β Scribed by Marc Stiegler
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Someone Out There really hated humans. Twenty years ago Shiva I swept aside Earth's defenses and rained down destruction until a suicide squad boarded it and blew it to smithereens. Now Shiva V has entered the Solar System. Vastly more powerful than any of its predecessors, it has destroyed all fleets sent against it. There is only one way to defeat a Shiva: get inside and kill it. Once again, in the personae of five champions, four billion of us are about to do just that, linked and coordinated by -- The Earthweb!
Our Web-enhanced Future
How do you enable a billion people to work together as a tightly knit team?
How might our lives change when a mature version of the World Wide Web becomes the underpinning fabric of global society?
I have spent over a decade working with, and often managing, organizations in Silicon Valley dedicated to answering these questions. Indeed, I was working on these questions even before the term "World Wide Web" was invented: in 1988 I published an article for Analog magazine about hypertext and hypermedia, predicting the development of a global network that would embody the bulk of human knowledge, allowing us access from our homes. For those of us working in the hypertext community, the sudden arrival of the Web was not a surprise; the only question had been, which companies would first deliver Web-like capabilities successfully? But the Web as it now stands is not half so remarkable as the Web that will one day grow from it.
In fact, we already know how to enable a billion people to work together as a tight-knit team. We already know how to replace the bulk of government bureucracies, laws, and regulations, with Web-based machinery that can form the underpinning fabric of global society. The only question is, which companies will first deliver these capabilities successfully?
EarthWeb is the story of a world in which we have navigated through this evolution of the Web to a new, better place, only to see a terrible threat from deep space descend upon us. All the future machinery of the Web will be needed to meet that threat. This is a story of how billions of individual human beings, pursuing their own individual goals, often selfishly, sometimes altruistically, always with great differences in opinion, can come together and forge a solution to a problem of global scope. It is a story of liberty, wrapped in a story of the Web, cloaked in a story of alien battleships and cataclysmic combat.
You can read the first few chapters of EarthWeb at http://www.baen.com
You can read other information related to EarthWeb at http://www.the-earthweb.com
Related information at www.the-earthweb.com includes:
--Links to R&D efforts now underway to build the technologies of EarthWeb;
--Comments by various early readers of EarthWeb, including K. Eric Drexler (Engines of Creation), David D. Friedman(Machinery of Freedom), and of course Vernor Vinge( who is quoted in the elsewhere on the Amazon.com Earthweb page);
--Links to the EarthWeb Contest, revolving around the question, "What Ever Happened To Microsoft In the EarthWeb Universe?"
Join the Contest--you too can be a winner! :-)
And thank you, Amazon.com, for being a part of the evolution of the Web that will one day lead to a world not unlike...EarthWeb!
Library : Science Fiction
Formats : EPUB
ISBN : 9780671578091
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