heinleinblog

Is the Internet developing sentience? The writer of this article evokes Heinlein to say it’s possible:

We tend to get lost in all that information and for the larger segment of web travelers we forget about the whole network of machines that are joined together by a nervous system of wire and wireless
connections. When I sit back a think about the wonder that is the Internet I am often reminded of a book by Robert Heinlein called The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. The basic premise of the book is that at some point in the vast computer network that runs the Moon colonies something happens. In a corner of this network an awareness is born and it calls itself Mike. While the book is about much more than just a computer network becoming aware – developing an intelligence – that one aspect of it always fascinated me.

Cool.

I like Heinlein. I like the Internet. See how well the two work together:

In Robert Heinlein’s classic science-fiction story “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” an outrageously extravagant entrepreneur constructs a huge and elaborate business plan inspired by the question, “Who owns the moon?” The entrepreneur has noticed that the moon only passes directly over those parts of the earth within about 30 degrees of the equator (more or less the Third World), and given that property rights are generally understood to extend down to the center of the earth and upward without limit, he asks himself, what if someone set about buying up the “lunar claims” of these Third World “Moon States.”

It’s an entertaining story, but it’s just science fiction. Greg Wyler is a real-world entrepreneur who merely plans to hook up the 3 billion people in the Moon States to the World Wide Web. His company, O3B Networks, has as its mission to make the Internet accessible and affordable to the “other three billion” (hence “O3B”) people in the developing world, enriching lives and ensuring fair and equal access to information throughout the entire world.