Renaissance Man

It used to be that a fairly smart person could know just about everything there was to know about science and technology. Such a person was called a "Renaissance Man", as least to my way of thinking. I never looked up the definition, but that was the impression I gathered. I don't know why they were called "Renaissance Men", instead of just really smart people who knew everything except, well, it's considerably shorter. There is also the bit about being a "know-it-all", which is more of a personality flaw than having anything to do with how much actual knowledge one had accumulated. And let's not forget that the term was Renaissance Man because back in those days women didn't count.

I think that impression stuck with me until about twenty years ago when I began to suspect that the total accumulated knowledge of the human race was more than one person could handle. Note only that, but knowledge was increasing at an exponential rate. Now it could be that I was just a naive youngster, and the actual amount real knowledge available to the human race has been more than one person could handle for thousands of years.

Just to be clear, I am talking about real scientific knowledge. Not the day to day minutiae of people's lives. Every minute of every day people produce more gossip than anyone can handle, but fortunately, gossip has a half life of about 30 seconds, so after a day it just so much heat energy being dissipated into space.

And there is another thing about knowledge. There is knowledge in books and there is knowledge in people's minds. Information stored in books is good. Printing multiple copies of books and passing them around is a good way to disseminate information (whether you do it with paper and ink or magnetic dipoles, electrons and phosphorescent particles is immaterial). But it is only when that information has been been absorbed by a person's mind and integrated with the knowledge that they already have that it becomes useful. So part of the exponential growth in knowledge is because of our increasing population and the generally increasing level of education.

Another part is the growth of the internet. For the last several hundred years, people have been establishing trade routes across the globe and devising ever more efficient ways of moving goods. You could look at these trade routes as blood vessels of the human organism. Over the last hundred years or so we have been developing electronic communications. This can be likened to the growth of nerve fibers in developing organism. So are we all part of Gaia? Or are we becoming a new form of multi-bodied life? Or perhaps as Agent Smith in "The Matrix" put it, we are a cancer on the face of the earth?