Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: How do you lose a planet? (was Questions about Pern...)
From: burns@latcs2.lat.oz.au (Jonathan Burns)
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 13:53:56 GMT
Organization: Comp Sci, La Trobe Uni, Australia


In article <1993Jan18.070804.29799@netcom.com>
 dani@netcom.com (Dani Zweig) writes:


> Streaker's microlibrary contained about a thousand times as much text
> as Earth had produced by the end of the twentieth century, and was on
> the order of a cubic meter -- counting data, software, and hardware.
> That may not be as good as you feel it ought to be, but it's impressive
> enough.

> Now, some conservative order-of-magnitude guestimates:  If the galaxy has a 
> steady-state oxygen-breathing population of a million planets, and each
> produces as much text per century as Earth has to date (it seems safe to
> assume that most of Earth's text has been produced in the past century),
> and this has been going on for two billion years, then that so-called
> microlibrary is actually a picolibrary -- the full library being over a
> trillion times its size.  *Not* within the capacity of Earth's data centers.

> Btw, I've been trying to remember the title of the short story in which
> all knowledge is stored in a single small box -- surrounded by several
> solar systems worth of indices and bibliographies.  Anyone remember?

_Ms Fnd in a Lbry, or, The Day Civilization Collapsed_, by Hal Draper.
My pleasure.


And this is much to the point, I think. The Library has been worked over
by several million species, whose sensoria, timescales, neural and genetic
architecture differ as much as ours do from ants'. What awes me is that
the dialectics of the _system of classification_ alone must have occupied
trillions of brain-years, and generated numerous galactic languages.
(Even given that each Patron species uplifts Clients into its own
intellectual paradigm.)

The full Library must contain at least a section in which is a "population"
of translators, e.g. between ray-optical vision and echolocation. One 
enquires into the geography of Planet Foo, but golly, where are the maps?
Nowhere! The geography is implicit in the conversation of the giant squids
that there abound, and makes real sense only by analogy with the Earth
Whale Dreaming, as interpreted by Dolphins, who can only just make themselves
understood in Galactic 8/11, most of their intellection being in Late
Terragens Synthetic Dialects. It's enough to make you want to go to Foo
and take a look, but your grant money only covers Library search...

Another thing about the Library, as Brin has set his Galactic Culture up,
which gives plausibility to his mysteries remaining so mysterious.
Planetary micro-branches will be customized for the technologies and
galactic society which the inhabitants most need to handle. In fact I
would not be surprised if Earth has been handed a bowdlerized collection
of What-the-new-Client-needs-to-know childrens' encyclopaedias. Mesonics
Made Easy, Know Your Neighbours... _and if you want to know any more,
ASK YOUR PATRONS_.

[* Turns out it's not quite like that. See below...]


This is well enough for aspiring clients, and exactly what they want to
know. But it will not be enough to support historical investigation.
Human history is a labyrinth. What happened then? Who said? Can they be
trusted? What were their preconceptions? Are we reading their language
right, or are there matters of context and analogy that we're missing?

Now form the combinatorial product of this with the indexing and coding
matters above ... and the detective work required to expose a cover-up,
(e.g. that certain parties quietly steered an asteroid into Earth collision
60 million years ago, subsequently deleting the Solar System from the
Perseus Arm Ephemeris Release 622570), becomes a thousand-year project
for a university.


Then in  <1993Jan18.225138.16014@clarinet.com>
   from: brad@clarinet.com (Brad Templeton)

> But it is, if what you want to store is facts, reference material,
> planetary discussions.  Classifying data exactly is hard.  Classifying
> data generally is not as hard.   The "encyclopedia galactica" even of
> a universe as varied as Brin's, should still store fine in a roomfull of
> gigabyte optical disks.

> You also underestimate earth's data storage.  Consider that certainly
> a few billion CDs are sold -- perhaps even every year.  Those are read only
> right now but we've already developed the technology to make them cheap and
> writable, and that's a billion gigabytes, not in data centers, but out
> in the consumer market.   Space today on writable optical disks costs 
> under 2 cents a megabyte.    I expect it to drop to a hundredth of that in
> time, or 20 cents a gigabyte.  (Certainly read-only storage, as would be used in
> a library, is already down to $1/gigabyte)

> A trillion gigabytes then would cost 200 billion dollars.   Forget about
> the Earth -- the U.S. defence department could buy it easily in a year.

> The cost of a trillion trillion bytes is high.  *Today* it would cost
> you 1000 trillion dollars, but how long until only a trillion?  A figure
> surely worth the cost of a complete galactic library.

Definitely. And from the viewpoint of the Library Institute, nothing
would be lost in letting Earth have it. After all, without specialist
Librarians, it would take Earth centuries to comprehend a millionth
of it. (Brin's Galactics would seem consistently to underestimate our
'Satiable Curiosity.)

[* Consult sources before posting, Jonno. According to _Sundiver_,
Earth initially _wants_ a micro-branch Library, and is resisting the
efforts of the Pila to foist a Full Branch on them, with assisting
staff of a few thousand librarians. We'd rather be Afghanis with machine
guns we can maintain, than Iranians with a superb airforce and no spare
parts...]


Losing the Solar System sounds most implausible to me. We have to assume
that everyone within 1000 lightyears is so trusting of the Library
that they never build telescopes, even to the extent of 20th century
Earth effort. Well, maybe so. Who makes fire by rubbing sticks? But
Brin's Galactics have neutrino scopes, supercomputers, etc, etc.

And they have at least two motivations for checking the atlas. (1) Prior
to migrations, cultures must send out prospectors, and there has to be
the equivalent of a Claims Office. (2) To check that nobody steals a
planet for a few million years extra occupancy.

I hope Brin surprises me. I can only imagine a conspiracy, and I'd hate
to have it be the Arisians, um, Progenitors, watching out for us in
secret.

There _is_ a conspiracy on our side, namely Fagin's Institute of Progress.
They don't look big enough to jigger the Library, but I'll bet they're
bigger than they look. It sounds rather as if wolflings, if they survive,
are groomed as potential Patrons for the next generation of Progenitor-
level sapients.


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jonathan Burns        | 'Dream that my little baby came to life again;
burns@latcs1.lat.oz.au| that it had only been cold, and that we rubbed
Computer Science Dept | it before the fire and it had lived.'         
La Trobe University   |   Journal of Mary Wollestonecraft Shelley, 1815
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