I get the feeling that Manfred is based somewhat on Ray Kurzweil, inventor and devotee to consciousness extension and long-term survivability. Kurzweil did invent some of the earliest non-visual computer interfaces, pioneering audio engineering techniques that eventually gave rise to the technology that populates my favorite love/hate synthesis monolith. Manfred is a synthesis of more than just Kurzweil though, I detect hints of Richard Stalman and Bruce Sterling (via his next-hundred-years-or-so novel Schismatrix which involved, among many other things, jovian moon terraforming and nation-state in space economics).
At some point in the novel Accelerando, Macx gets a suitcase full of noise. It’s random holographically stored data that when modulated in certain ways is a huge catalog of older music data he’s snatched up the copyrights on, and he first beams by radio to some point in space that’s sent a signal to earth that he figures is a Matrioshka brain. I’m wondering if maybe that random data is actually just the number Pi, which you can supposedly find any given string of numbers in if you compute it long enough – if they stored Pi to any given large number, they’d just have to specify a formula for what sections of the memory to read off and for how long to reconstruct the data needed.
In fact, if that’s possible, all we’d need is a data store large enough to store all of Pi (and if Pi really does contain all strings, you would need the entire universe to store it… oh), or a quantum computer fast enough to calculate it to whatever arbitrary size starting from whatever arbitrary point, then you’d just have to construct an algorithm to tell you where to get your data back from. It’d be like a hard drive that already HAD everything, you’d just have to figure out where to look for it.
Tags: fiction, Ululations are fun