The Speed of Thought: And Ramblings on Human Evolution and Nature

By Don Collier

In our modern world, people are encouraged to think out of the box. It has been pointed out that Don doesnt even have a box so thinking outside one comes quite easy. In an ideal world, we would all be able to question things and to challenge accepted theories. That is how we evolve and move forward as a species. Without questioning things we will never gain new knowledge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Apr 19, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469182933

Don Collier

Don Collier is a US citizen who has lived in Japan for the past 27 years. In his younger days he traveled quite extensively throughout Asia observing and learning from different cultures. Having grown up in a small town in the middle of the US this was a real eye opener. Don has seen and experienced things that most people would never believe unless they were there at the same time. From a young age, Don was taught to be open-minded and that it was okay to question things. When this teaching was combined with a natural curiosity about the world it led to more questions. Don was always encouraged to use his mind and not to be afraid of asking the difficult questions. Part of this thinking has helped with successes in life and eventually to the book you are reading. In our modern world, people are encouraged to think out of the box. It has been pointed out that Don doesnt even have a box so thinking outside one comes quite easy. In an ideal world, we would all be able to question things and to challenge accepted theories. That is how we evolve and move forward as a species. Without questioning things we will never gain new knowledge. Thank you.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Don Collier.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012904644

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-8292-6

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-8291-9

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-8293-3

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-800-618-969

www.xlibris.com.au

[e-mail]

501472

Contents

Introduction to the Speed of Thought

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Epilogue

Dedication

My first dedication is to my wife, daughter, and family. All have greatly inspired me to write this book. I would also like to thank all the people who I have met in life along the way for their contributions to my life. I would like to thank all of the great minds past and present for what they stand for and the discoveries they have made. Lastly, I would like to give my thanks in advance to the great minds in the future, for where you will take all of us.

Introduction to the Speed of Thought

Why have I decided to write this book? How did I come up with this radical theory, which, if proven, will turn the Laws of Nature upside down? My biggest inspiration comes from my brother. He has written two outstanding books on religion and many of the contradictions contained in the Bible. Many religious people believe everything that is written in the Bible, regardless of the contradictions and inaccuracies spread throughout the various books. In the Bible, the contradictions start on the first page! I learned more from the two books my brother wrote than I did in over ten years of Sunday school every week. It amazed me that he could point out things that are in direct sight, but that no one has ever bothered to mention.

So my brother has definitely been an inspiration. I guess another inspiration comes from society in general. It is said that we all have a book in us, but how many people actually sit down and write a book? Honestly, not too many. I’ve started many over the years but usually have the entire novel done in less than ten pages. Everything—the intro, main story, and ending—would all be finished before I even got started. I considered being a short-story writer, but novels excite me more than a short story. I am a book reader; the thicker, the better. And by book, I mean book, not e-book. I like to physically hold whatever it is that I’m reading.

Of course there are many challenges when it comes to writing a book. The first challenge is always the subject. What are we going to write about? Fiction? Nonfiction? What do I know enough about to actually sit down and write an entire book on or about? I would not consider myself to be an expert on many things that could fill over 100 pages. It would be easy to ramble on about various things, but that probably would not be something that many people would want to read. I do have a tendency to go off on tangents while talking, but that would make for a very difficult read. It would be interesting but hard to follow.

There are many things I am interested in doing and seeing. I am good at doing a few things and have a wide variety of hobbies. The problem is if I put my hobbies in a book, it may or may not match your hobbies or likes. This could also lead to having my book in too much of a niche market. Or it could lead to my book being one of too many in a general category. I like to play drums, and I am good at that, but there are already too many drum books on the market. I don’t have anything new to add to the books already on the market. I am also not interested in rehashing the same thing over and over in a slightly different way.

I could also write a book on Lean or Six Sigma. I have learned this through work, and it turns out that I am very good with both of these subjects. Again, though, there are already too many books on both subjects in the market. I might be able to improve on what’s out there, but there would be no major breakthroughs. The best I could do to improve anything would be to give real-life examples. I could show how to apply both Lean and Six Sigma in the real world. I could talk about various applications and projects that I have done in the past. This material would not be of very much interest to people not involved with these programs. For people who are involved, they would be able to find many different points to contest and argue.

