>At around the same time, Lem envisaged a future where people have an instant and universal access to a giant virtual data base which he called a ‘Trion Library’. Trions themselves were tiny crystals of quartz, ‘whose particle structure can be permanently changed’. Trions operate like modern pen-drives, but connected by radio waves, forming a giant library of knowledge. This is how he described it in his The Magellanic Cloud from 1955 (our translation):
>Trion can store not only luminescent images, reduced to a change in their crystal structure, that is images of book pages, not only all kinds of photographs, maps, images, graphs and tables – in other words, anything that can be observed by sight. Just as easily, Trion can store sounds, the human voice as well as music, there is also a way to record scents.
Um; this doesn't sound like Google at all. I mean; maybe if this was described as predicting the internet or smart phones, it'd be more reasonable. However, the author follows this description with
>Lem’s description is quite accurate, only that what he describes, we call today the Internet or simply Google.
I'm a bit concerned that an index of a thing has been confused with the thing itself. Is this common? Has anyone else encountered this confusion between Google and the Internet?