A Permanent Encyclopaedia?

Hat tip to George Dyson by way of Edge by way of Event Horizon by way of The Speculist for this intriguing quote:

The whole human memory can be, and probably in a short time will be, made accessible to every individual... It need not be concentrated in any one single place. It need not be vulnerable as a human head or a human heart is vulnerable. It can be reproduced exactly and fully, in Peru, China, Iceland, Central Africa, or wherever else... It can have at once, the concentration of a craniate animal and the diffused vitality of an amoeba.

This is no remote dream, no fantasy... It is a matter of such manifest importance and desirability for science, for the practical needs of mankind, for general education and the like, that it is difficult not to believe that in quite the near future, this Permanent World Encyclopaedia, so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence, will not come into existence.

Its uses will be multiple and many of them will be fairly obvious. Special sections of it, historical, technical, scientific, artistic, e.g. will easily be reproduced for specific professional use. Based upon it, a series of summaries of greater or less fullness and simplicity, for the homes and studies of ordinary people, for the college and the school, can be continually issued and revised...

And its creation is a way to world peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision with the warring political forces and the vested institutional interests of today. Quietly and sanely this new encyclopaedia will, not so much overcome these archaic discords, as deprive them, steadily but imperceptibly, of their present reality.

That's from "World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopaedia," an essay written by the astonishingly prescient H. G. Wells in 1937!

It is easy to see this permanent world encyclopaedia -- "so compact in its material form and so gigantic in its scope and possible influence" -- as the World Wide Web. How amazing that Wells and some of his contemporaries just happened to think of the concept, oh, about 55 years in advance.

Mike Treder

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