Another area I am very good at is my Japanese language ability. Just like with drums and Lean/Six Sigma, there are already too many books out there. This would be another area difficult to compete and stand out in. I like to drink beer, but I don’t think it is really necessary to write a book on this subject; it should come natural! As you can see, coming up with a subject to write about can be quite difficult and a big challenge when getting started.

Once you have decided on a subject, the next hard part is getting started. This is probably the area where most potential authors start falling by the wayside. I have had ideas in the past and got started but ran out of things to say after a few pages. It takes a real skill to write enough words to fill a book. I should probably change the first sentence—getting started is not all that hard but keeping started is! I have read heavy, deep books that kept me interested for hundreds of pages. I have to give a ton of credit to the people who wrote them. They have an amazing talent to fill blank spaces with words. These words not only fill space, they make sense and keep me entertained. Having tried this before, I know that is not an easy task.

I am not that creative of a person with stories, so it would be difficult for me to write any fiction book. I could not write a fantasy, or anything science fiction, and definitely not a romance novel. I tend to be more of a hard data type of guy. I don’t remember if that is the left side of the brain or the right, but I am definitely unbalanced to one side. Make-believe really does not excite me all that much. I prefer to talk about something that I can see, touch, or feel. Part of that may have to do with being born in Missouri. In case you did not know, Missouri is the Show-Me state. We need to see something to believe it. That could be the reason why I am a bit lacking in imagination to write a fiction book.

Now this is not to say that I am totally noncreative. I can be very creative when discussing life, religion, or politics with certain people. This is also where the going off on tangents comes in to play. The thing with my tangents, though, is that no matter what, they always come back full circle to the original conversation. I always forget all of the creativity when the conversation returns to the start point. These conversations can last hours but always come back to the beginning. At the end, all I remember is the beginning and the end, which are always the same. Everything in the middle is lost.

So after careful consideration, I finally came up with a subject and something to write about. This is something brand new, hot off the presses, and has the potential to shake up the entire world. There have been many great men and women in history who have never won a Nobel Prize of any sort, even though they should have. With the new theory I have, I could end up with an accomplishment and achievement that they never received. Trust me, it will not be for literature but in the scientific field. I will leave the literature prize to someone much more deserving than me and someone who can actually write.

In my book, I will be challenging some of these great minds. I will be challenging many of the fundamental Laws of Nature. I will be challenging established science going back hundreds of years. I will be challenging one of the most accepted theories: the Speed of Light. Basically, if my hypothesis is correct, it will radically alter science as we know it. It is not my goal to destroy the established foundations of science. I am simply suggesting that we may not know as much as we think we do and that there is always room for learning new things. I have always been the type of person to ask why, and that is how I came up with what you are about to read. Enjoy!

Chapter 1

Changes and the Origin of Speed

Humans have always been fascinated by speed. This goes back all the way to our ancient ancestors for whom speed actually had meaning. Their very survival depended on speed. In order to hunt, they had to be fast. In order not to be hunted, they had to be fast. Obviously, speed has played a very large part in our evolution. It only makes sense that we are not evolved from the slowest people. Think back to when we were still walking on two legs and two arms; actually, this would have been the equivalent of walking on four legs. That is what we used our arms for—as an extra pair of legs. Even today, our closest relatives tend to walk more often on four legs than two. They do this even though they are capable of only using two.

This is one of the major ways that we have evolved differently than chimpanzees, monkeys, apes, etc. After we reach one year or so, we tend to only walk on two legs. My daughter is thirteen months old as I write this. She just started walking a few weeks back. Since she has discovered that she can only use two legs, she almost never crawls anymore. I can only imagine the surprise hundreds of thousands of years ago when our first ancestor got up on two legs. Try to imagine the reactions of everyone else around of what we commonly call the missing link between monkeys and the earliest humans. My guess is that it was a real shock.

I can also imagine that it did not take too many years for the other members to realize the advantage of being able to walk on only two legs. It would open up a whole new world. It would make getting the low-hanging fruit on trees so much easier to reach. Arms would actually be useful for other things besides just walking. Considering the animals of the day, it would also make escaping from the hungry ones much easier. Eventually, they would find out that it made it easier to keep up with other four-legged animals. All of a sudden, we could go from being almost strictly herbivores to partial carnivores. Eventually, this would evolve into the omnivores we are today.

