The Interplanetary Internet: Towards a Matrioshka Brain?
Written By: Surfdaddy Orca
Date Published: July 20, 2010
In 2008, NASA quietly announced the first successful test of a deep space communications network modeled on the Internet. The new software protocol was jointly developed with Google’s Vint Cerf and is being deployed on the International Space Station as a first step in what could become an Interplanetary Internet. The software protocol is an attempt to deal with the variable delays and intermittent connectivity of transmitting information through space. If you think you’ve got problems today connecting to the Internet from your smart phone or home wireless network, imagine that magnified a 1,000,000-fold when information is being shared between the Earth’s Moon, Mars, and beyond.
在2008年，美國航天局悄悄地宣布首次成功測試一建模在互聯網上的深空通信網絡。新的軟件協議是與谷歌的溫頓瑟夫合作開發的，和正在部署在國際空間站作為第一步，可能成為一個星際互聯網。那軟件協議是一項嘗試去處理變化的拖延和通過空間傳播信息的間歇性連接。如果你今天認為你以智能手機或從您的家庭無線網絡連接到互聯網是有問題，想像一下那已被放大1百萬倍，當信息是與地球的月球、火星以及更遠之間在共享的。
Today’s debate over the direction of the Internet is less concerned about space than what’s called the semantic web — a means of managing the relationships between information contained on the growing billions-upon-billions of web pages using intelligent agents. Kate Ray’s elegant and penetrating “Web 3.0” video captures the depth of the issues under discussion:
今天在互聯網的方向的辯論，是更少關注到太空比起所謂的語義網絡 - 一種管理工具關係在信息之間，包含越來越多億疊億的網頁使用智能代理。凱特雷的優雅和深入的“Web 3.0”視頻捕捉問題進行深入的討論：
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
Web 3.0 from Kate Ray on Vimeo.
And, as we rewire the web, the web rewires our brain. Author of the Atlantic article,“Is Google Making Us Stupid?”, Nicholas Carr argues that increased use and reliance upon the Internet is making us more “superficial and shallow” thinkers. Vint Cerf responds in the following video that teaching kids critical thinking is extremely important regardless of whether the source is a newspaper, magazine, friend, or the Internet:
而且，正如我們接通國際網絡，網絡接通我們的大腦。大西洋文章的作者，“谷歌是否使我們愚蠢？”尼古拉斯卡爾爭論，更多地使用和依賴互聯網使我們成為更“表面和膚淺的”思想家。溫頓瑟夫回應在下面的視頻，教孩子們批判性的想法是非常重要的，無論來源是報紙、雜誌、朋友、或互聯網：
Are Smart Phones Making Us Dumb? - Vint Cerf
智能手機是否使我們變啞巴？- 溫頓瑟夫
西元2010年02月08日
As one anonymous blogger comments, these “revolutionary technologies” will not make people smarter or less smart, “They may make one who uses them wisely more learned.”
正如一位匿名博客評論，這些“革命性的技術”不會讓人變得聰明些或少些聰明，“它們可能會使一個用他們的人明智地更博學。”
Increased “Web 3.0” intelligence coupled with NASA and Cerf’s enhanced communication Internet space protocols raises the intriguing possibilities of a “cosmic Internet” discussed in a recent article in the Daily Galaxy that starts to cross over into the realm of Vernor Vinge’s well-known SF novel, A Fire Upon the Deep. Vinge imagines a galaxy-wide "Net of a Million Lies," where different species are moving upwards through a series of "zones of thought" as their technology becomes more sophisticated. To achieve such a network, as the Galaxy article points out, “…we will need to use a lot of power - as much as the entire power of the Sun. A civilization able to do that kind of cosmic engineering is referred to as Kardashev Type II, or KT-II.” The power source for this civilization would be a Class B stellar engine — that is, the Sun itself. This would make our current feeble attempts to harness solar energy seem but a grain of sand on the beach of the possible.
Physicist Freeman Dyson is one of the few people who’s considered the possibilities at such a scale. His “Dyson spheres” would consist of a system of orbiting solar power satellites meant to surround a star and capture most or all of its energy output. Computer scientist Robert Bradbury took the concept of Dyson spheres and proposed nesting them inside one another like Russian matrioshka or babushka dolls using nanoscale computers — creating essentially a giant brain. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, inventor Ray Kurzweil, and others speculate that an advanced civilization may have already created such a brain, and that we humans are simply simulations running inside it.
Is the NASA Interplanetary Internet program the seed of such an enterprise?
“I don’t think of myself predicting things,” says Dyson in a recent New York Times article . “I’m expressing possibilities. Things that could happen. To a large extent it’s a question of how badly people want them to. The purpose of thinking about the future is not to predict it but to raise people’s hopes.”
Just as the semantic web will likely provide a tighter coupling between us as biological entities, our intelligent agents, and the googleplexes of data we are creating, the Interplanetary Internet could provide the substrate for an intelligent web that spans multiple planets — and perhaps beyond if we are to consider the SF-like possibilities described by Bradbury and others in the book Year Million: Science at the Far Edge of Knowledge.
The interesting thing — assuming that we aren’t simply simulations — is that the species likely to be around to experience this intelligent interplanetary web won’t be recognizable as you and me — homo sapiens sapiens. Our descendants will more likely be virtually indistinguishable — in ways we can’t yet understand — from the network itself.
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/editors-blog/interplanetary-internet-towards-matrioshka-brain
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