{"id":1443,"date":"2008-08-11T11:33:47","date_gmt":"2008-08-11T16:33:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1443"},"modified":"2008-08-11T11:33:47","modified_gmt":"2008-08-11T16:33:47","slug":"and-nowa-wee-moment-of-species-pride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/1443","title":{"rendered":"And Now&#8230;A Wee Moment Of Species Pride&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m copying the following from Brad DeLong&#8217;s blog comments in their entirety.&nbsp; Some days you read the news and you just want to write off the human race altogether.&nbsp; When those moments hit you, it&#8217;s good to be able to keep things in perspective&#8230;<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"entry-body\">\n<p>Hoisted from Comments: The Dawn of Humanity<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/delong.typepad.com\/sdj\/2007\/01\/the_dawn_of_hum.html#comment-28146250\">Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong&#8217;s Semi-Daily Journal: The Dawn of Humanity<\/a>: What astonishes me is the <em>speed<\/em>. They&#8217;ve got the origin date at -56,000, and the oldest modern human remains in Australia are -40,000. The route from East Africa across Asia to Northern Australia is 10K+ miles, which means humans were expanding at close to a <em>mile a year<\/em>. That&#8217;s just unbelievably fast.<\/p>\n<p>We have all sorts of branches of homo surviving stably for a million plus years all over africa, asia, and europe, and this new branch comes out of Africa and by the end of the Great Migration, only a little over ten thousand years later, they are <em>building boats<\/em> to sail to Australia. And wiping out or out-competing every one of our homo sibling species on the way.<\/p>\n<p>The Singularity is truly in our past.<\/p>\n<p>Posted by: tavella | January 23, 2007 at 05:15 PM<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"entry-content\">\n<div class=\"entry-body\">\n<p>Here&#8217;s a link, <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Technological_singularity\">in case you&#8217;re wondering about that reference to &quot;The Singularity&quot;<\/a>.&nbsp; It was coined mostly to refer to advances in machine intelligence, but others have co-opted the term to refer to where the acceleration of change reaches a point where humanity itself simply becomes unrecognizable from anything we once were.&nbsp; Those ancient branches of the humanoid family tree, long gone now, would certainly never comprehend us now, but they probably didn&#8217;t back when we first emerged, and they first laid eyes on us.\n<\/p>\n<p>We can do this&#8230;we can survive.&nbsp; We can endure.&nbsp; We can find our way to the stars.&nbsp; Maybe it&#8217;ll take another ten thousand years.&nbsp; But we&#8217;ll do it.&nbsp; And in another 56 thousand years they&#8217;ll be looking back in amazement at how quickly we did it&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m copying the following from Brad DeLong&#8217;s blog comments in their entirety.&nbsp; Some days you read the news and you just want to write off the human race altogether.&nbsp; When those moments hit you, it&#8217;s good to be able to keep things in perspective&#8230; Hoisted from Comments: The Dawn of Humanity Grasping Reality with Both [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,1],"tags":[64,80,29,99],"class_list":["post-1443","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thumping-my-pulpit","category-uncategorized","tag-cosmos","tag-life-rapture","tag-science","tag-the-human-status"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1443"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1443\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1443"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1443"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brucegarrett.com\/brucelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1443"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}