Speed has always been an important part of what we are. Speed has also been an important part of what we will become. For hundreds of thousands of years, we got around by walking. Eventually, someone invented the wheel, and all of a sudden, we could go faster. Fast forward another 100,000 years, and we have cars. Add a few more years, and we have airplanes. It is quite amazing to think of the progress since the beginning, but this is especially true for the past 100 years. As a species, we have evolved by leaps and bounds in a very short period. We have certainly come a long way since the beginning. It would be interesting to see the reaction someone from a 100,000 years ago would have to the world we currently live in.

We have gone from fur-wearing, spear-carrying, hunter-gatherers to what we are today. We now have seven billion people in the world, all competing for the same amount of limited resources. Everywhere you look, people are always rushing around trying to get ahead. Speed continues to be very important to us. There are so many sayings in the English language that are related to speed. The early bird gets the worm. If you snooze, you lose. The list goes on and on, but the point here is that our lives still revolve around speed.

Speed doesn’t have the same meaning to us as it once did. While there are still many places in the world, where people continue the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, those numbers dwindle day by day. The odds of being killed and eaten by a hungry animal continue to decrease. In most of the developed world, we hunt our animals prepackaged in the supermarket. We do our gathering in the produce section. Any way you look at, for the majority of us, speed is not as important as it used to be. As far as survival purposes go, most of us will go our entire life without ever depending on speed to survive. In a way, speed has become a luxury.

Even though speed is a luxury now, we still continue our pursuit of going faster and doing things faster. A great example of this is the personal computer. The evolution of computers is nothing short of amazing. As far as a product evolution goes, it is hard to come up with something that has evolved as quickly as the computer. Of course there are examples of other things that have evolved over the years, but it is really hard to come up with a better example than the computer. What we take for granted today only existed in imagination even 100 years ago.

Think back as recently to when NASA was trying to put a man on the moon. What little computing power that did exist to assist them would take up entire buildings. These were still the days when everything would have been measured in bytes. No megabytes or gigabytes but just normal everyday bytes. Any and all data would have to be stored on external disks. Sorry, actually at this time, it would have been on some sort of reel-to-reel equipment. Disks were not really around yet, and when they were first introduced, they were huge!

Fast forward to 2011. My smart phone is literally millions of times more powerful than anything they had at that time. It is also millions of times smaller and of course millions of times faster. I can hold what used to take an entire city block in the palm of my hand. Pause for a moment to actually think about that for a bit. Doesn’t that amaze you? What the current generation takes for granted every day used to be a dream and fantasy for the generation before mine. I can actually include my generation in there as well. The advances in computers that I have seen in the past twenty-five years are incredible.

How many of you can remember when a screen saver actually served a purpose? With the current technology available, we no longer need to worry about the characters on screen being burnt permanently into the CRT. Most of our computers do not even use the CRT monitor anymore. I remember quite well the days when that was a valid concern. This concern does not exist with modern monitor technology. Screen savers are still around, but from a practical standpoint, they don’t really serve any true purpose. Again, this is all due to the incredible advances in computer and computer-related technology. Things just keep getting better and faster.

On a similar note, how many of you can remember the first generation of dial-up modems? These days, all you have to do is plug a cable in and basically you have instant access to the Internet. Internet? Yes, I am also of the pre-Internet generation. The Internet has truly revolutionized how we live our daily lives. I know it will be hard for many of you to believe, but there was a day, not so long ago, when the Internet did not exist as we currently know it. I would like to continue on the subject of modems a bit more first before getting back to the Internet.

Since many of you will not remember or be familiar with modems, let me explain what it was used for. A modem was used as a dial-up connection to get onto the Internet. Modems were clunky, slow, and made a very unique sound when connecting. I sometimes get nostalgic for that sound, but not for the speed or cost of actually getting online. Since it was all done through the telephone (landlines, not mobile), it was expensive. Getting online would usually be measured in minutes, not seconds. Trying to access even the simplest homepage would be measured the same way. Things were slow in the dark ages!

Over time, use of the Internet became more widespread. And in keeping with the basic human need for speed, better solutions were developed to get online. Now you can use cable, fiber optic, and, yes, even wireless connections to get online. Each new method was faster and cheaper than the previous. Modems are now obsolete. I have not seen or heard of a modem in many