Tuesday 26 November 2013

A Brief History of Time, Communication, The Cloud and Everything

In the beginning there was a cloud. Slowly, over aeons of time, bits of this huge cloud clumped together and consolidated. Then suddenly one day - bang! It  got hot enough to trigger a nuclear reaction. The sun appeared and blew away most of the cloud.  Some bits of cloud remained, and these turned into the planets. After a bit of violent upheaval, they finally settled down into the configuration we have today, with the Earth situated at a very pleasant distance from the sun and at a nice moderate temperature. Under these conditions it was inevitable that life formed and eventually evolved into animals, plants and the human race.
 
In the Beginning There Was a Cloud
If you look at the literature on the history of the human race, it is obvious that human beings and their ancestors never actually communicated at all for the first two and a half million years. That's rather a long time to just sit and stare at your neighbour. No wonder they developed stone axes and decided to hit each other with them. They must have been absolutely fed up with the sight of each other.

Eventually however, someone came up with the bright idea that it might be nice to talk, so language came into being. This seems to have happened somewhere around 50,000 years ago, and it was an instant hit. It was like a virus, with everybody now chattering away to everybody else.  The Earth, totally silent for the previous 4.5 billion years after it coalesced out of the primordial cloud, suddenly became a noisy place.  It was full of conversations like  "I heard Mrs Ugg talking to the Oggs the other day.  Terrible people, those Oggs, their cave is always filthy, full of old dinosaur bones. I wouldn't deign to speak to them myself".  But other people would speak to them, and they continued to do so for millennia.

Stories were invented so that people could pass them on and others could learn from what had happened before.  These stories turned into lengthy sagas, and the amount to remember became huge. As time went on, the sagas turned into entire encyclopedias, and it all started to get a bit difficult. Eventually everybody got fed up. This stimulated the human brain to suddenly cross another size threshold, and to invent WRITING. What a day that was!  The only problem was this: what on earth to write on?

They tried a few things. Sand: no problem writing, but the words tended to get obliterated quite quickly.  Rock: could scratch this a bit, but it was hard work to get any amount of information down. Then somebody thought about animal skins. This seemed to be fine with just two minor problems. The animals objected rather a lot to being skinned, so the ones chosen tended to be the smaller ones.  This meant that you either had to write very small or stitch a lot of them together. The other problem was that these started to smell after a few days and then rotted shortly afterwards, once again defeating the object of the exercise.

The human brain must have hit another huge technological breakthrough  about 7,000 years ago, when somebody thought it would be a good idea to go and pick a few reeds and stick them together, strip off the outside and use the sticky bit in the middle. Bash it all together with a hammer, making an even stickier mess, and  finally weight it all down and  leave to dry. So papyrus was born, and the Egyptians loved it. At this point it seems that the capacity of the human brain started to know no bounds, and in no time at all (c 2,000 years), paper was invented. This could be written on with ease, didn't disintegrate, and it could be copied again and again. What's more, it could be put together to make books. Libraries soon came into being, holding all the wisdom of human history.  There was a minor blip when the library of Alexandria went up in flames taking about three quarters of the world's knowledge with it, but it didn't take long to go and work it all out again.

In the 19th Century a man called Babbage invented something called a 'Difference Engine', the world’s first computer. At first computer data were saved on paper, but this method required a lot of trees, took up masses of storage space, and nobody ever got round to reading it anyway. So somebody invented paper tape.  Not a great advance, as this was even more difficult to read than print-out, but you could at least feed it back in to your computer.  After that came reel-to-reel tapes. Marvellous! Now you could retrieve any information you wanted; you just had to remember which tape it was on, and hope that the machine operators weren't on a coffee break.

Finally we move into the 21st Century, and somebody has invented a way of storing data in a cloud. Just look up above you and you can see what a great advance this is.  In the UK there is certainly plenty of storage space. This is the future! Unlimited on-line document storage, right up there in the sky. Your plans are safely stored in a nice big cloud hanging over Manchester.  No danger of ever losing that data: there is always a cloud over Manchester.


There are more clouds on Earth than anybody can possibly use, but if we do ever run out of them, just look up a little higher into the heavens.  Venus is covered in them, and Jupiter, with a surface area over 120 times that of Earth, has an inexhaustible supply. Is there another technological advance beyond Cloud Computing? Maybe so, but it isn't needed just yet. There is plenty of cloud space to store all the world's knowledge for many hundreds of years to come. So we can all live happily ever after, safe in the knowledge that it is all secure, accessible, and constantly backed up.