A. H. Eden, J. H. Moor, J. H. Søraker and E. Steinhart (eds): Singularity Hypotheses: A Scientific and Philosophical Assessment

Yet in the 18th century, European thinkers noticed that social transformations had been accelerating for several thousand years; subsequent historical knowledge has made this observation more graphic and global. How long can the acceleration regime continue? In 1958, John von Neumann used the mathematical ‘singularity’ concept apropos of this subject, and the sonorous term was soon accepted in the humanities. The conceptual intrigue has become still more fascinating since a series of independent calculations demonstrated that the acceleration period was not limited by human history and prehistory but embraced 4.5 billion years of biosphere evolution in tune with a simple logarithmic law. This is one of the epoch-making and surprising discoveries in the early 21st century. Continents have been drifting on Earth over billions of years, climate changing repeatedly, meteorites falling down and volcanoes blowing up—yet, the phase transitions forestalled by global catastrophes happened successively, as if they were timetabled. Even after humans with their free will and interminable recklessness appeared, the logarithmic succession of global (now anthropogenic) catastrophes and revolutions did not change. Thus the evolutionary singularity’s status has essentially grown, through not only human history but at least the history of the biosphere (and in some hypothetical assumptions, the acceleration could have begun long before the Solar system, as first heavy elements were formed in the cosmos, about 10 billion years ago, and then localized on separate planets). Still more unexpected was an extrapolation of the