Future Web, life the universe and ZX basic.
Future web
Street-view has been polemic in its reception recently, both positive and negative reactions, but none can deny it’s wow factor. Phil Gyford recently blogged about its possibilities moving forward, as an aggregation of all location based data. I see a future were ‘star trek’ style scanners replace the street view cars, and ‘super nano mega x-ray’ every molecule as they drive by (probably quite slowly and carefully avoiding all the jet-packing commuters). This would give a complete digital snapshot of the location, including every object internally, people and all (detecting any harmful tumours as a bonus). Privacy issues aside, this would be a completevirtual recreation, add in digital molecule production and you have ‘replicators’ or brain backup facilities.
Then I started to think about the data storage issues. If for the sake of argument you could scan and store every molecule, how would you store it. Presumably the database would require more molecules than 1 to store each. Therefore would the database be physically bigger than the surface and contents of the earth, would we have to turn mars into a data centre? Compression would help the problem, but still!
My brain is starting to ache a bit now, and I’m certainly getting it wrong.
Back in the mid 80’s I wrote a program for my ZX Spectrum, a simple program that started with the screen white and one by one in binary sequence changed each pixel from white to black. It also started to make by ears bleed. Somewhat like the rice on a chess board it seemed simple yet ‘impossible’ how long would it take to complete? The thing that was even more mind boggling was that it would in the course of completion display a cure for cancer (and lots of wrong ones) every paragraph from every book every written and ever to be written, and with comedy misspells, it would display a picture of me, you and everyone every.
OK the pictures would be crude as the 256×192 pixel mono graphics are far from photographic quality, but fine for copy. 49,152 pixels to turn on and off as a binary sequence, a mind boggling number but a finite figure. So is there is only so much knowledge that we can output in written form as a race. And was it all created in a few lines of code in the 80s? probably not, but it make you think (well if you are as dim as me it does). Oh and I now own the copyright of everything every past present and future.
