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Walking around with the sum total of human knowledge. That featured heavily in a lot of episodes where the ship carried around a library of everything and and c
by dougmwne 5y ago
Walking around with the sum total of human knowledge. That featured heavily in a lot of episodes where the ship carried around a library of everything and and could communicate back to the network on Earth for everything squared. Often problems were solved by database search algorithm.
And the VR Holodeck is spot on actually. I was having moments where I was questioning how much better the experience really would be with a matter-energy converter. It already works pretty well using stupid human perceptual tricks.
- mr_gibbins 5y agoWe used to have the sum total of human knowledge, or at least a good facsimile of it. Unfortunately, with the Internet as we know it transformed into a handful of walled gardens, finding detailed knowledge is increasingly difficult. Wikipedia is excellent, as usual. But it is an encyclopaedia, not a definitive source of original knowledge, and it remains the case that I can browse my modest (physical) bookshelves and find a book on, say, Russian modern history that will give me far more in-depth information in the first ten pages than I can find online. Same applies for almost any genre, except perhaps fiction. Seven Years In Tibet taught me more about Tibetan geography and culture than any amount of Googling could do. The idea of an infinite knowledge bank is appealing and I think the Internet could have made it - imagine a suite of applications that complement Wikipedia - but commercialism has ruined the utopia, as it is designed to do.
- native_samples 5y agoTechnically, all the books are online now thanks to Google's book scanning programme and Kindle. You might have to buy it to see the pages but that's OK. Of course Star Trek didn't have money, so ...