From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Thu Dec 23 1999 - 08:33:28 MST
"Bryan Moss" <bryan.moss@dial.pipex.com> writes:
> I'm looking for ideas for some short (~ 5 minutes) animated
> CGI sequences and still images that I'm hoping to produce in
> Maya. If any of you have favourite Extropian sequences from
> sf novels or other sources I'd be grateful if you could
> point me to them. At the moment I'm thinking of taking a
> few from Greg Egan's Diaspora - I think the "orphanogenesis"
> could make for a visually stunning scene.
Yes, that one had me imagining a lot of stuff. Waves of cellular
automata activity, reaction-diffusion equations, Hugo de Gari's 3D
cellular automaton and genetic algorithm based neural networks etc.
Other favorite sequences:
Gabriel building a staship out of an asteroid using nano in _Aristoi_
(not well described, but could probably be made into a fun sequence).
The creation of Permutation City.
The interfacing with the knowledge spaces in David Zindell's novels.
The temporary transcendence of Mr Slippery and Erythrina in Vinge's
_True Names_:
Ery laughed and made a loud snuffling sound. Carefully,
quickly, they grabbed noncritical data-processing facilities
along all the East/West nets. In seconds, they were the
biggest users in North America. The drain would be clear to
anyone monitoring the System, though a casual user might
notice only increased delays in turnaround. Modern netsare at
least as resilient as old-time power nets --- but like power
nets, they have their elastic limit and their breaking
point. So far, at least, he and Erythrina were far short of
those.
---but they were experiencing what no human had ever known
before, a sensory bandwidth thousands of times normal. For
seconds that seemed without end, their minds were filled with
a jumble verging on pain, data that was not information and
information that was not knowledge. To hear ten million
simultaneous phone conversations, to see the continent's
entire video output, should have been a white noise. Instead
it was a tidal wave of detail rammed through the tiny
aperature of their minds. The pain increased, and Mr. Slippery
panicked. This could be the True Death, some kind of sensory
burnout---
Erythrina's voice was faint against the roar, "Use everything,
not just the inputs!" And he had just enough sense left to see
what she meant. He controlled more than raw data now; if he
could master them, the continent's computers could process
this avalanche, much the way parts of the human brain
preprocess their input. More seconds passed, but now with a
sense of time, as he struggled to distribute his very
consciousness through the System.
Then it was over, and he had control once more. But things
would never be the same: the human that had been Mr. Slippery
was an insect wandering in the cathedral his mind had
become. There simply was more there than before. No sparrow
could fall without his knowledge, via air traffic control; no
check could be cashed without his noticing over the bank
communication net. More than three hundred million lives swept
before what his senses had become.
Megascale engineering has a lot of potential, although the scale might
be hard to really make visible. Beanstalks, dyson spheres, O'Neill
colonies. (Post)humanity spreading across the galaxy. Replicating
robot ecologies building huge structures in the desert or on the Moon.
I just spent the entire night playing Alpha Centauri, so I'm right now
a bit biased by the film sequences (even if I have to admit several of
them are less than fantastic). The "Voice of the Planet" and
"Transcendence" sequences are quite good IMHO (and who can resist the
Microsoft parody in "The Network Backbone"?).
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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