From 4/27/2006

I began a tangential discussion with a friend a few days ago, regarding something I’ve been thinking of for quite some time. That if you were to visualize the combined intelligence of the human race as a sphere, an imaginary object that contains all the thinking, all the printed words, and all the media that humanity has expressed since we began thinking and recording those thoughts into media that such a sphere would be truly immense.

Then I imagined what one person might look like in the context of that thought-sphere. A dot, a very small very bright dot. Now for each person, you can look around, you can explore and you can learn – this I associate with movement and increase on the surface of this imaginary sphere – the more you know the bigger your dot.

What then, is the chance of any human being able to approach the horizon of that sphere? Or more likely, is it even possible?

In the case that it is not possible for any one human being to reach the horizon of the information sphere then the next logical argument would be that humanity exists on this sphere, that there are people covering every surface of the sphere, just that nobody will be able to visit all the “islands” in this sphere of knowledge. What then for our fate? If we haven’t the hope of integrating all that we know, how could we possibly think that we can consider new things – unless the sphere looks more like a puffer-fish than a beach-ball, with localized growth building up mountains of insight, surrounded by plateaus of general knowledge. What really gets me is the fear that we do have many if not all the answers we seek already, it’s just, there is nobody around bright enough and fast enough to integrate all the separate islands of knowing into a cohesive and definitive answer.

What might happen if someone miraculously did acquire the breadth of knowledge that would be regarded as a span across the horizon?