The Saturation Point

If you guys followed me on Twitter, you would have seen the series of tweets I wrote last night about the world being oversaturated with people. It's not that these people lack talent. Not at all; however, any field that contains even the slightest appeal, writing, for instance, is now overflowing with aspiring authors, journalists, poets, songwriters, etc., which makes it harder for any of these talented people to rise to the top.

At first, one would argue, "Well, hey, doesn't that mean that the absolutely most talented are gonna get famous due to survival of the fittest?"

Oops, no, so sorry, wrong answer. First, let's all reflect on the fact that Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen (a.k.a. Tila Tequila) got a television show. As far as I know, she has no marketable talents, besides being extremely hot (she is) and having over 1 million MySpace friends, neither of which can truly be considered talents. Essentially, she's a whore. Her show just took up time that could have been given to someone who actually had talent.

Now for the second part. If you've read Malcolm Gladwell's newest book Outliers, you will understand how success is influenced not only by the person's talent, but also by many arbitrary factors. He uses the example of birthdays in Canadian hockey influencing success, with those who have earlier birthdays being more likely to become pros in hockey, due to the setup of the Canadian youth hockey league. His proposal is that a player, Ned, born closer to January 1 (which is the cut-off date for the league) will have had more time to grow and mature than a player named Ian, who was born December 31st of the previous year, so their birthdays are only a day apart. Because hockey apparently favors larger players, the January 1 birthday will be seen as more talented and pushed to attend special hockey programs that will result in his becoming genuinely better at hockey than the player born on December 31st who was not drafted into the special hockey programs. Because January 1 is better, he will be sorted into the A-1 league, Canada's top youth hockey league, where he will compete against the best youth hockey players, gaining experience. December 31st probably didn't get into the A-1 league because he wasn't sent to the advance hockey program, a result of him not being seen as talented at hockey.

The end result? Ned eventually becomes a pro hockey player. Ian does not. And this could have been reversed, or happened a totally different way if only one of them had been born a few hours earlier or later.

So if success can be based on something completely arbitrary, like birthdays, how can we say that "survival of the fittest" in relation to humans will let the most talented rise to the top. This is obviously an erroneous viewpoint. Ian could have been more naturally talented than Ned, but because of their birthdays, Ned was put into the advanced leagues, while Ian was not. If success depended completely on talent, Ian would be the pro of the two of them.

But because 6.5 billion people are living on this planet, it can be hard to sort out who of us is the most talented at anything. And talent is not necessarily and indicator of success. Again I offer up the example of Thien Thanh Thi Nguyen. Compare that to one of my friends. She has written several short stories, which I think are rather amazing, and yet, she is not famous.

Perhaps the "whoring" nature of self-publication is onereason why the talented rise to the top. To achieve fame in the way that she did, Tila Tequila was forced to self-publicize relentlessly, whereas my friend sort of expects that somehow, she will become famous.

If this is why the most talented do not recieve notice, doesn't it mean that there is something wrong with the model? I realize that the sheer numbers of people alive today prevent publishers and talent scouts from discovering everyone who is good at something, and that if you want to be famous, you have to put yourself out there, but still, there needs to be a way to certify that those who have true talent are exposed and discovered.

But again, as I mentioned at the beginning, the number of talented people on Earth is astounding, and seems preventative to anyone getting discovered and recognized. There are simply too many people.

Which leads me to the necessity of a mass extinction event. Humans are so intelligent and geographically ubiquitous that the normal controls on population size (i.e. Drought, fire, natural disaster, famine, disease, predators, etc.) simply don't work anymore. At this given moment, I am sure that any number of these events is going on somewhere in the world. And is the human population plummeting? No. Even with these events occuring, the human population continues to increase exponentially.

This makes Agent Smith's revelation from The Matrix ring true: "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure." --The Matrix. (Can't believe I quoted The Matrix, but whatever).

Continued next week.