| rdfs:comment
| - The communities of the Aquarius phase are likely to be some of the most ‘wired’ communities of the 21st century, host to Ubiquitous Computing environments linked to the global Internet and supporting a vast spectrum of personal communications, entertainment, information, and hard data communication between the various supporting subsystems of colony infrastructures. Aquarius will set the pattern in IT for much of later TMP development, marine colony systems serving as proving grounds for architectures that will be employed, with progressively more advanced hardware, in the later Asgard phase and on the lunar and planetary surface settlements of the Avalon phase.
|
| abstract
| - The communities of the Aquarius phase are likely to be some of the most ‘wired’ communities of the 21st century, host to Ubiquitous Computing environments linked to the global Internet and supporting a vast spectrum of personal communications, entertainment, information, and hard data communication between the various supporting subsystems of colony infrastructures. Aquarius will set the pattern in IT for much of later TMP development, marine colony systems serving as proving grounds for architectures that will be employed, with progressively more advanced hardware, in the later Asgard phase and on the lunar and planetary surface settlements of the Avalon phase. In the original TMP Marshal Savage placed great importance on information technology in the culture of Aquarius colonies. Though he did not anticipate all of today's IT trends, he did have the prescience to realize the importance the Internet, personal computing, and digital communications would assume in near-future society, it’s potential for media and communications convergence, and how embracing the virtualization of property and communication through IT could contribute to a materially leaner culture. Savage saw living at sea as preparation for living in space based on its ability to compel a similarly more efficient way of life and envisioned Aquarius as a community where IT was fully embraced toward minimizing of the unnecessary material overhead of society. He envisioned a community where all media would be digitized and stored in collectivized, high-reliability data storage. Computerized personal packet transit would eliminate wasteful goods packaging and maximize the convenience of casual barter and the community-wide sharing of tools. And robust digital communications would preclude much long-distance travel and link human activity, and our living and working environments, across space and time, allowing for international collaboration and reducing the need for large specialized facilities on the colonies by allowing so many people to work out of their own homes. The Aquarian inhabitant can expect to experience a lifestyle greatly reduced in volume of physical stuff but greatly expanded in volume of communication, media, and information and thus with no sacrifice (indeed, a great improvement) in standard of living. The typical Aquarian dwelling may seem simple or minimalist in some ways but it will still have room enough to bring the whole world in. But how will such a wired habitat be achieved? In the original TMP Marshal Savage, somewhat anachronistically, envisioned a great, possibly artificially intelligent, supercomputer at the heart of Aquarius, centralizing and collectivizing its IT infrastructure and systems control. In TMP2 we envision the whole Aquarius colony itself as that computer, its IT infrastructure distributed throughout its physical structure and the lives of its inhabitants rather than concentrated in any one machine. The key to this difference in paradigm is a concept we introduced in the Foundation section as one of the suggested projects of the Open Source Everything Project; a computer architecture concept known as the Distributed Computer.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)