When you look on the Internet, you could almost assure that it is new and that it is brand new.Rare is the visited website that has more than a decade, and all applications, browsers, operating systems and devices are recent.the differences, something very similar happened when in 1950 people stepped on the continental ground and wondered about the age of the Earth.
Knowing when the Internet came up is easy because there are records, however, gathering evidence of the moment when the Internet was created would be as difficult as the problems that Clair Patterson overcame in 1953 to find evidence of the moment when the Internet was created.Earth.And the fault of all this is subduction .
Clair Patterson's rocks and an ever-new Internet
It was the year 1948 and a professor named Harrison Brown was trying to find out the age of the Earth dating the rocks that were on it.It seemed logical to think that the Earth would be as old as the oldest rock found on it .
Similarly, a current researcher who would like to reliably date the age of the Internet would only have to find a page that had been in the network from the beginning.The Internet would be as old as the oldest page found.
Relationship between the loss of lead-207 with respect to uranium-235 in a sample of rock from the earth's crust.Source: Chemical Petrology II: elements, traces and isotopes, 2010, Tucuman .
Luckily for science, Harrison Brown had just invented in 1948 a new method for counting lead isotopes in rocks, and smelling a boring task ahead delegated all of the dating to a student named Clair Patterson, much more willing to the fieldwork.Patterson soon realized the problem he had in his hands.After several years of measurements all the rocks I analyzed seemed relatively new .
If today we use tools like whois.domaintools.com to date a website, we find the same problem: all web pages seem modern.Even the information of the classic World Wide Web , the first Accessible page of history, has gone through so many servers and code renewals that seems younger (1994) than it really is (1991).
Surrounded as we are in pages and applications in constant renewal many may think: Where is the principle of the Internet? This is always updated, and in the same way that in 1948 Patterson did not find rocks old, we find it difficult to find websites that are of age .
If the origin of the Internet has ever existed (and obviously yes), where is it?
Continental drift and content creation
Something similar was asked in 1960 Harry Hess.Where were the oldest rocks on Earth, and why nobody found them? Without knowing Patterson's work, which at that time was measuring lead in the atmosphere, Hess began measuring the ocean floor to find something unusual.
It turns out that near the Mesoatlantica Dorsal (in light blue in the image below) the rocks were brand new, a few thousand years old, but as one moved away towards the coasts, the rocks were rising of age until reaching 175 million years .
It was almost as if Frank Bursley Taylor, the amateur scientist who in 1908 drew attention to the suspicious coincident form between Africa and South America had been right.And yes, he was.But when Bursley exposed his Theory before the Geological Society of London happened what happens when someone presents to the scientists data that change their perception of the world: they denied everything and strived to write dozens of articles for each one that Bursley published.
The relay was taken by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist who published in 1912 his book The origin of the continents and the oceans , proposing the now accepted model of continental displacement.Even had the value in 1920 , after being ignored by the entire scientific society, of publishing an edition revised that few deigned to read.
Continents that move? Come on, man.
In fact, Albert Einstein died in 1955 making it clear (and in writing in prologue form) that the seemingly complementary forms between some continents were due to chance , that these had always been where they were now and they didn't move.And he said it even after Arthur Holmes wrote his book Principles of physical geology in which he explained the process in detail, with data.
Now we know that Bursley, Wegener and Holmes were right, and the continents are pushed by the ocean floor .The pressure from the inside of the Earth due to the radioactive processes of its interior make arise million tons of hot rock that push the ocean floor sideways .And this, in turn, displaces the crust.Yes:
The process is similar to the process of creating content and writing on the Internet. Imagine the Atlantic gap like the Internet now : magma (content) coming out hot to a huge surface where there were already many others websites to which it moves.What is news today ceases to be tomorrow (it cools) and is pushed sideways by new data.
As you move away from content creation you travel to the past of the Internet , and you find older pages and records.However, as with the rocks, there comes a time in which you collide with a more or less stable mass of rocks that remain afloat in all that Internet voragine, and interestingly they are billions of years old. The montanas of the Internet or the stable Internet .
Pages that have been going around for two decades and succumbing to the pressure of other websites that have helped them rise and position themselves as stable.But they are not all.Moreover, we could say that almost all of the old Internet has disappeared .
But, where do the old rocks go? Where do the old web pages go? What happens with all that? Why am I reading about rocks in a technology article? Do the websites disappear by magic? ?
Subduction (informatics) and parting of the Internet
It occurs on our planet, and this was discovered by the Harry Hess mentioned above, that the earth's crust acts like a rock raft that floats on a moving ocean under them.The hot rocks (the content Internet) that arises from the Mesoatlantica Dorsal at high pressure pushes the oldest rocks (previously published content) until it ends up sweeping them under the crust of the continents.
Scheme of the computer subduction.Own source
From time to time, as if it were the magma of a volcano, some content of the old Internet is processed by some point of the Internet to end frozen in the "stable zone" , as Archive.org does with thousands of websites that once disappeared.And there are totally obsolete websites such as zombo (1999), dolekemp (1996) or Welcome to Netscape (1993) , old-fashioned survivors of an older Internet.Slightly isolated, but existing.
Although almost all the Internet of the 90s and previous decades has succumbed buried by modern content and new hardware.
If today someone tries to prove that the Internet was born in 1969 with the union of four American universities and that in 1971 23 computers set up the ARPANET, we would have to go to the museums where some of its original components are exposed.
Two points are still curious: the first, that we would have to leave the Internet to check the age of the Internet ; and the second one that went to Clair Patterson who came up with the idea in 1953, when he set out to find rocks from outside the Earth (meteorites) to determine his age.
Images | peshkov, Marine Universe, Mesoatlantica Dorsal, Own source
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