#https://sirxemic.github.io/wormhole/

[driving-hazard]

(I was originally going to call the servers virtual people are housed in "polises" as they're called in Diaspora by Greg Egan, but ultimately decided to call them Grids because it sounds like something from Tron.)

The Grids and their inhabitants have by far the most well-documented history of any society before or since. The ease of storing information led to their 110,000 year timeline having almost zero ambiguity or discontinuities. This timeline extends as far back as the early 22nd century, a period which we will discuss here.

Following the wave of development of atomically precise manufacturing in the 2090's, a period of extremely rapid advances in all areas of technology occurred, which among other things led to the development of both molecular computers and brain-computer interfaces that were both fully integrated into the brain at a sub-cellular level and required no invasive surgeries. One of the uses of these technologies was to create backups of the minds of users, so that in the rare event of death, one could have a snapshot of their mind loaded into a robotic body, leaving them with amnesia, but leaving them alive nonetheless. This capability had a major unexpected consequence however, because after the first few years, some people began to simply load their backups into simulated environments on their computers while they were still alive, creating clones of themselves that lived entirely within VR.

Something like this brought about a major ethical issue, giving people the ability to create and destroy minds on a whim, leaving an entire class of people completely without autonomy, regardless of the supposed benevolence of their creators. With the near-impossibility of enforcing a ban on such practices, governments around the world turned to a different option: the creation of "virtual cities" where such creations could be housed within relative safety. To encourage people to move their copies to these cities, a major international propaganda campaign was drafted to form a coherent subculture around users who copied themselves, and to give the cities a vague mythical place in their minds, to make them feel as if they would be missing out on something if they didn't bring them into this secretive underground shadow society. A completely astroturfed cultural perception, but nevertheless it became pervasive enough to bring an estimated 79% of copies from home computers onto the semi-closed networks.

The first of these cities was a supercomputer complex constructed in Ashtabula, Ohio, known as ERIE-GH-JSK38831-3, and dubbed "The Grid" by outsiders. Its location was an open secret, and it was completely disconnected from the power grid, with a 500-MW nuclear fusion plant housed inside the facility. The next city, housed underground in Svalbard, was quickly dubbed the Svalbard Grid, and the naming convention stuck. By the 2260s, new molecular computer designs had increased the thermal efficiency of processors drastically, bringing the typical Grid's capacity from 25,000 copies to roughly 50,000,000,000, meaning the Grids would almost never have to worry about being filled to the brim, even if everyone on Earth copied themselves. A decade later, the first Grid was constructed in outer space, around the asteroid 1036 Ganymed. The facility was fitted with nanofactories, giving it the ability to manufacture anything, including copies of itself. From there, copies were under full control over their own futures, under the protection of no one but themselves.

[newshare-blog1]

Taken from /r/space/

Posted by Andi via newshare.