PREDICTIONS – 10 Years Later - Santa Fe Institute

2. NEEDLES IN A HAYSTACK
derstanding of the difference between exploration and mere
travel.
• • •
Tourists are not explorers. Tourists go where many others have already
gone before. For an undertaking to be qualified as an exploration, it
must involve learning through doing something for the first time. The
more times it has been done before, the more reason for this activity to
be classified as tourism. Both exploration and tourism involve learning,
but of different quality and scale. Exploration consists of many events
that conform to the S-curve of a learning process—for example, the S-
curve that describes Europe’s learning curve about the Western Hemisphere.
Tourism is made of isolated events with no connection to one
another. The only ones who learn from them are the individual tourists.
We will come back to look at the relationship between S-curves and
tourism in more depth in Chapter Ten, but what we can conclude at this
time is that exploration, like the learning process itself, follows the S-
curve pattern of natural growth. Therefore, it becomes possible to estimate
the time of its origin, if it is not documented, as well as the time
that it will slow down and stop, even if that time is well into the future.
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