NEW REALITY

A friend recently e-mailed to me a short article about the Leakey family discoveries of skeletons of primitive man. My reply follows: 

Interesting, but small stuff in the grand scheme of things because it has little perceivable affect on contemporary times.
A couple of ideas  follow which are unsettling, if not downright scary though, and I offer these to your circulation list, a convenient, bright audience.
Evolution of technology has far outpaced biological evolution. The latter is slow, responding to environmental  effects and occasional mutations accidents of nature. But technology is advancing asymptotically, and can be observed, year to year. It diminishes, at the same time, the importance of biological evolution. Not only  is the change accelerating, but the rate of change  is too. One manifestation of this is future multiplication of the capability of the human brain, perhaps trillions of times.
It's part of the theme of Ray Kurtzweil's book:  "The Singularity is Here," in which he defines a future that has computers linked to the human brain.
He's right. It is already happening on a primitive scale. The reader of this, attentive to screen, is already a rapidly evolving being, seated with a virtual umbilical connected to an external brain - the PC. It's addictive nature guarantees that the trend is unstoppable, and with time the external brain will provide more and more of humanity's demands. Fascinating, scary stuff.

Even more scary - we are very much alone in the universe. Astronomers, theorizing and using the most advanced telescopy -  Atacama, Keck, Hubble, etc, can't tell us anything about the universe as it currently exists. Step outside and view the stars. except for a planet or two and the moon, everything you see is as it was - years, tens of years, thousands millions, billions of years ago. Nearly everything is unreal.
Suppose an advanced telescope were to discover a planet bustling with signs of an advanced civilization as near as three thousand light years, just a short distance away as the universe goes. A message from them to explore for other beings might not have arrived yet. Any attempted communication by us would not see a response for six thousand years. Civilizations come and go in that time frame.
Assuredly, we are very much alone in the universe.