of the world, just the end of the world as we know it.
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From the wikipedia article on timewave zero:
His predictions for this transcendent event were wide ranging and varied, depending on his audience, and different times he conjectured the following: the mass of humanity would, by means of some technology, become mentally conjoined in a great collective; the moment in which time travel became a reality; the birth of self-conscious artificial intelligence; a global UFO visitation; and occasionally he even expressed doubt whether anything at all would happen. However, McKenna claimed that there was no contradiction between these scenarios, as they might all happen simultaneously.
That makes me think of Continuum. Then again, everything makes me think of Continuum.
Continuum is an RPG about Time Travel.
In the near future, the bulk of humanity discovers their psychic powers, learns to time-travel, and apparently evolves into "alien" Grays. This moment of transformation is known as The Inheritance.
The game's rulebook is written with a straight face and never winking at the camera, claiming to be the truth masquerading as a game. According to the text of the rulebook, visitors from that future came to the books authors and dictated the RPG to them. It was part of the Inheritors plan for incrementally preparing civilization for the coming cultural (and later physiological) metamorphosis. The big list of significant events in human history (and pre-history, and post-history, and secret history) that starts in 12969 BC and runs to Inheritance even includes an entry for the specific meeting of the Atlantean Council that gave the green light to the RPGs release several millenia later.
The game is a heck of a read.
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