Quote:

Terence McKenna (who died April 2000) was a professional mushroom researcher, among other things, and in the course of his long first-hand study he experienced a visionary inspiration for a fascinating piece of software called Timewave Zero. I first read of it in his book The Archaic Revival: Speculations on Psychedelic Mushrooms, the Amazon, Virtual Reality, UFO's, Evolution, Shamanism, the Rebirth of the Goddess, and the End of History. Quite a mouthful, that: but when you've done as many mushrooms as Terence... Anyway, the official introduction to the original program from Dolphin Software (by Peter Meyer) describes it best:

This software illustrates Terence McKenna's theory of time, history and the end of history as first described in the book The Invisible Landscape by him and his brother Dennis, and more recently in his The Archaic Revival (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992). The theory of Timewave Zero was revealed to Terence by an alien intelligence following a bizarre, quasi-psychedelic experiment conducted in the Amazon jungle in Colombia in 1971. Inspired by this influence Terence was instructed in certain transformation of numbers derived from the King Wen sequence of I Ching hexagrams. This led eventually to a rigorous mathematical description of what Terence calls the timewave, which correlates time and history with the ebb and flow of novelty, which is intrinsic to the structure of time and hence of the temporal universe. A peculiarity of this correlation is that at a certain point a singularity is reached which is the end of history-or at least is a transition to a suprahistorical order in which our ordinary conceptions of our world will be radically transformed. The best current estimate for the date of this point is December 21, 2012 CE [common era], the winter solstice of that year and also the end of the current era in the Mayan calendar.

Order Timewave Zero in its latest incarnation, Fractal Time Software.

It's illuminating to experiment with this program, finding correlations of the novelty points (sudden, steep descents of the timewave) with critical eras of transformation: the atomic bomb, the Neanderthals, the rise of homo sapiens, the birth of language, the Black Death, the Enlightenment, the agricultural revolution, 1967....

And what about now? Where will this period before the "zero point" of 2012 take us? It seems we've still got a ways to go yet, in this ordinary consciousness....

Update 1 February 2002: "On Novelty"

--Nowick Gray

further reading...

The End of the River


Towards 2012

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Yoschie99 said:

the coolest part i thought was about a computer experiment for predicting stocks that has since come to 'tell the future.'.. it also mysteriously can't see anything past 2012... and has accurately predicted the tsunami and other major events over the past few years.  Maybe most disturbing was that it predicts 'light nuclear warfare' beginning in 2008 or 2009.. 

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But you know if there's a computer somewhere predicting good things it'd never get put on TV cause people wouldn't care to watch.

Yoschie99 said:

did anyone else catch the discovery (or maybe science channel) show last night about oracles?

it covered the mayans, the oracle of delphi, sybil the roman oracle, and others..

it featured a bit on mckenna and had appearances by pinchbeck throughout.

the coolest part i thought was about a computer experiment for predicting stocks that has since come to 'tell the future.'.. it also mysteriously can't see anything past 2012... and has accurately predicted the tsunami and other major events over the past few years. Maybe most disturbing was that it predicts 'light nuclear warfare' beginning in 2008 or 2009..

yay for politically fueled mass murder!!

yos-

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Booby said:

The only ideas Terrance instills in myself is that he basicaly reinforces a notion that the mayan's new what they were talking about. In a reincarnation sense I suppose those Mayans are still amongst us. Perhaps Terrance was a Mayan? Does his viewpoint mean that he will be 12 in 2012?

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He was simply an intergalactic mushroom salesman, that's it. 

Yoschie99 said:

the theory they covered in the show that I think is the most likely complete end to civilization(s) is the polar flip.. in 2012, the earth is going to be in perfect line w/ the galactic equator and scientific theory is that when crossing this line, the poles will realign... possibly in as little time as a couple days or maybe even hours. Basically, the entire mantle of the earth would slide over the liquid beneath.. alaska and the arctic would end up on the equator, w/ pretty much all of the populated world being thrown towards the poles... effectively wiping out all major life.

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Quote:

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1083866.htm

Doomsday polar flip takes 7000 years

A reversal of the Earth's magnetic field, a rare but feared event due to the catastrophic effect it could have on human life, takes about 7000 years to complete, a U.S. scientist predicts.

Associate Professor Bradford Clement, from Florida International University in Miami, publishes his work in today's issue of the journal Nature.

The so-called flip between the Earth's North and South poles occurs at long but unpredictable intervals, the most recent one occurring about 790,000 years ago.

A compass needle, if one existed then, would have pointed to the south and not to the north.

The 180º switch occurs when there is a change in the circulation patterns in the molten iron that flows around the Earth's outer core and, like a dynamo, creates the magnetic field.

The intensity of the field drops for a while before the circulation rhythm is established and the new polarity occurs.

But scientists have only estimated how long the switching process takes before the new poles become established. Estimates have ranged from a couple of thousand years to 28,000.

Looking at rocks

Clement cast light on this area of uncertainty by analysing records taken from sedimentary rock samples drilled from various sites around the world.

These samples, deposited at four different ages in Earth's history, had a residual magnetic echo from the magnetic field at the time.

"These records yield an average estimate of about 7000 years for the time it takes for the directional change to occur," Clement said.

But the big switchover does not take place in one swoop. It happens faster at the equator and takes longer at higher latitudes, the closer you get to the poles.

He calculated it took 2000 years at the equator and about 10,000 closer to the poles.

The reason for this, said Clement, is that in the absence of the main north-south magnetic field, the Earth's core develops a weaker secondary field that has many mini-poles at the surface.

Eventually the two main poles are established again, but on opposite sides of the planet, and restore their primacy.

Catastrophic effects

No-one knows what would happen to life on Earth if the flip occurred today but the speculation borders on the doomsday.

Many aspects of life today would be literally turned upside down, both for humans, given our dependence on magnets for navigation, and for migrating animals that use an inner compass.

We would also be more exposed to deadly busts of solar radiation, from which we are normally protected by Earth's magnetic field. And the loss of that shield would cause solar particles to smash into the upper atmosphere, warming it and potentially causing wrenching climate change.

There was a scare in 2002 after French geophysicist Professor Gauthier Hulot discovered a weakening of Earth's magnetic field near the poles, which could be interpreted as an early sign that a flip is near.

Polarity reversals "seem to occur randomly in time", wrote geophysicist Professor Ronald Merrill from the University of Washington in Seattle in a commentary in the same issue of the journal.

The shortest interval between flips is between 20,000 and 30,000 years, and the longest is 50 million years.

Merrill said Clement's model for pole reversal was "probably not physically realistic" but was an "important contribution" to our understanding of these magnetic flips.

Among Merrill's criticisms were Clement's assumptions about the symmetry of Earth's magnetic fields and that he didn't account for the different behaviour of different types of magnetic fields in his model.

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