I like the idea of a subspace internet - but I think that offline copies of as much unclassified information as possible, however insignificant, would be kept in as many places as possible, for four reasons:
1. The storage capacity is there, especially for text based info.
2. Earth lost a lot of information in its late 20th/early 21st century wars, including important cultural items, which would lead me to believe that humans would probably packrat information after they realized what was lost.
3. I believe that we will begin doing a better job of this at some point when we realize that we need the advantage that printed newspapers provided back - when a news item is centrally stored in one or a few digital places, it is easy to change. When it is in a million places, most of which you don't have control over, it is harder to edit the "facts" for your own purposes.
4. How many times has a mission turned on three random people that were put into cryogenic storage 300 years before, or figuring out that someone is immortal and has been masquerading as other people throughout history, or some other weird bit of what would otherwise have seemed like useless trivia? If not from the beginning, surely at some point the people responsible for loading the shipboard databases would have said, screw it, put it ALL in there.
All of that said, I agree that only an idiot would not do local loads and updates of STAR CHARTS for a freakin' starship, no matter what else was loaded in there or not!
1. The storage capacity is there, especially for text based info.
2. Earth lost a lot of information in its late 20th/early 21st century wars, including important cultural items, which would lead me to believe that humans would probably packrat information after they realized what was lost.
3. I believe that we will begin doing a better job of this at some point when we realize that we need the advantage that printed newspapers provided back - when a news item is centrally stored in one or a few digital places, it is easy to change. When it is in a million places, most of which you don't have control over, it is harder to edit the "facts" for your own purposes.
4. How many times has a mission turned on three random people that were put into cryogenic storage 300 years before, or figuring out that someone is immortal and has been masquerading as other people throughout history, or some other weird bit of what would otherwise have seemed like useless trivia? If not from the beginning, surely at some point the people responsible for loading the shipboard databases would have said, screw it, put it ALL in there.
All of that said, I agree that only an idiot would not do local loads and updates of STAR CHARTS for a freakin' starship, no matter what else was loaded in there or not!
