Imagine, if you will, your body. It seems normal to you. Your lungs breathe, your heart pumps blood and your hair grows. Now your body has a few things that make it uniquely yours as well, the way you walk, the sound of your voice at the pattern of your retina. But where is all this information stored? Now imagine a computer; as you read this you are the benefactor of several functions of the computer that you probably don’t realise; the way your display works be it a CRT (cathode ray tube) or an LCD (liquid crystal display), both options format the information that they receive via electronics into a usable format that at the present point in time is relaying my thoughts to you.
All of these functions, from your heart to the text on screen require information. I have kept this list very short as to try and not confuse the issue, but there is one more thing I would like you to try and hold In your head at the same time. Your Chair. Chances are that, while reading this, you are sitting on some form of chair. Now the previous two examples I have given incorporate a process of active information transfer; your computer talking to Google and then translating that information which I had previously stored there as text back into a readable format for you, and your heart pumping blood around your body when stimulated to do so by an electrical impulse from your brain telling one half to contract and the other to do likewise in turn. But here is where things start to get tricky.
The chair too has information imbued to it – let us assume for the time being that it is a simple wooden chair with a padded seat. This chair was put together by a craftsman of some skill – be that skill great or little it required at least a basic knowledge of measurement, wood craft and how a nail works. With this information, the craftsman created an object to sit on that would support your body weight, and then he added a more comfortable seat to make the experience more enjoyable. Now that all of this information has been put into the making of the chair, where does this information go? Where is the weight rating or the stress tolerance of the nails and screws used in its construction? The chair still works without you, and I understanding such things, but all that information must be stored somewhere, because if I were to sit on a chair not designed to take my weight, an easier thing than you might think, the chair would fail because those same tolerances that had been put into the construction of the chair would be overcome and the chair would fail. But even the failure of that chair could be pre-determined if you had that original information, my weight information, and the information about how I would distribute that weight as I sat upon the chair.
This is also true of your heart, we know that if your heart receives the wrong electrical signals or those signals are over powered by an outside source, then your heart too will fail, or be brought back from having failed if the charge is supplied in the right way by someone with the right knowledge. And we find this again in the world of computers: give the computer incomplete or wrong information and it will be unable to perform the task that it was asked to perform.
And so we get to my Idea. All of this information must be stored, and it must be accessible in one form or another so that when I sit on the wrong chair, or the network cable is pulled from the computer, or the heart gets the wrong electrical signals, or a hammer strikes a nail, everything acts as it must according to this “programming”.
But where is it stored? Well, you may or may not have heard of metadata; it’s the data that is collected about, say, a phone call that is not relevant to the call itself. For example – I call my friend to talk about sound desks. The meta data associated with that call is the length of the call, who the call was from and to, where the call was made and received, and so on. The call itself was about sound desks but the meta data was still recorded so that I might be billed for the call (or that the government might snoop). But the metadata has nothing to do with the call itself.
Therefore, I am proposing a metaverse, a place where all information is stored, from the length of my call to how well the nail was hammered onto the chair to the quality of the nail when it was forged and what the elements were doing before they were made into a nail.
A place where all information exists, and must continue to exist so that all past and future interactions of this information may be recorded and predicted or reviewed. How many times will your heart beat before it fails depends on a number of factors both internal and external and is in some way relevant to the number of times my heart beats and the nail in the chair. It has long been said that everything is connected, but the question of where is it connected is what woke me up tonight. Why is it that if I hold a lighter to a candle it will burn but if I hold a lighter to a tap I will not get the same effect? Information. Information that goes back as far as time itself, Information that must be available and yet hidden so that when we see a chair we do not see all the backstory of every atom, of every fibre of wood, of the tree that grew from the seed that was planted from the branch that dropped it from, from, from.
All of this information must be able to be accessed at any given time by any given object or substance, but the information must also be immutable, unchangeable, or everything (that is related) would fall apart because a butterfly flapped its wings.
So as you go about your day, dear reader, try to think of the information metaverse, where all things are stored and interact according to...
Well, this is interesting...
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