Ya know, it's downright amazing to think that the arrival of our very species is viewed as occurring no further back than 200K years. An individual in his life has a near-range of about 100 years between his own experience and that he has heard about from those he knows or their parents. You can probably conceive readily enough of the nature of change in our world between 1903 and now. At full maturity, a well-connected human adult can see with somecertainty perhaps 90 years back and 10 forward.

That means that there are only 2,000 steps back to the shore of Lake Adis Ababa, or whatever it was called, when the early homo sap was sorting out which end of the stick to hold. Maybe 3,000 allowing for some overlap.

Now, I can't even predict with any certainty where we will have gotten to in 2103. That's just ONE hundred-year forward leap. 2203 is even harder for me to imagine. That's two steps.

What can you say about three steps forward -- 2303? All bets vanish in the mists of future. But we can look back hundreds, or even thouands of centuries with some clarity.

Because the rate of change has accelerated so dramatically we will be breaking through into unknown territory faster in the next hundred years than 'we' ever did in the past 1000 or 2000 years, let alone the past 2,000 centuries.

It is gonna be interesting. That's for certain!

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