Time Compressors (feat. Terence McKenna)

We've been involved in complex prostheses

Which we call machines and computers

They are part of us. We don't perceive them as part

Of us because we identify

With the flesh and exteriorize the fabricated

Metal but in fact they are a

Part of us as much as our political systems

Our agriculture production

Systems, so forth and so on. So the animal body

Has reached the limits of its evolutionary

Abilities. A cheetah can run 75 miles an hour

An elephant can lift three tons, and so forth and so

On To go beyond those capacities of the animal body

You have to make a marriage with mechanical things

So we are extending ourselves through the machines

Well one of the things that these machines do

Is their time compressors You know you and I sitting here

Talking are operating at about 100 hertz

If we could be magically downloaded

Into a top-of-the-line

Computer we would run at 800 megahertz

That means we could do 800 million more things

In this moment than we can do

When we're wearing flesh

So it may be that we will find a way

To technologically stretch time

And this will become for us like a false eternity

You may have only 10 minutes left in your life

But it may be time enough to pack in all of human history

From the fall of Rome to the present moment

So we are finding ways out of the three-dimensional

Newtonian prison

Which says, you know, life is narrow and confined

And ends at the grave

And we doing it by becoming information that is freed

From material And somehow this allows us

To make this ascent to the next dimensional modality Information

Is not time and space constrained the way we are

We talk about the difficulty of moving an object at the speed of light

Our entire planetary technology cannot achieve moving

A marble at the speed of light, but

We can move the information at the

Speed of light, tetrabytes of it

We do this every day

So we see how we stand then like children

At the edge of the ocean of information

And we're putting our feet in and wondering

You know, could we swim in that?

What would it be like to be wet in that?

What would it be like to go into that new medium?

A similar dilemma must have confronted

The early amphibians as they stared at the land

And said, you know, could we leave the ocean?

Could we go up into those places?

Could we breathe air and actually make the transition

To such a hostile and alienating environment as the land?

And so these are major symmetry breaks

But in every case, the answer has been, you bet

And sooner or later, somebody did it

And then all succeeding generations have followed suit

What is fascinating about this particular transition

Is that we are conscious of the implications

We who will make the transition will in some sense

Some limited sense, understand its implications

Where I don't think that was true for the animals

That left the primordial ocean

They simply were behaving blind instinct and

Evolutionarily dictated behaviors

But the degrees of freedom accessible to us are so multifarious

That we can actually appreciate for the first time

Our circumstance

And our circumstance is awe-inspiring

I mean, we are about to take the step out of matter

The planet is on a collision course with

The most profound event it's possible to imagine

The freeing of organic life from the chrysalis of matter

For a billion years there's been life on this planet

But never life that could step outside of matter

But this is obviously what's in the cards

And we are privileged to be central to that