"LIFE ETC."

Cloning the Globe

Virtual reality has always been a means of writing an ordinary sci-fi story. Just like time travel, robots or Martians, cyber-life were all fiction...until recently.
The 27 November issue of Newsweek International Magazine reports Microsoft's investing in the realization of this fantasy by creating a 3D replica of the real world:

"If Microsoft continues to add new cities and improves the [Virtual Earth 3D] project, the 3D Web could become a carbon copy of the real world and a powerful new platform on which to blend advertising, social networks, search and e-commerce."*
This is a rather positive and a very limited way to understand such a challenging achievement. Author of the article, Brad Stone writes, "Engineers at Microsoft understood that creating a navigable replica of the planet might give users a more intuitive way to surf and search the Internet." Okay, nice… Blending social networks with e-commerce… An intuitive way to surf the Net… But, come on, we're talking about creating a carbon copy of the real world! This must sound like something beyond a new car or iPod!

If Microsoft has already hired a whole technology company just to "take millions of high-resolution photographs of stores, homes and street signs," this really means a huge investment. This first phase will let Microsoft create a frozen version of a particular city at a particular moment.
But will this be enough? Would anyone surf a 3D replica of the world if it stands still? No. The "fake planet" definitely needs some action.

So, will Microsoft be able to refresh the replica by adding newly taken photos every other second? Of course not. Instead, it will be much more efficient to understand the logic behind how things happen, turn these codes into software and make the replica imitate everyday life's logic.
You see? If Microsoft is planning to improve this project, they have two choices: (i) decoding the social and natural system of the world and inserting them into the replica through software, or (ii) giving up the realistic replica and creating its own logic different from the real world.

One way or another, things will become very interesting as this project progresses. By the way, while Microsoft is working hard to destroy reality by multiplying it, Google is working on turning history into a spectacle by adding historical maps to Google Earth. One of the two post-modern giants is consuming space as the other consumes history. Such a perfect replication reminds us of the "Rigor in Science" by Jorge L. Borges and Adolfo B. Casares:

"In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City. … In time, … the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography."**
Happy ending: Grandsons of the cartographers found the map useless and left it. But what if we decide to live on the replica instead of the real world as the world becomes too ruined and useless?

* Newsweek, 27 November 2006
** Andrew Hurley translation:
https://notes.utk.edu/bio/greenberg.nsf/0/f2d03252295e0d0585256e120009adab?OpenDocument