Over the last week or so, I’ve been joyfully ploughing my way through a series of lectures from the Long Now Foundation. Their excellent series of Seminars About Long-Term Thinking (SALT) is an ongoing outreach program of public presentations designed to foster interest in, and debate about, responsiblity for the common global future. The mp3s of each monthly seminar since 2003 are available on the website, and I can’t recommend them highly enough. Speakers include Ray Kurzweil, Bruce Sterling, Vernor Vinge (all on the Singularity), Phillip (Linden) Rosedale on Second Life, Will Wright, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, Freeman Dyson, to name but a few.
One talk by David Rumsey led me to the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection, of which he is founder and patron. This huge and searchable cartographic archive developed from his collector’s passion for maps, and is available online for free viewing and download. I came across this 1875 Adolf Stieler map, showing the locations of trans-Atlantic submarine telegraph cables and shipping routes (link to larger image):
The first reliable trans-Atlantic cable began operating in 1866, although previous attempts at establishing a working connection dated back to the 1850s. The map above is by no means the first map of a submarine cable – a map of the first cable was published in 1858, for example – but it does show the beginnings of an international communications network predicated on electrical means. In 1902, this network was extended across the Pacific, thereby encircling the world with remote voice transmission technology for the first time. This map is actually a palimpsest of communications, with the relatively new telegraphy system superimposed on much older lines of communication, i.e. shipping routes.
A couple of days ago, Neomeme posted a link to a Discover magazine article about the mapping of the blogosphere. Matthew Hurst of Nielsen BuzzMetrics produced a series of images derived from reciprocal traffic data between internet nodes, in this case blogs.
The large white circle in the middle of the image is Daily Kos, along with other sizable nodes such as BoingBoing and Michelle Malkin in the central cloud. Outliers of significance include sports and pornography communities, and LiveJournal to the top right, in splendid near-isolation. This map is a representation of a modern form of communication, the blog, which is growing faster by the second than probably any other form of human interaction in history. Blogs are purely data, of course, in contrast to the submarine cables which carry much of this information around the globe. Whilst cables continue to be laid along old and new routes alike, there are two new blogs born every second, a trend that seems likely to continue for a while yet.
As for future networks, the BBC reports that the US government will have a router in orbit by 2009. Project Iris will facilitate military communication using IP, rather than more traditional means. It may be the first in a series of orbital satellites, routing traffic between each other, rather than through terrestrial servers, as happens at present. This would dramatically increase traffic speeds, so the theory goes, as transmitted data only need leave and return to ground once. No pictures for this project yet – even the prototypes have yet to be built …
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Thankyou Kuipercliff. I am again indebted to you for pointing out the Long Now foundation. I am clearly going to have to plow through this excellent material as well.
As to communications networks though, possibly the most significant ones in our future may well be self assembling ones whose maps, is we have them at all, will be reported by the nodes themselves. Some may even be small enough to be called “Smart Dust”.
Exciting though such prospects are, they certainly have their dark side to. I will post shortly in more detail but for now wanted to register my thanks.
Seems the first picture (1875-stieler-map) doesn’t load for me.
I recommend The Clock of the Long Now (shit, I sound like Amazon’s recommendation system). Similarly, Longbets.org is fun.
Great article, as always.
Additional: I didn’t know that Longbets.org was affiliated with the Long Now Foundation. I see it now in the corner of their page.
@klauswitz and hthth
My pleasure, as always! Check out the Long Now – I’ll post something about it again: it’s calmed me down somewhat. It’s amazing how many things lead back the same way. I’ll try and sort that map out btw. Wanna lay a bet that I do? The bets are quality: will the Singularity occur before, or after, 2040? Hrafn, I need to pick your brains re that last issue.
@hthth
Reckon that image is sorted?
@clauswitz
Smart dust has been in the news this week, but I want to hear your take on it.
On Singularity: My pessimistic guess is after 2040 — but it’s very hard to predict considering the unprecedented rate at which tech is advancing.
The pic is sorted, yeah.
2040+? It’s a weird one, isn’t it, although I agree with you. Kurzweil’s a 2040-2050 man, I know. I tend to side with Cory Doctorow on this – we’ve had several technological singularities already, literacy being the obvious one. His argument being that it’s nearly impossible to explain to someone from a pre-Singularity world what the post-Singularity world might ‘look’ like. As a result, the notion of an apocalyptic Singularity is somewhat misplaced.
I’d be interested to know if anyone has worked up a thesis based on the analogue of Hawking radiation, i.e. can you detect information escaping from the Singularity? Of course not – the analogy breaks down here: information would have to go back in time for us to do so!
I always have the sneaking feeling of self-fulfilling prophecies with regard to the Singularity. I can’t remember whether it was Bruce Sterling or Vernor Vinge who described it as the ‘nerd rapture’, but you know what they mean. The more I look into this, the more uncertain I get, not as to the actuality of it – something will surely happen – but to the perception/psychology of it. Your recent poll showed that in spades, to be honest, as you surely expected it to.
I guess you read George Dvorsky, right? Damn, I need to get back to a country with bookshops!
Corrections:
1. Yesterday, I heard a recording of Ray Kurzweil maintaining that he’d always had the date of 2029 in mind for a technological singularity (rather than the 2040-2050 date range I quoted).
2. Ken MacLeod coined the phrase “Rapture of the Nerds”, although I’ve heard both Sterling and Vinge quote it.
rockin!!!!