Whoa, Nellie! A super-extra fast Internet???
Last week there were some reports that CERN, the world's largest particle physics lab located in Geneva, is prepared to reveal their newest addition to their impressive resume of technological breakthroughs. CERN is the very organization that created the Internet that we know and love today. But what they have done now is create a super-fast Internet to exchange enormous packets of data between research centers. How does this affect us? Well, if the world adopts this newer “grid” as their web-surfing backbone, downloads of huge data packets will be done in seconds rather than minutes. But wait, that's not all!
3 hour movies downloaded in seconds? Full scale audio/visual real time holograms of teachers on another continent beamed into your classroom? Online gaming involving hundreds of players, if not thousands all at once? The possibilities are amazing, if not downright frightening. I’ve always believed that the Internet would get faster and faster as technology progresses, but would that allow for more efficient criminal activity? Even the grid project director Tony Doyle acknowledges the unpredictable nature of such a possibility becoming reality: “The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge.”
Huge indeed. What do you think?
Here’s the link to the story from TimesOnline.uk:
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece