PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

10. IF I CAN, I WANT
what the world had been familiar with. Value and recognition are associated
with newness.
Seen as a whole, tourism is repetitious behavior; tourists are all doing
the same thing, copying one another. An activity like copying does
not draw on someone’s creative potential. There is no danger of running
out of ideas. One can go on copying forever by copying copies. Creating,
however, ultimately exhausts someone’s innovative potential, is
subject to competition and follows a natural growth-process, which at
the end flattens out.
Exploration can be related to creativity and “newness,” while tourism
is related to copying and “the same old thing.” The lifework of
Einstein, discussed in Chapter Two, demonstrates both features. Up to
1945 Einstein’s publications followed and S-curve because he was creating
and contributing to the world knowledge of physics. From then
onward, the number of publications with his name became poor in
original scientific thought and followed a straight-line trajectory with no
ceiling in sight.
If we consider the whole of Western European society as a single organism
over time, one may be able to see exploration as an act of
tourism. The exploration of the Western Hemisphere (Figure 2.2), when
seen at this level of abstraction, can be interpreted as one action of the
“organism” Europe. The organism takes such an action because it can—
adequate ships, means of navigation, and other conditions permit it at
some point in time—and for reasons of “nourishment,” not unlike the
tourist at Notre Dame. Alternatively, one may want to think of an
American tourist as an explorer, for example, following his or her destiny
on America’s learning curve about a particular European
monument. A conceivable saturation level can be envisaged when all
Americans have passed in front of that monument.
One can thus try to relate natural growth to tourism but only on an
abstract conceptual level. The difference in time scales and relative
sizes is such that while the learning curves of natural growth provide a
good description for explorations, they do poorly with tourism. The
number of tourists in front of a monument per year is smaller than the
rate of population increase, so that saturation will never be reached.
The cumulative number of tourists, no matter what time scale, will not
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