A couple of my favorite science fiction stories involve ancient repositories of data that have fallen into disuse.
For example, toward the end of Foundation and Empire in Isaac Asimov’s classic Foundation Series, our heroes go to the now mostly abandoned world of Trantor, which is described as being the closest habitable planet to the center of the Milky Way. At the height of its influence, Trantor was essentially one colossal city — an enormous metropolis (an ecumenopolis) — that stretched deep underground and was home to a population of 45 billion human inhabitants. In addition to housing the Imperial Palace and the Emperor, Trantor’s function was to administer and rule the millions of inhabited worlds and the quadrillions of people that formed the Galactic Empire.
One of the prominent features of Trantor was the Library of Trantor (variously referred to as the Imperial Library, the University of Trantor Library, and the Galactic Library), in which “librarians were tasked with indexing the entirety of human knowledge by walking up to a different computer terminal every day and resuming where the previous librarian left off.”
Our heroes visit the now long-abandoned library in search of… but I will say no more because I don’t want to spoil anything for anyone who has not yet read this classic. If you do decide to indulge, then may I recommend starting with the original trilogy, and only then reading the prequels and sequels.
The point is that I have spent more time than is good for me imagining exploring the hundreds of levels, each occupying multiple square miles, of this library.
Another classic tale is A Fire Upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge. The story starts with an expedition to a planet at the outer edge of the Milky Way investigating a five-billion-year-old data archive that offers the possibility of unimaginable riches. Unfortunately, they wake a dormant artificial superintelligence that sets out to take over all the races in the galaxy, “rewriting” their people to become its agents. Although this may sound exciting, all of this takes place in the 7-page prologue, after which the action really starts.
These meandering musings were triggered when my chum Jay Dowling sent me a link to an article on The Verge titled New Research Shows How Many Important Links on the Web Get Lost to Time. The main topic of this article is the concept of “link rot” (also called “link death,” “link breaking,” or “reference rot”), which is the phenomenon of hyperlinks tending over time to cease to point to their originally targeted file, web page, or server due to that resource being relocated to a new address or becoming permanently unavailable.
I’m sure that, like me, you see examples of this every day. In addition to being annoying, it also makes me feel sad that so many resources are “evaporating away” and being lost to time. Of course, there’s always the Wayback Machine, but you can’t use that for every broken link, or you’d never get anything done.
We can always impute entropy, but playing the blame game doesn’t really help. Now I feel sad. I’m thinking of Roy Batty’s Tears in Rain soliloquy in the Blade Runner movie when he says, “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” I’m also thinking of the line “All we are is dust in the wind” from the song Dust in the Wind by the American progressive rock band Kansas (see also Is Dust in the Wind All We Are?).
Maybe my gloomy disposition is based on the fact that it’s Friday afternoon and it’s been a long week (I’ve had shorter months). I need cheering up, which is your cue to quickly post some cheery and/or consoling comments.
Max, I admire you for the number of SF books you have read, but even more, I admire your ability to remember the details. On the other hand, as I am in retirement, I find the fact that I forget details to be a blessing because I can re-read these great books and still enjoy the mystery and surprises. I have read Asimov’s “End of Eternity” probably 8 times, and Hogan’s “Thrice Upon a Time” at least 3 times, maybe 6 times, but I don’t remember that either. 🙁
One of the reasons I remember the details is that I keep on re-reading the books LOL. Which reminds me that I remember reading a lady saying that you get to the point in your life when you realize you have only a limited time left and you decide to not bother reading anything new but instead to revisit old favorites. I think this was in “Algorithms To Live By” by Brian Christian (https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250118360) — a really good read — strongly recommended.
I heard about this but since it is something I have not read before, I will pass.
I’ve also forgotten a lot of details about the books I’ve read. I’ve read both of the ones you mentions, but I don’t recall much more than that I have read them. Then again, it’s probably been at least thirty years since I’ve read either of them. Time to read them again, I suppose. If only I didn’t have all these other books queued up.
Some years ago, I wrote on my blog that the way you knew you had a problem with books was not when you started reading a book and came to realize that you’d already read it, but when you bought a book, knowing that you’d already read it, because it was easier than finding your copy.
“…when you bought a book, knowing that you’d already read it, because it was easier than finding your copy.” ROFLOL
Been there, done that.
One other thing, I do believe that life is the only anti-entropy agent in the universe. Glad to be alive.
Sadly not, because life burns energy in the process of creating order out of chaos and then maintaining that order. The next result is that more energy is consumed — and overall entropy increases — where life is present.
That is interesting. I would like to revise and extend my remarks. Life, in the context of order vs. chaos, and ignoring thermodynamics, is the only agent that is anti-chaos. However, many would claim that human life has only contributed to the chaos.
“Life, in the context of order vs. chaos, and ignoring thermodynamics, is the only agent that is anti-chaos.” I hate to burst your buggle again (LOL), but what about crystals?
Mr. Google says “Even though the crystal has low entropy, its formation increases the entropy of the surroundings enough so that the process has a net positive entropy change for the universe.”
That’s right — net positive entropy means that entropy is increasing — so the crystal itself has a low entropy, but the act of the crystal forming increases the entropy in the universe — I rest my case.