Re: The Spike, nanotech, and a future scenario

Gregory Sullivan (sullivan@blaze.cs.jhu.edu)
Sun, 12 Oct 1997 19:27:41 -0400 (EDT)


Hal Finney (hal@rain.org) said:
>If you plotted such things as the fastest a human had ever gone,
>or the highest a human had ever gone, you would undoubtedly have
>people at Jupiter by 2000 if you extrapolate that curve from ca 1970.
>Gregory Sullivan wrote here here last December about predictions by G.
>Harry Stine in 1961. Stine extrapolated based on previous rates of
>progress and found that human speeds should become infinite in 1982.
>Instead we saw a levelling off of the rate of progress.

Hal has a good memory, and I wish the Stine article itself was available
on the web because it does starkly illustrate the flawed predictions that
can be generated by simplistic extrapolation. My note about the Stine
piece is available on the web in the Extropian list archives:

PREDICTION: Naive extrapolation
Gregory Sullivan Mon, 02 Dec 96 16:25:40 EST
http://www.lucifer.com/exi-lists/extropians.96/3563.html

Damien Broderick replied to the note and stated that he was planning
to cite some of Stine's predictions in his, at that time forthcoming,
book "The Spike". I have not had a chance to read "The Spike" yet
but hope to do so in the future.

Gregory Sullivan