big history perspective

Submitted by ponderland (United Kingdom), Jan 14, 2010 at 18:21

Your characterisation is correct, similar to Niall Ferguson's analysis in the War of the World.

What if the unthinkable happens and by means of this "third wave", the Islamists win? In the first wave during the occupation of Iberian Grenada in the early medieval period, an influence on the development of the Spanish language and the creation of a frontier mentality was evident. These days, the societal impacts from the third wave evident in the West.

However, it is possible that even if the West morphs into a Islamist utopia, it is possible that arising from the population/ecological pressures, the arrival of a super artificial intelligence (Ray Kurzweil's 'Singularity') and most importantly, the fact that even this future civilisation would need scientific and technological progress (to compete with the surviving civilizations of India and China with an annexed Russia) means that an Islamist society and worldview could not survive intact, birthrates would lower through assimiliation and a secular schism would happen, just as has happened to the original Europeans, who are now criticised as a result.

Four great minds (2 European, 1 Australian and 1 American) in the post WWII period discovered that pattern/order and chaos are self creating in all structures in the universe at all scales and do not require intervention by a celestial designer (other than one which set the initial conditions and then kicked back and let the simulation run). This revelation is a ticking timebomb to current medieval orthodoxies. Science will prevail, as it did during the Dark Ages when the knowledge of the Classics was preserved and developments in mathematics occurred in the Fertile Crescent (what is the etymology of al-gorithm?)

This poster is for you, by Dawkins!
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/jmiles/tag/fractal_wrongness/
"You are wrong. You are wrong at every conceivable scale of resolution. Zooming in on any part of your worldview finds beliefs exactly as wrong as your entire worldview."

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