The book of Revelation in the Bible is a fascinating read, it really is. If you start from the assumption the ancient prophet and sage really did see the future then the issue becomes understanding how he would describe give or take our now using the words available to his times and experiences. The segment about the number of the beast has always been of particular interest to me, being as how his understanding of numbers was really rather primitive compared to ours... he didn't even have the concept of zero to work with. Anyway, for some reason I've always felt that the number of the beast was actually an attempt to give a population value for Planet Earth, perhaps a warning about how many people can live on Earth before population pressure would cause things to start degrading into barbarism... say perhaps 6.66 billion or so?
But tonight a different thought occurred to me: what if it was indeed a population value, but one that marked when mankind would hit a certain level of technology? A level of technology sufficiently advanced for mankind to be at serious risk to a technology greater than his wisdom? Tonight I grabbed the big calculator and started playing with some numbers relative to that thought. Guess what... if you take six sixes, thirty six, and then raise that value to the sixth power guess what you get? Ok, you don't have to guess, you could work it out for yourself on your big calculator, but just to save you the trouble what you get is 2,176,782,336... two billion and some change. Would you like to guess when the population of planet Earth hit that value? According to the 2010 United Nations estimates courtesy of Wikipedia planet earth passed that value somewhere around 1940... just about the time of the first atomic weapons.
In post script: or was the triggering technology of that vision Eniac... the first truly digital computer developed and built at the same time as the first atom bombs? Project PX (the government code word for the work) didn't predate the Manhattan Project by enough to matter, considered against the centuries between those works and the work of John...
Things that make you go hmmmm.... and think about it.
Even conservative Christians have speculated that the "locusts" mentioned in that book, with stings in their tails, might be attack helicopters...
ReplyDeleteBut perhaps it was not this or that mechanical technology, but simply the predominance of Machine over Man, foreseen as early as the poetry of William Wordsworth: "The world is too much with us...Little we see in Nature that is ours/We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!"
Indeed... the Russian Hind attack chopper is the baddest bird of its' kind, and it does beat the ground with the sting of its tail (20mm gattling cannon) and from certain angles it does look like a hovering lotus...
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