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"Human beings hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn; when they do, which isn't often, on their own, the hard way."
- Robert Heinlein
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| Datasphere | ||
| The entirety of computers and their information linked together, typically on a planet, in concept. |
Clever term encourages the reader to visualize a vast linkage of computers on the surface of a planet, perhaps using connections in orbit, forming a sphere.
| "The colony worlds have limited dataspheres," said Johnny. "While there is some contact with the TechnoCore via fatline transmissions, it is an exchange of data only... rather like the First Information Age computer interfaces... rather than a flow of consciousness. Hyperion's datasphere is primitive to the point of nonexistence..." |
| Technovelgy from Hyperion,
by Dan Simmons. Published by Doubleday in 1989 Additional resources -
|
The term is also used in the novel to describe the totality of linked computer systems on a large ship:
Charles Stross picks up this term and runs with it in Curator (2003):
"How long until we land?" asked Brawne Lamia. She had been using her comlog to access the treeship's datasphere and obviously was frustrated with what she had found. Or had not found.
Amber and her husband have few funds with which to pay for the propulsion lasers: what they have left of the kinetic energy of the Ring Imperium — based on the or- bital momentum of a small Jovian iimer moon — is being sapped, fast, at a near-loss, by the crude requirements of the exobionts and metanthropes who fork and spawn in the datasphere of the outer Jovians.
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'Our study of your race has convinced us that you are not fitted to leave your planet in the present state of your civilization.'
'...the spreading beam of the deranging ray struck them, and Then one toppled and fell. Then another.'
'Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space...'
'The men are dead, but their acquired wisdom lives on and I am the beneficiary.'
'Young people found the driverless car admirable for petting.'
'After twenty generations of shillyshallying...'
