This is a Cosmos of Novelty Shock, a cosmos of The Big Surprise.

We know that giant upgrades in this cosmos always come. We know that massive transformations of this planet’s biomass will come too. Change beyond recognition is Nature’s way. Upgrades will come over and over again. They’ll come with us or without us, whether we’re they’re makers or their victims. They’ve been doing it for 13.7 billion years.

Our task, as beings with a consciousness, is to ride the cosmos as if it were a bucking bronco, to turn it from a good horse into a great horse and from a great horse into a time-and-space glider, the ultimate intercosmic racing machine.

Nature breaks, nature smashes, and nature destroys as she goes through her creative throes. Our job, should we choose to accept it, is to become the masters nature challenges us to be. It is to be the instruments of cosmic creativity while taming nature’s impulse toward destruction and catastrophe.

Here's takeaway message number one: Homo sapiens is the first species to periodically reinvent itself. There’ve been upgradeable databases on this planet ever since macromolecules discovered the secret of weaving themselves into knots of DNA. But the human upgradeable database is of a brand new kind. It’s not in your brain or in mine. It’s in a granary, a tower of stored insight and stored invention that we’ve been building generation after generation for 2.5 million years or so. That data-silo is culture.

What happens when this data-tower goes from the few primitive levels it’s reached in 2004 up to a height that scrapes the clouds and sky? Is that when the next big surprise kicks in? Is that when we go from the equivalent of high-speed plasma to a radically new thing—to a lazy atom—or to a whole cosmos full of them?

Will new forces, new emergent properties, kick in as we lift our data tower higher? I hope so.

Let’s imagine a cyclic cosmos, one that starts in a big bang and ends in a single black hole, a cosmos that then squeezes through that infinitesimal hole and squirts out in a new big bang again. I have such a model—it’s called The Bloom Toroidal Theory of the Cosmos--The Big Bagel. More important, so do mainstream physicists like Lee Smolin and Max Tegmark at the University of Pennsylvania.

Here’s what I suspect is our ultimate challenge. How do we come out of the final black hole and into a new big bang not only alive and kicking, but better off than when we began? How do we turn the end of the cosmos into a new beginning? How do we harness the ultimate cataclysm as an energy source? How do we make it as transformative as the invention of the hearth that tamed wildfire, the invention of the dynamo that harnessed Niagara Falls, and the invention of the internal combustion engine that harnessed the explosions of gasoline?

Here’s takeaway lesson Number Two: Dream your ass off. This is the cosmos of infinite singularities. This is the cosmos of the big surprise.

Change came every 700,000 years in the days of the Acheulian hand axe; every 20 years in the 19th century, every ten years at the end of the 20th century, and soon will come every 5 or 2.

In this environment of instant change, it’s no longer the copper or the steel that makes the difference; it’s the mindware—the imagination factor

America’s at number one but China is catching up fast…and Fortress Europe, the EU, is trying to best America, too.

Front-runner in the Tour de France has a disadvantage—he’s the aerodynamic icebreaker. So’s the economic front-runner, America. Others can copy us. We must innovate.

The Chinese, Indians, and even the Europeans are still operating in lockstep formation.

We have an advantage--our romanticism, our cowboy myth, and our myth of individualism. It gives us the freedom to speak our visions. It gives us the freedom to be freaky, geeky, bohemian, and artsy. It gives us the freedom to create.

It’s time to take advantage of our mongrel, hybrid culture, our culture of immigrants—and to dream of things that will make humans on all continents salivate

We’re entering the era of business as art, not business as rationality.

This is not the information age, it’s the passion and imagination age—imagination has very little to do with reason and everything to do with emotion.

This is not the age of formulae. It’s the age of taking feeling from darkness into light—of finding goods, services, and radical innovations that satisfy our irritations, our insecurities, our daydreams, and our dreams of night

Your most embarrassing and wordless personal needs and fantasies will be those of 600 million people—1/10th of humankind—they will be saleable, they will be messianic. They’ll give others meaning and identity.

It’s time to reverse the 20th Century’s objectivism and to go subjective—it’s time to jettison the manager-mindset.

It’s time to recognize the power of emotional need, to recognize the hunger for identity. It’s also time to recognize the deep need for community.

It’s time to make the next great surprise—or firecracker-chain of them—happen before either nature does it or the Indians or the Chinese do.

We’re in a cosmos whose creator has let go of the reins and left the horses to run wild. Now the new creators are you and me.

©Copyright 2004 Howard Bloom

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