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Tim Tyler's avatar

"Frequency of phase transitions per year"? Isn't that just a bunch of nonsense?

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Tim Tyler's avatar

Growth in a finite world often consists of "S-shaped" curves. We can see the bottom ends of many of these curves in areas where there appears to be exponential growth. It seems likely that many of these curves will exhaust themselves within a century. Transistor sizes can't keep getting smaller and smaller at anything like the current rate. The next century will likely be the one where lots of big and important S-curves get exhausted. Of course, there may still be other, slower S curves going on. We won't master stellar farming in 100 years, for example. Progress won't come to an end. However, that still makes the coming century look especially interesting, which in turn raises the issue of: how come we are witnessing it? Simulism offers one possible answer. Chance is another explanation. Maybe there are other possibilities.

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