What Happens in 2012?

As I mentioned earlier, there are effectively two singularity theories: the Technological singularity and the Consciousness singularity.

The year 2012 has come to serve as a hub, nexus and strange attractor for myriad types of information, predictions, phenomena and events over the last decade or so. The entire period between the early 1990’s and onward to the early 2020’s is almost as important to look at. Unlike the talk surrounding Y2K, this is not a one day event subject; most people are not expecting much of note other than certain astronomical occurrences to happen on the 21st of December in 2012, no sudden end of the world. Rather the date is regarded as a spectral portal through which human consciousness itself will pass, and be weighed in its worth, much like the ancient Egyptian belief that men’s souls were weighed on the scales of the Gods, so as to assign them to their correct afterlife.

This period of some two decades or more has been categorized by some of the indigenous elders of tribes such as the Mayans, as the ’speeding up’, or ‘quickening’. This is so labelled because our perception of events will change, things will seem to happen exponentially faster as time itself spirals into smaller and smaller loops before entering the 2012 singularity. It is also held that in this temporal bottleneck past and future will be constantly in flux, ancient phenomena and future phenomena manifesting alongside those of the modern day. Alogside this timeslip, will be a polarizing of forces with a swelling of interest in compassionate spiritual living, met by a diametrically opposed rise in aggression and greed.

Some of the more often discussed esoteric subjects in relation to this period are the birth on the planet of a generation of highly advanced spiritual beings, currently commonly labelled as Indigo Children, and a massive increase in the occurrence of both psychic abilities and supernatural phenomena. Other subjects being expounded within the 2012 counterculture are the possible arrival of aliens, or some kind of biblical ascension in which ’spiritually pure’ persons will pass into higher realms of existence, or indeed walk into the Christian heaven.

The plethora of 2012 information souces also deal with the manifold physical happenings associated with the predicted changes. This includes a great number of disaster level Earth events, as well as radical changes in how human society functions globally both in political and social terms. Most of the related books, web-sites, and radio shows seemingly agree that the period in which 2012 serves as a hub will include many painful happenings. The phrase that perhaps best sums up this mode of thinking would be, “you can’t make an omelette without breaking any eggs”.

Seemingly when new ages of existence are being born it is much akin to a human birth, plenty of pain and suffering pre-empt the moment of joy and relief when the act is complete and all is found to be well. There are a number of both earthly and cosmic disaster scenarios discussed in relation to this time. These include, but are certainly not limited to; mega-tsunami, super-volcanoes, mega-quakes, massive solar flares, super-storms, biosphere collapse, colossal meteor impacts, magnetic & geological pole reversals, earth crust displacement, encounters with an ‘X’ planet or large-scale terrestrial and extra-terrestrial warfare. Each scenario has a wealth of evidence behind it, though it quickly becomes clear that some are far more unlikely than others.

As I mentioned earlier, it is obvious that life is forever speeding up. In almost every area, change is occurring faster and faster. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries; calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes; communication that used to take months happens in seconds.

The reason for this acceleration is that each new development is, so to speak, standing on the shoulders of what has come before.

The idea that there might be a singularity in human development was first suggested by the mathematician Vernor Vinge, and subsequently by others, most notably Ray Kurzweil in his book The Singularity Is Near. They argue that if computing power keeps doubling every eighteen months, as it has done for the last fifty years, then sometime in the future there will be computers that can equal the performance of the human brain. From there, it is only a small step to a computer that can surpass the human brain. There would then be little point in our designing future computers; ultra-intelligent machines would be able to design better ones, and do so faster.

What happens then is a big question. Some propose that humans would become obsolete; machines would become the vanguard of evolution. Others think there would be a merging of human and machine intelligence – downloading our minds into computers, perhaps. The only thing we can confidently predict is that this would be a complete break from the patterns of the past. Evolution would have moved into a radically new realm.

But this transition, as major as it would be, would not yet be true singularity in the mathematical sense. Evolution – whether human, machine, or a synthesis of the two – would continue at an ever-increasing pace. Development timescales would continue to shorten, from decades to years, to months, to days. Before long, they would approach zero. The rate of change would then become infinite. We would have reached a true mathematical singularity.

Some of the theories proposed on this website might seem a little far fetched, and on first glance this theory might seem equally proposturous, but upon further investigation, it is probably the most plausible:

It is obvious that life is forever speeding up – in almost every area of life, change is occurring faster and faster. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries; calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes; communication that used to take months happens in seconds.

The reason for this acceleration is that each new development is, so to speak, standing on the shoulders of what has come before.

This pattern is seen not only in technological advances, but in evolution of species as well.

And it’s set to continue in the future – each new phase requiring a fraction of the time required in the previous phase. In the future, we might expect the same amount of change we’ve seen in the last twenty years take place in years rather than decades.

It is difficult, therefore, to predict what the world will be like in ten or twenty years. Two hundred years ago no one predicted we would have telephones or movies, let alone cell phones or the Internet. Just twenty years ago, very few of us had any notion of the WorldWide Web, or of how dramatically it would change our lives. Similarly, who knows what new breakthroughs or developments will be transforming our lives ten years from now?

So where is all this leading? Some people think we are headed toward what is called a “singularity.” This is the term that mathematicians give to a point when an equations breaks down and ceases to have any useful meaning. The rules change. Something completely different happens.

As I mentioned, this pattern is seen in both technological advances and in the evolution of species, and there are effectively two singularity theories: the Technological singularity and the Consciousness singularity.

Have I whet your appetite? I’ll write about both of these separately.