Saturday, November 12, 2011

Hope Amidst Stagnation

I've been following the evolution of the ideas described by Tyler Cowen's idea of 'The Great Stagnation'. I've also been playing MineCraft recently and I started thinking about how players can setup servers to host a MineCraft 'map', especially so multiple users can play together, but that this 'virtual reality' compares so incredibly poorly to the virtual reality depicted in most (all?) of the scifi books I've read. We have grossly underestimated how much work reality actually involves! And it struck me that it's wonderful that we don't have anything approaching the true, full 'realism' of the real world!

The world,
we've learned,
is far more rich
in details –
and history! –
than we ever before
could compute.

We have yet
many more eons
before us
to plumb its depths,
and all the rest
of our time
to enjoy them.