Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Frost
However , consider first the amount of data that even a half Dton {250 square feet} of storage at T.L. could hold . Current hard drives are around 1-3 terabytes and are roughly and about 1/90 to 1/100 of a cubic foot {and keep getting more compact} .
Now uncase your crystal ball and look 2 tech levels into the future : that 25,000 hard drives worth of storage should be able to hold enough data to have even the volume your alluding to suffer from digital agoraphobia .
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I'm not sure what you are getting at. If you are saying that the data and computing capacity per credit will go up with time, that also means the IFM members' demand for Big Data goes up with time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr Frost
Something would need to be present to maintain anything approaching not only Imperium-wide cultural standards {remember , Imperial culture amongst the common citizens is cannon} but also any real sense of political cohesion without which such a vast polity would collapse no matter how much force was threatened or used .
The numbers of ex Imperial military would be far too low to fill the role of cultural homogenizers {not to mention that Imperial culture doesn't seem to be particularly martial} .
The Roman Empire found it didn't work unless you removed much of the local population first and instead employed a combination of encouraging urbanization {where town criers could effectivly tell people what Rome wanted them to hear and given wealth flowed into the towns , not the fields , so to did the political and social power} and lots of festivals {Humans also like to party and tend to do similar things during festivals : note how nearly everyone in the "western world" embraces a Coke advert as the symbol of Christmas for example} .
The only way the Imperium could have survived 1,000 years as such a bogglingly vast polity is with a lot of social interaction between worlds creating a sense of "Us" between the peoples of at least the major worlds .
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It should not take much bandwidth for such propaganda. By its nature, it is a shared experience so a little content goes a long way toward unifying the nations, and it may be in the Imperial interest in fact to limit the distribution of local content in certain ways. (See the BBC.)