In 1923, Edwin Hub­ble dis­cov­ered the universe—or rather, he dis­cov­ered a star, and humans learned that the Milky Way wasn’t the whole of the cos­mos. Less than 100 years lat­er, thanks to the tele­scope named after him, NASA sci­en­tists esti­mate the uni­verse con­tains at least 100 bil­lion galax­ies, and who-knows-what beyond that. The expo­nen­tial growth of astro­nom­i­cal data col­lect­ed since Hubble’s time is absolute­ly stag­ger­ing, and it devel­oped in tan­dem with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary increase in com­put­ing pow­er over an even short­er span, which enabled the birth and mutant growth of the inter­net.

Mod­ern “maps” of the inter­net can indeed look like sprawl­ing clus­ters of star sys­tems, puls­ing with light and col­or. But the “weird com­bi­na­tion of phys­i­cal and con­cep­tu­al things,” Bet­sy Mason remarks at Wired, results in such an abstract enti­ty that it can be visu­al­ly illus­trat­ed with an almost unlim­it­ed num­ber of graph­ic tech­niques to rep­re­sent its hun­dreds of mil­lions of users. When the inter­net began as ARPANET in the late six­ties, it includ­ed a total of four loca­tions, all with­in a few hun­dred miles of each oth­er on the West Coast of the Unit­ed States. (See a sketch of the first four “nodes” from 1969 here.)

By 1973, the num­ber of nodes had grown from U.C.L.A, the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute, U.C. San­ta Bar­bara, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah to include loca­tions all over the Mid­west and East Coast, from Har­vard to Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­si­ty to the Carnegie Mel­lon School of Com­put­er Sci­ence in Pitts­burgh, where David Newbury’s father worked (and still works). Among his father’s papers, New­bury found the map above from May of ’73, show­ing what seemed like tremen­dous growth in only a few short years.

The map is not geo­graph­i­cal but schemat­ic, with 36 square “nodes”—early routers—and 42 oval com­put­er hosts (one pop­u­lar main­frame, the mas­sive PDP-10, is sprin­kled through­out), and only nam­ing a few key loca­tions. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Hawaii appears as a node, linked to the main­land by satel­lite. Just above, you can see an update from just a few months lat­er, now rep­re­sent­ing 40 nodes and 45 com­put­ers. “The net­work,” writes Seli­na Chang, “became inter­na­tion­al: a satel­lite link con­nect­ed ARPANET to nodes in Nor­way and Lon­don, send­ing 2.9 mil­lion pack­ets of infor­ma­tion every day.”

These ear­ly net­works of glob­al inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty, cre­at­ed by the Defense Depart­ment and used most­ly by sci­en­tists, pre­date Tim Bern­ers-Lee and CERN’s devel­op­ment of the World Wide Web in 1991, which opened up the enor­mous, expand­ing alter­nate uni­verse we know as the inter­net today (and was, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, invent­ed around the same time as the Hub­ble Tele­scope). Though maps aren’t ter­ri­to­ries (a 1977 ARPANET “log­i­cal map” dis­claims total accu­ra­cy in a note at the bot­tom), these ear­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the inter­net resem­ble medieval maps of the cos­mos next to the beau­ti­ful com­plex­i­ty of glow­ing col­ors we see in 21st cen­tu­ry info­graph­ics like the author­i­ta­tive­ly-named “The Inter­net Map.”

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Inter­net in 8 Min­utes

What Hap­pens on the Inter­net in 60 Sec­onds

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A year ago, Boston Dynam­ics released a video show­ing its humanoid robot “Atlas” doing, well, rather human things–opening doors, walk­ing through a snowy for­est, hoist­ing card­board box­es, and lift­ing itself off of the ground. Rarely has some­thing so banal seemed so pecu­liar.

What is “Atlas” doing these days? As shown in this new­ly-released video above, it’s jump­ing to new heights, twist­ing in the air, and doing back­flips with uncan­ny ease. Stand­ing six feet tall and weigh­ing 180 pounds, Atlas was designed to take care of mun­dane prob­lems–like assist­ing  emer­gency ser­vices in search and res­cue oper­a­tions and “oper­at­ing pow­ered equip­ment in envi­ron­ments where humans could not sur­vive.” But that’s not where the appli­ca­tions of Atlas end. See­ing that the Pen­ta­gon has helped finance and design Atlas, you can eas­i­ly see the humanoid fight­ing on the bat­tle­field. Stay tuned for that clip in 2018.

Which brings us to our next video. The new short film, “Slaugh­ter­bots,” comes from the Cam­paign to Stop Killer Robots and it fol­lows this plot:

A mil­i­tary firm unveils a tiny drone that hunts and kills with ruth­less effi­cien­cy. But when the tech­nol­o­gy falls into the wrong hands, no one is safe. Politi­cians are cut down in broad day­light. The machines descend on a lec­ture hall and spot activists, who are swift­ly dis­patched with an explo­sive to the head.

Accord­ing to UC Berke­ley AI expert Stu­art Rus­sell, “Slaugh­ter­bots” looks like sci­ence fic­tion. But it’s not. “It shows the results of inte­grat­ing and minia­tur­iz­ing tech­nolo­gies that we already have.” It is “sim­ply an inte­gra­tion of exist­ing capa­bil­i­ties… In fact, it is eas­i­er to achieve than self-dri­ving cars, which require far high­er stan­dards of per­for­mance.” Recent­ly shown at the Unit­ed Nations’ Con­ven­tion on Con­ven­tion­al Weapons, “Slaugh­ter­bots” comes on the heels of an open let­ter signed by 116 robot­ics and AI sci­en­tists (includ­ing Tesla’s Elon Musk), urg­ing the UN to ban the devel­op­ment and use of killer robots. It reads:

Lethal autonomous weapons threat­en to become the third rev­o­lu­tion in war­fare. Once devel­oped, they will per­mit armed con­flict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can com­pre­hend. These can be weapons of ter­ror, weapons that despots and ter­ror­ists use against inno­cent pop­u­la­tions, and weapons hacked to behave in unde­sir­able ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.

If we already have mil­i­tary drones tak­ing out ene­mies across the world (in places like Yemen, Soma­lia, Iraq, Syr­ia, Libya and Afghanistan), the men­tal leap to deploy­ing Slaugh­ter­bots does­n’t seem too great. Do you trust our lead­ers to make fin­er dis­tinc­tions and keep a lid on Pan­do­ra’s Box? Or could you see them tear­ing Pan­do­ra’s Box open like a gift on Christ­mas day? Yeah, me too. The robots of your dystopi­an future are now here.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT