Monday, March 22, 2010

Polls Archive 57 - Will 10-10-10 be significant?

Poll 57: "With which prediction do you more agree? 1. 10/10/10 (October 10th 2010) is going to be a very significant date for our planet. or 2. 10/10/10 will be an unremarkable day."
Poll ended January 30th 2010. 26% said that date will be significant, and 74% said it will be unremarkable.

:-) I just noticed that this poll ended on the 30th day of 2010, a nice little countdown, purely unintentional. But that's what our brains are designed to do, isn't it - look for the patterns within the noise, find the concealed meanings, see which is the approaching predator and which is just the waving grass.

Some people have remarked that 101010 in binary equals 42, a number familiar to Douglas Adams fans as "the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything". The idea that October 10, 2010 - 10/10/10 - could be significant, a day when we all find some answers, is an entertaining one to consider. After all these years of talking to people about the tenth dimension, having some sort of climactic event like this occur on that date would certainly be amazing, wouldn't it?

Let's ignore for a minute that 10/10/10 as a date is quite arbitrary - there are any number of counting systems and calendar systems that would assign a completely different set of numbers to that particular rotation of the earth that we're thinking of as October 10, 2010. A quick search on the net showed a few dire predictions, and a few optimistic ones. I like the approach of this hubpages.com web page by paradigmsearch: it leaves things fairly open-ended, and provides some interesting information. It also gets more specific with its poll-question than I did, asking us to predict whether 10/10/10 will be good, bad, or an unremarkable "nothing". As I'm writing this their poll has "good" slightly ahead of "nothing", with a comparatively small number of votes for "bad". Paradigmsearch also provides us with these interesting takes on the 10/10/10 number set:

101010 (base two (binary)) equals 42 (base ten). Oddly enough, this is evenly divisible by the number of days in a week (7 (lucky)); and equally oddly, is also evenly divisible by the number 6 (which is generally designated as being unlucky). Both a Ying and Yang situation seem to be incorporated into this date.

10 (base ten) = 1010 (base two)

(base ten): 10 x 10 = 100

(base two): 10 x 10 = 100

The binary attributes of 101010 lends itself to use by the sciences of fractals (recursive geometric shapes) and chaos theory (the butterfly effect).

In Imagining the Tenth Dimension, we've talked a lot about predictions. One of the very first poll questions I ran at this blog, Poll 4, asked about predictions of the end of the world and how that fits in with Everett's Many Worlds Interpretation. Does the fact that a prediction has not come true before prove that it's not going to happen this time? In my discussion of that poll question, I quoted from chapter 6 of my book:
...But eventually the deadline for all good predictions of the end has to arrive, and like the celebrated Y2K scenario, its promoters are then left looking a little foolish. In the anthropic viewpoint, we can imagine how those people also exist on different timelines where their predictions did come true. The reason we’re here on our current timeline to question what went wrong with their predictions is because on the timeline where they were right, we would no longer be here. Perhaps there were also people in Atlantis, or Mu/Lemuria, or in the ancient sunken ruins off of Cuba or south of Okinawa, who issued dire warnings of impending disaster, and who got to say one last “I told you so” before the end of their civilizations really did come to pass?
Which returns us to one of the more popular songs from the 26-song collection attached to this project. This is a song about how all predictions may come to pass in some part of the multiverse, or in some sliver of the multiple parallel universe landscape predicted by Everett's Many Worlds interpretation: "The End of the World".


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2Y9m34iJVY

So what's my prediction for 10/10/10? I predict that a large number of people are going to wake up on that day with a feeling of well-being and heightened awareness. And if you wake up that day feeling tired and grumpy does that disprove my prediction? Not at all. It will just show that you are observing your own version of the universe, one that is different from all the people who woke up that day feeling better. So if you're not enjoying the journey, ask yourself: why not?

Rob Bryanton

Next: Polls Archive 58 - Finite But Unbounded?

3 comments:

Mariana Soffer said...

Hi Rob, hope you are doing well, I needed to tell you that I really liked this post, well you know I love numbers, they seem to be magical and playful to me, sometimes I think about them as entities that do some combination provide weird results just to play tricks on us (I am not delusional, this is just an imaginary thought from when I was a kid).
By the way I loved the 42 in binary, and well I never thought about 10 10 10, which is strange, nobody brought that up which is strange.
Take care and hope you are doing well.

Peter said...

since the actual date is the year 2010 and not the year 10, it seems that all considerations are off - and what happened in 101010 - in the real year 10 (as opposed to the year 2010) - would be of extreme interest. It seems though that nothing remarkable happened on that day in the year 10.
cheers, Peter;

Rob Bryanton said...

Hi Mariana, I know what you mean! It's fun to play with ideas like this, and finding hidden patterns is what we are all designed to do.

Peter: are you suggesting 10 A.D. (or C.E. if you prefer) is not just as arbitrary as any other way of referring to a particular position in our spacetime continuum, including what we're referring to as October 10th 2010? Don't you think the real point here is that any date we choose to talk about has the significance we choose to assign to it? That's what I'm trying to convey here.

Thanks to you both for writing!

Rob

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