I was contemplating the vast amount of storage needed to house the world wide web.
Giant halls of servers thrumming endlessly.
But just how much space will these servers need as the number of users explodes into trillions over the coming decades?
How much energy will it take to keep these towering hives of wires cool?
Will we one day see colossal farms of storage encrusting the Moon or colder more-distant bodies and planets? Grand larders powered by the sun and cooled by space?
Gerry Anderson could never have predicted the World Wide Web [or at least I don't think he did] but had he then data storage could well have been a crucial role for his various world protectorates and space fleets.
My own favourite, Project SWORD, could well have found itself setting up and guarding the globe's mega-servers on data farms spanning colder worlds like Ceres or Io.
Massive satellites would harvest the flow while city-sized space stations would offer respite for SWORD personnel and the re-fuelling of sentry craft at the far edges of the system.
How would data sentinels look? How would SWORD web farmers and storage miners be transported? Which craft would be needed in the fleet?
As we contemplate this and other gargantuan puzzles we may well gaze at the grandeur of Gerry Anderson's titles for ETERNITY and seek some counsel there.
What do you think readers?
I suspect we will find new ways of storing more data, quantum mechanisms, dna, or something we haven't thought of yet! Shame we don't do something good with it!
ReplyDeleteYeah I agree Kev. I reckon some form of bio-storage like a DNA-Internet fusion! Sounds creepy though! Like you I hope we don't fill it all with adverts and trash.
DeleteI'd just wish the contents would be worthy of all the trouble taken with storing it.
ReplyDeleteThose dreams of space and future I grew up with, often contained an inherent idea of a qualitative chance for the betterment of the human race. Now that this future, at least in part, technologically is here, there is very little evidence of this happening.
I do know what you mean Arto. I wonder if this is a baby boomer thing, a result of of so much brilliant retro-futurism on TV and at the cinema and in comics when we were kids. Could it ever have come to pass? As an aside, Scot;and will get a new rocket site in the coming years on the edge of the world in far Sutherland.
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