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Decades back there was a UI sketch for a phone answering machine. It dropped a marble in a tray for each message received. "New messages? How many?" was a simple glance "New marbles? How many?". To play a marble/message, place it on the play-back dimple. Replay by nudging it. Save the marble, save the message. No "to save this message yet again, press N". Delete by dropping it in the recycling hopper. Running out of length-limited n-slot message storage is running out of marbles in the hopper. Very tactile, tangible affordances. The marbles were merely ID, not storage. But (reliably archival?) storage might be fun too - eg, finding a bag of marbles from when you were a kid? EDIT: Durrell Bishop

That sounds amazing actually. One of the more non-technical user-friendly paradigms I've heard of.

Leads to a new meaning for “I lost my marbles”.

This is insanely creative thinking. I wonder what other things people have thought up like this that haven't seen the light of day.

Not possible. Imagine the number of scenarios that require fixes. There are just too many of them. So you either end up with a gigantic amount of crystals (but still can't solve a problem in some exceptional cases) or you have a small number of crystals but a high number of situations where you can't resolve the problem with them.

So maybe those crystals are more like app-configurations that we already have: you can tune things in a predictable way, but as soon as it goes beyond that you need to change the code.

"Getting back to the sci-fi, I realized that the crystal swapping could just be the high level interface to all the complex code below. "

Personally I find it a bit hilarious when I think about it too much. We can fit a terabyte on something that fits on our thumbnail comfortably, and we can provide enough computation power to run most any plausible control system comfortably in a phone form factor, but the superadvanced aliens way smarter than us and millennia if not more beyond us need massive crystals.

I suppose we can hypothesize that some variant of "hyperspace" requires vast computational powers to work at all, and maybe some of the other advanced stuff does (e.g. one imagines the holodeck or anything even resembling it would possibly require more computing power than our entire world has), but it's hard to imagine "life support" requires some massive crystal to run.

Science fiction has always had a complicated relationship with computers. The exponential power increases of so many decades is just hard to deal with. Even if you understand that exponential power increases are occurring, that doesn't mean you can correctly understand what that means in practice.

(In the alien's defense, one thing they may legitimately have on us, and for which unspecified "crystals" clearly made out of a very hard and durable substance may even make some sense, is longevity. A crystal that "merely" stored a few gigabytes and had the computation power of a modern cell phone, but that could be accidentally left behind in someone's grave for 20,000 years and work just as well as the day it was made would have a lot of legitimate uses, even if they had the capability of making things with a lot more power that wouldn't last as long. But even then I don't see swapping these things around like they're a fancy puzzle from Rubiks or you're trying to solve an ancient Sudoku as being a likely use case.)

Maybe it's an exabyte micro micro micro SD card the size of a grain of sand inside a crystal case. Works the same as a floppy disk.

Imagine 100 years from now when humanity's population has been reduced by 100s of millions because of climate catastrophe. Now imagine all the software society relies upon. Now imagine being one of the few people left alive being capable of working on that software. You probably won't have source code.

One thing that has remained constant in our lives is the number of people who are capabable of working on complex software has steadily increased. What happens if that number suddenly decreases?

Now I started to think what is the actual ratio of software we need and software that is produced or distributed.

Gotta make it simple and robust enough that someone who isn't an idiot can reach in and change it when it stops working.