"The syntactical nature of reality, the real secret of magic, is that the world is made of language. And if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish." -Terence McKenna

In his book Food of the Gods: the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge: a Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, Terence McKenna crafts his carefully thought out theory proposing that our pre-human primate ancestors consumed psilocybin mushrooms for thousands of years, and this is the primary reason humanity’s evolution rapidly accelerated — launching us forward in the animal kingdom. Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is more plausible than it sounds -- especially in context of the emergence of human mind and language development.

As our distant ancestors left the forests for the grasslands and began moving throughout Africa after the last ice age, about 18,000 years ago, the species switched to a more omnivorous diet, which included psilocybin mushrooms. A variety of mushroom spores were found embedded in the dental remains of an 18,700 year old prehistoric woman. Researchers discovered microscopic evidence that the upper paleolithic woman had been nibbling “sponge capped, bolete mushrooms and gilled mushrooms from the Agaric group.” Thus, these ‘special’ mushrooms were definitively part of the stone-age diet.

In McKenna’s theory, the consumption of hallucinogenic psilocybin was done in small doses, where the effect doesn’t quite reach the point of hallucination, but instead reaches the point of heightened senses, such as visual acuity. This enhancement of vision would have helped our ancestors hunt, gather food, and detect predators.

At a medium dose, psilocybin acts as an aphrodisiac -- creates a sense of restlessness and sexual arousal. This would have increased instances of successful copulation, i.e. sexual reproduction which is the main game in evolution.

At higher doses, according to McKenna, in glossolalia-induced states of mind members of the group were inspired and compelled to use vocal sounds to communicate images to their tribesmen. The Stoned Ape Theory suggests that experience on magic mushrooms was the major contributing factor to the fast development of language during that period.*

“Nanotechnology has given us the tools…to play with the ultimate toy box of nature atoms and molecules. Everything is made from it…The possibilities to create new things appear endless.” -Horst Störmer
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​The nanotech field was arguably launched by Richard Feynman’s 1959 talk “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom.” As Feynman said then: "It is a staggeringly small world that is below...Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the head of a pin? "

Eric Drexler’s 1987 book Engines of Creation popularized the notion of nanotech and the next tour de force in the field was his classic 1992 book Nanosystems, which laid out conceptual designs for a host of nanomachines, including nanocomputer switches, general-purpose molecular assemblers, and a fascinating variety of other good stuff. Today's nanotech mostly focuses on narrower nano-engineering than what Drexler envisioned, but it’s still in the process of building a platform and tools that will ultimately be useful for realizing Feynman’s and Drexler’s dreams. The emerging nanotech marks manufacturing and utilization of carbon nanotubes, which have multiple applications, from the relatively simple such as super-strong fabrics and fibers to potential components of more transformative nanosystems like nanocomputers, molecular assemblers, and nanobots connecting our brains to the cloud.

What's next beyond nanotechnology? Here's how Wikipedia defines the term femtotechnology: "Hypothetical term used in reference to structuring of matter on the scale of a femtometer, which is 10^−15m. This is a smaller scale in comparison to nanotechnology and picotechnology which refer to 10^−9m and 10^−12m respectively."

Hugo de Garis, Australian AI researcher, wrote a few years ago in Humanity Plus Magazine on the power of the femtotechnology: "If ever a femtotech comes into being, it will be a trillion trillion times more “performant” than nanotech, for the following obvious reason. In terms of component density, a femtoteched block of nucleons or quarks would be a million cubed times denser than a nanoteched block. Since the femtoteched components are a million times closer to each other than the nanoteched components, signals between them, traveling at the speed of light, would arrive a million times faster. The total performance per second of a unit volume of femtoteched matter would thus be a million times a million times a million = a trillion trillion = 10^24."*