I saw, running on a reality engine, our world. Not some jerky, nasty, low res
version of the world. I saw an 10x8 projected hi-res interactive model, which
was controlled using a hand spinnable globe (rotation in an arbitay direction)
and a spacemouse (viepoint).
I rotated the world. I flew over it. And I learned. I learned BIGTIME (but more
on that later). The model goes down, and down, and down. The people at the
Terra Vision project have combined lots of different models. The have one of the
big German towns (Bremen I **believe**) mapped down to building-level features.
Other areas of the world don't currently have this level of detail, but they are
working on it ...
Suddenly, it's there. The world, in your hands. You realise so completely,
absolutely, that this is one planet, that the boundaries are arbitary, goverment
imposed, totally false. You also realise that this isn't much data. It might
**seem** like a lot to today's machines (the web site (URL below) mentions than
32bits worth of virtual memory isn't really enough ...), but the very fact that
it's even manipulable using today's primitive computing devices (not than a
reality engine is that puny :) ) is, quite frankly, amazing. This is a fucking
***tiny*** planet. Not small. Tiny.
Terrra Vision, for me, crystalised a lot of questions bumping around in my head.
Just what kind of simulation is this universe we enhabit ? Pretty impressive,
whatever, and the coding system (DNA) compactness for the complexity it
generates is, well, nothing short of incredible. Plus a bunch of other things.
And it makes me want to apply one cardinal rule that strikes me everytime I
write something recursive and beautiful. If you want the system to remain
stable, you shouldn't fuck with it too much. You certainly shouldn't **tweak**
it while you are inside it. Ever been **inside** a VR environment, interacting
like crazy, when it crashes ?? It's bad. Disorientating. Very Nasty. Words don't
even come close to describing the claustraphobia. You rip off the goggles and
grab a breath of air. Not possible inside the simulation we enhabit daily.
We have to take care of this little planet of ours. I, for one, don't want
**anyone**, present, or future, to see a planetery crash. It would not be, as
they say, a good time. I think what we need is to take a few reality engines on
the road, across America, in a bus, and to every place on the face of the
planet. Or, if we have to wait, we only have to wait, I estimate, 6 years,
before RealityEngine(now)==PC(then). But time's a wasting. We need a five year
plan. Get the globes to places of conflict, to places of learning, places where
computer eguipment has never gone. Stick solar panels out in daytime and at
night, use the power that was gathered to **educate**. This is a far, far,
better too than LSD was in the 1960's ..
The URL:- http://www.artcom.de/projects/terra/
Anyhow, you got this for very random reasons, so feel free to distribute it to
other places/media forms if you want ...
-- Mike