From: whheydt@pbhya.PacBell.COM (Wilson Heydt)
Subject: Re: How Can You Lose a Planet?
Reply-To: whheydt@PacBell.COM (Wilson Heydt)
Organization: Pacific * Bell, San Ramon, CA
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 00:17:02 GMT

In article <199301211657.AA28127@bio-rad.com> mlo@bio-rad.com writes:
>I think that you are all still underestimating the size and
>complexity of the Library.  
>
>In the long run, pure text will be a miniscule part of any library.
>And what format will the rest be in?  I doubt that the Galactic
>culture has had stable and universal software standards for the past
>billion years -- to a good first approximation, *all* the data
>in the library is in obsolete formats.  Perhaps, depending on
>whether there's much technological change, even on obsolete
>types of media.  I would think that a major part of the Library
>Institute's job is bringing data into useable formats.

While you may have a point for 'real world' considerations, Brin's
universe has three salient conditions that contravene this--first
there is the reverence whith which the Galactic culture holds the
Progenitors.  It if was done that way by the Progenitors--then that is
the right and only way to do it.  The Galactics are extremely
*conservative*.  The first (and usually *only*) place a Galactic will
look to find out anything is In The Library.  If it isn't In The
Library--it is held not to exist.  Recall the space battle sequence in
_Startide Rising_.  Doing a gravity-assisted tight turn around a
planet is an 'accepted' tactic.  Dumping a couple of million tonnes of
water in the middle of the turn *isn't*--it isn't In The Library.
Third, the Galactic culture is *old*.  We live if a very rapidly
developing technological era.  Most of our history isn't like that.  As
little as a couple of hundred years ago, most people lived in a nearly
(technologically) static situation.  While we think we can build
smaller faster computers, bigger memory chips, denser disk drives, and
more efficient machines of all types--we know there are limits.
Within another order of magnitude, microcomputers are going to start
running into signal transmission limits.  We can cram more memory onto
a chip--but we're already running into practical problems with memory
stability due to cell size (on modern, high density, memory chips
we're getting to the point that most errors are or soon will be caused
by radioactive trace contaminants in the encapsulation...).

I will grant that (due to the existence of FTL drives in Brin's
universe) the Galactics may not be limited by lightspeed for their
computers--indeed, one would tend to view the Library as a bunch of
really spiffy terminals with FTL-dial-up capability and a permanent
FTL-linked backbone among sector libraries (sort of a superduper
usenet with a superduper Internet backbone).

>Secondly, indexing.  All that data -- in alien languages, formats
>and media -- must be indexed to be useable.  I can't believe that 
>the Galactic Library Institute is up to the task!

Remember--the Galactics have been using a small (about 20) set of
languages that are easy to translate among for a *very* long time.
The culture is Static and Conservative.

>It's much harder to see how Earth could be missing from the
>mass of raw data unless there was some ongoing suppression of
>it whenever an indexer stumbles upon some data about it.

I think that's waht some of us have been saying...

	--Hal
-- 
Hal Heydt                    |    
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