“You have to imagine now, an Old Earth before humankind had offworld colonies. No Hawking drive. No interplanetary flight to speak of. All of our eggs were literally in one carton, and that carton was the lovely blue and white water world of Old Earth. “By the end of the twentieth century, Christian era, this little world had a crude datasphere. Basic planetary telecommunication had evolved into a decentralized swarm system of old silicon-based computers demanding no organization or hierarchy, demanding nothing beyond a common communications protocol. Creation of a distributed-memory hive mind
...more
