PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

2. NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK
MESOPOTAMIA, THE MOON, AND THE MATTERHORN
Learning, discovering, and exploring are activities of similar nature and
are often encountered together, as in the field of archaeology. Archaeologists
dig and analyze in order to learn about our past, at times in
remote places on earth. Mesopotamia is such a distant region, rich in
buried secrets of remarkable ancient civilizations. This itself is no secret;
scholars have been excavating the region for centuries. The rate of
excavations can be taken as a measure of the archaeologists’ interest,
reflecting the amount of knowledge obtained. Treating the process as
learning, it should be possible to forecast the number of further excavations
remaining to be undertaken.
The way to do this is to fit a natural growth curve to the cumulative
number of excavations. The ceiling will define the size of the niche of
knowledge that is slowly being exhausted. I performed this exercise on
the cumulative number of major excavations carried out in that region as
reported by a historical atlas. 4 The curve followed the data closely and
practically reached the ceiling.
Excavations in Mesopotamia began in the middle of the nineteenth
century and grew to reach peak activity during the 1930s. Later, the rate
of new excavations in the region slowed. It is a searching process similar
to the one of finding needles in a haystack, and the number of
needles remaining to be found slowly dwindled to a few. The fitted
curve predicts there are practically no more major new endeavors to be
undertaken in that region. By and large, learning from digging in Mesopotamia
has reached a ceiling. Like gold miners who find no more gold,
archaeologists are turning elsewhere for their searches.
The natural growth curve can also be applied to chart the progress of
explorations of the moon. Moon explorations came and went in less
than a decade, leaving behind an S-curve of visits to Earth’s nearest
neighbor. That is what we get if we plot the cumulative number of
American moon missions. The total number of launches to the moon
(both manned and unmanned) is only fourteen, which makes the statistical
fluctuations rather visible. Therefore, one can expect some scattering
of the data points around the curve. For example, the second expedition
came a little too early, while the fourth one was a little late. But on the
average the data points follow the S-curve pattern closely all the way to
the ceiling, (Appendix C, Figure 2.1). The moon knowledge “niche”
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