Event · era
The Grounding Wall
2060s–2120s
Step 3: progress throttled by contact with the physical world.
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Step 3 — The Grounding Wall (2060s–2120s). Even systems that had read everything were throttled on novel physical science, because reality is the bottleneck: experiments take time, materials must be made, organisms grow at their own speed. Progress becomes limited by contact with the world. This is where the embodiment thesis (next section) becomes history, not philosophy.