David Brin - Earth

In mathematics, a singularity is a sudden discontinuity, where one expression suddenly ceases being valid, and a completely different one takes its place.

You got the simplest kind of singularity — a delta function — by dividing any real number by zero. The result, converging on infinity, was actually undefined, unknowable. That’s where we’re at right now… a singularity in the life history of mankind .

It wasn’t just the present crisis. Oh, certainly he was worried. Would the world’s institutions — or the planet itself — survive the next few hours or days? Stan was as concerned as the next man. Still, even if tomorrow the spectre of reborn international paranoia evaporated like a bad dream, and all the gorgeous, terrifying new technologies were tamed, nothing would ever be the same.

Earlier today, some of the youngsters had been discussing notions about gravitational circuits … equivalent, in collapsed mass and stressed space, to capacitors and resistors and transistors, for heaven’s sake! To Stan it was proof the time had come. The moment he’d secretly been waiting for all his life.

There’s another kind of singularity… having to do with society, and information.

Technological breakthroughs had happened before — when farming was invented, for example. Or metallurgy. Or writing. Each time, men and women gained new power over their lives, and thinking itself changed. With each such naissance, human beings were in effect reborn, remade… reprogrammed.

In early times, change came slowly. But each breakthrough laid a foundation for those that followed. And with the Western breakout of the sixteenth century, it became self-sustaining. Inventions bred wealth, which spread education and leisure to broader masses. Printing dispersed literacy. Transport distributed food. Food meant more people.

He paused near a sandy bank in the wind-shadow of a boulder, and used his walking stick to trace a rough figure. It was the standard doom scenario, depicting the fate forecast by Malthus for any species that outbreeds the carrying capacity of its niche.

The curve portrayed human population over time, and it rose very slowly at first. All through the late Stone Age — when Stan’s ancestors had chipped flint, scratched fleas, and thought fire the final terror weapon — there were never more than five million homo sapiens at a time. This changed with agriculture, though. Human numbers doubled, then doubled again every fifteen hundred years or so — a rapid climb — until they reached five hundred million around the time of Newton.

Impressive progress, achieved by people who had hardly a glimmer of what the laws of nature were, let alone concepts like ecology or psychology or planetary history. But then it accelerated even faster! New foods, sanitation, emigration… babies lived longer. Humans reproduced copiously. The next doubling, to a billion souls, took only two hundred years. The next, less than a century. Then, from just 1950 to 1980, two billions became four. And still the curve steepened. Stan recalled the elegant, symmetrical projections proclaimed by pessimists when he was young. No population boom can be sustained forever on a finite world. There must inevitably come crash .

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The curve never reached infinity after all. It peaked. Then, like a spent rocket, it turned over and plummeted. The great die-back, that’s where we seemed headed. After all, it happens whenever anchovies and deer breed beyond their food supply .

And we did have little die-backs. But so far we’ve escaped the big one, haven’t we?

So far.

He scratched another rude figure, identical to the first until it reached the top of the curve. At which point the population stopped growing all right, but neither did it fall! Instead of plummeting, this rocket turned sideways.

This is what they say can happen if you add intelligence and free will to the formula. After all, we aren’t deer or anchovies !

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Two graphs. Two destinies. Malthusian calamity and the so-called S-curve. On the one hand, utter collapse. And on the other, a chain of last-minute reprieves… like self-fertilizing corn, room-temperature superconductors, and gene-spliced catfish… each arriving just in time for mankind to muddle through another year, eking out a living from one brilliant innovation to the next.

We thought these were the only two possible futures:

— if we prove selfish and short-sighted — mass death ,

— and if we bend all our efforts, working together, applying every ingenuity — then a genteel decline to a sort of threadbare equilibrium .

But was there a third choice? Another type of social singularity? Stan’s stick hovered over the sand. When each generation owns more books than its father’s, the volumes don’t accumulate arithmetically or even geometrically. Knowledge grows exponentially .

Stan recalled the last time he and Alex and George had gotten drunk together, when he had complained so about the lack of new modalities . Now he laughed at the memory. “Oh, I was wrong. There are modalities, all right. More than I ever imagined.”

Those youngsters back in the encampment were talking about making gravitational transistors! It was enough to make a man cry out, “Stop! Give me a minute to think! What does it all mean?”

Knowledge isn’t restrained by the limits of Malthus. Information doesn’t need topsoil to grow in, only freedom. Given eager minds and experimentation, it feeds itself like a chain reaction.

A third type of social singularity, then, would be a true leap, some sudden, jarring shift to a completely undefined state — where changes manifest themselves in months, weeks, days, minutes… Still climbing, the rocket attains escape velocity.

With a sigh, Stan wiped away the rude figures. We’re caught up in our own close view of time. A human life seems so long. But try on the patient outlook of a glacier .

His eyes lifted to the white continent of ice, only a few kilometers away and stretching from horizon to horizon. Ice ages are geologically rapid events. And yet we’ve flashed from caveman to world wrecker in just three hundred generations. One moment there are these barefoot Neolithic hunters, bickering over a frozen caribou carcass. Turn around, and their children’s children talk about tapping energy from pulsars .

Stan sat down on the convenient boulder, which had been dragged hundreds of miles only to be dropped here by the retreating glacier. It was a good place to watch late autumn’s early twilight usher onstage the gauzy curtains of the aurora borealis. He loved the way the colors played across the glacier, causing its rough corrugations to undulate in time to the sizzling of supercharged ions high above. It was starting to get chilly, even in his thermal coat. Still, this was worth savoring for a while.

Stan heard a soft clunk and saw a stone roll across the sand, coming to rest near his foot. Not far away, two other rocks quivered.

Well, I guess we’re at it again.

But it was more than a typical tremor. He realized this as a deep groan seemed to fill the air… apparently strongest toward the ice. He started to rise, but changed his mind when a sudden trembling made it hard to gain his feet. Whether it was in the ground or his legs, Stan decided to stay put.

After all, what can harm me out here in the open?

Sparkling fireflies were the next phenomenon, dancing within his eyes.

This must be what it’s like to be near a beam when it exits , he thought bemusedly. A level-six harmonic at about twenty kilowheelers should do it, coupling with my own body’s bag of salty fluid. If the frequency dispersion isn’t too …