From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Sun Apr 14 2002 - 06:30:12 MDT
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lee Corbin
> Sent: Sunday, April 14, 2002 12:13 AM
>
> . . .it seems
> inescapable to me that the Western civilization was narrowing
> the gap between itself and the Eastern civilization, because
> whether you consider triples or pairs of items, the gap in
> time between initial development in the East and the West is
> definitely narrowing.
> ...
> This, if true, is incredibly strange! Diamond documents the
> following rather obvious reasons that one would expect the
> Eastern Hemisphere's peoples to have been more advanced: the
> land mass and population of the Eurasian/African continents
> is much greater, the "meeting place" of the continents (the
> Middle East) is much more accessible than the corresponding
> meeting place in the West (Panama), and (what perhaps isn't
> so obvious) broad bands of geographical uniformity along
> lines of latitude exist in the Eastern Hemisphere, but not in
> the Western. The latter particularly enables ideas to spread
> more quickly at any particular latitude.
Hmm -- I've never considered this, but it doesn't seem strange, now that
I do. Looks like a good example of Kurzweil's "Law of Accelerating
Returns" perhaps, i.e. that the effect of memetic evolution was
beginning to overtake the effect of other factors, which you would
expect, from an extropian point of view. In other words, the amplified
power that cultural factors put at the disposal of humans in the
Americas was beginning to have cumulative impacts. This was enabling
the humans to little by little overcome the differential impact of the
purely physical factors that Diamond identifies.
> The Spaniards first visiting Mexico City (Tenotitlan) report
> over and over again their awe at the size and splendor of the
> city. Perhaps it really was much more impressive (in certain
> ways) than European cities at the time. It certainly was
> more numerous, with a population, IIRC, of about 200,000. But
> of course, those same Spaniards might have been equally
> impressed with ancient Rome, which had a very large population.
BTW, Cortez's travels and battles with his tiny ragtag band of assorted
thieves, thugs and other flotsam and jetsam of the Old World is, IMO,
one of the great adventure stories of all time. If you made up such a
tale in a science fiction story, you'd be condemned for falling prey to
too many flights of imagination and allowing your story to be moved
along by too many dramatically improbable plot devices. I used to say
that the story could never be made into a movie because it would cost
far too much to do so, but with the coming of high-quality CGI, perhaps
some courageous producer will try it.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
( slowly rebuilding my website at http:www.gregburch.net )
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