Save the date: the Singularity on or around 12/12/12

September 30th, 2006 Filed Under random

Recently, we survived a chunk of apocalypse predictions; go team Earth! But Bayesian probabilists know that just because some event has never happened before, that doesn’t mean it has zero chance of happening in the future.

Some very intelligent people have chosen to believe in the god of exponential progress, predicting that within 20 years we’ll finally be able to put the requisite 2^64-1 grains of rice on the chessboard. Then we’ll have computers to download and simulate our brains.

From what I see and trust from qualified professional science people, an apocalypse is coming, or at least a high-speed grand slam right into the brickest wall that ever was–the laws of thermodynamics. I have high hopes for tomorrow and next year, but long term I’d have to say the probability of civilization-death approaches 1.

I don’t put much stock in premonitions or other supernatural knowledge that supposes to know the exact year of our demise. But the next date in the apocalypse pool is December 2012, held by the late Aztecs, who will have calendar overflow problems not entirely unlike our Y2K and 2038 bugs; and the late Terrence McKenna, supported by a numerological and arbitrary interpretation (aren’t they all) of the I Ching, predicts a more traditional singularity, that “in the time immediately prior to, and during this omega point of infinite novelty, anything and everything conceivable to the human imagination will occur simultaneously.” Which sounds awesome.

I think, for numerological reasons, “12/12/12″ is an obvious target, since it’s the last one of those for another hundred years at least and the others (not even 6/6/6) have obviously not been apocalyptic. It’s like that professor who promises to give you a pop quiz at random; but if his word is good then we have an elegant deductive proof that the quiz cannot be random at all!

So, presuming the world doesn’t actually end on December 12th, 2012, the weekend following should be one hell of a party: I propose we call it “the Singularity”. 2013 should be one hell of a hangover.