Hypernomics

CHAPTER 1A Brief History of Position and Direction

“The day science begins to study non‐physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of existence.”

Nikola Tesla

ANCIENT MAPS

“Here are Dragons” (HC SVNT DRACONES in the original Latin). These are the words of warning on the Lenox Globe (c. 1510) near the eastern coast of Asia. Such admonitions were common during the early Renaissance, as cartographers laced uncharted regions with hippos, lions, and sea monsters on their maps to scare away explorers. The unknown was terrifying. It still is.

Not knowing a safe way to get to the clean water on the Serengeti can get you killed. Every cave dweller knew that. What they needed to know was where the bad routes lay. Survival, then as now, depended on learning how to get from here to there in one piece.

You do not want to die of thirst. Yet, you do not want to have to guess about how to get to a river in the safest fashion, either. If you are on an isolated hike, something as simple as a badly sprained ankle can be fatal. You may need to deal with the good paths, the obstacles, the predators, the people along the way against whom you compete, and those with whom you conduct commerce—all of them to stay alive. What to do? Where to go? How to do it?

Humans have many capabilities brought on by millions of years of evolution. Our ancestors demonstrated our faculty for abstraction in the Serengeti, where researchers found some of the first ...