can somebody explain Terence McKenna's Timewave Zero Theory so i can understand it?

Answer 1

I can tell you what it's about, if you like.

But first, disclaimers. Terrence McKenna was more of a thinker than a scientist, and was long attracted to what he thought of as 'non-Western sources of knowledge'. And he was very fond of psychadelic drugs. None of this makes things he says wrong, of course, but it certainly never helped him when he was trying to convince others he was right.

Timewave Zero is a model he made based on some of his observations, numerology, and mathematics. Basically, he plotted out what he considered to be developments of new ideas throughout history and calculated the trend those points seemed to take.

The non-controversial part. It's pretty obvious that we've been finding things out faster and faster. Language is thought to have been invented around fifty thousand years ago, but we only get enough development and education to start producing history about seven thousand years ago. Most of science has been developed in the last fifty years and the amount of information an average person has access to today is simply staggering.

The controversial part. McKenna thought that this increase in information discovery and spread would keep increasing in rate until it reached a point of infinite height. At that point, he declared, everything possible would happen at the same time and the universe would come to an end. By no coincidence (he adjusted his curve to produce this result) the date when this was supposed to happen was the end of the Mayan calendar: December 21, 2012.

Since his original development of the concept, others have tinkered with it for various reasons... usually amusement. To my knowledge there are very few people who actually take it seriously, not only because of its founder but because it is based on so many unfounded assumptions (for example, "is there really any reason to believe information development will increase without limit" or "how exactly do you measure information density for past events").

Still, I suppose stranger things have happened. I can remember how many conspiracy theories were generally mocked before they were proven true (news sources considered the idea of Nixon's involvement in Watergate laughable at first). Hope that helps!