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Planetary Hard Drive
The BLDG BLOG offers an interesting proposal:
This reminds me of another ongoing fantasy of mine, which is that perhaps someday we won't actually need harddrives at all: we'll simply use geology itself.
In other words, what if we could manipulate the earth's own magnetic field and thus program data into the natural energy curtains of the planet?
For several years I've been fascinated by what might be called the geological nature of harddrives – how certain mineral arrangements of metal and ferromagnetism result in our technological ability to store memories, save information...
(Earth's magnetic field [Addison Wesley])
I have no idea how this could work, but it is a nifty idea. An idea that Roger Zelazny also had in his 1967 novel Lord of Light, in which a group of people crashlanded on a suitable planet and set up a version of the Hindu reincarnationist scheme based on technology - scientific reincarnation.
Yama regarded the monks who now sat upon the floor, their heads bowed, and he lowered his voice. "To have you to die the real death would have made you a martyr. To have permitted you to walk the world, in any form, would have left the door open for your return. So, as you stole your teachings from the Gottama of another place and time, did they steal the take at the end of that one's days among men. You were judged worth of Nirvana.Your atman was projected, not into another body, but into the great magnetic cloud that encircles this planet... You are now officially an avatar of Vishnu... You, personally, continued to exist only in the form of self-perpetuating wave-lengths, which I succeeded in capturing."
Read more about Planet Harddrive at BLDG BLOG. Also, read more about Zelazny's award-winning novel Lord of Light, including quotations from the book.
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