Some people may tell you that God created human beings, but modern science found that there was life on the earth 3.5 billion years ago, and the mythical descriptions are unreliable. So, what has made human civilization?
Many scholars think it is information, and there is no doubt that information is extremely important. Information promotes the generation of human brain thinking, makes knowledge structured and becomes the smartest species in the history of the earth. But all animals have the ability to collect information, and even tumbleweed, a plant that can perceive the environment and actively migrate, exists. Why are human beings so different from their destinies?
Data storage, or information storage, allows human beings to surpass all beasts and become the top of the food chain in just tens of thousands of years. Wolves have been hunting together. They will plan the hunting route in advance, and the relay chase will make the prey exhausted. In this process, they will howl to convey information and achieve cooperation. The same is true for humans, but compared with natural predators with sharp teeth and claws, human hunters need more experience, and it is difficult for newly grown humans to become excellent predators naturally like wolves.
In order to make up for this fatal shortcoming, human beings have learned a brand-new skill-mural painting, which is carved on the cave wall with specific stones, leaving eye-catching marks, so that human beings have the opportunity to accept hunting skills since childhood. The saber-toothed tiger with sharp teeth and claws is still a giant ground sloth with rough skin. Every human cub has learned how to avoid their attacks since childhood, and how to stab it in the chest with a stone spear until it is strong and faces the right moment of the picture.
The cave paintings in Little Wei Yan are the oldest known cave paintings, which can be traced back to 30,000-32,000 years ago. After that, the animals with fixed places, such as saber-toothed tigers and horses, decreased day by day and soon became completely extinct. Then humans have to hunt large animals that migrate all the year round, and the rock paintings and stone carvings in the caves can't be taken away. If mankind can't think of a new way, it will go back to the previous situation.
The inscription on Jiahu unearthed from Jiahu site in Wuyang, Henan Province tells us how human beings solved this dilemma by replacing rock walls with animal bones. For some unknown reason, 9000 years ago, humans preserved the animal bones left after eating, baked them with fire, and recorded and stored information on them, so that the stored information could migrate with human hunting routes.
With the further development of human civilization, from hunting civilization to farming civilization, for a long time, people only used tortoise shells, bamboo slips and sheepskin, which are also natural products, to store information instead of animal bones. At the same time, during this period, human character also developed and evolved.
After entering the farming era, human beings have actually left the food chain, and no wild animals can threaten people's status any more. Humans have also created splendid civilizations, and more and more cultures need to be recorded in words. In the past, the carrier of bamboo slips was so heavy that Dong Fangshuo wrote more than 3,000 resumes about himself and carried a load of bamboo slips to Emperor Wu of Han Dynasty. The cumbersome and inconvenient storage method has added a lot of resistance to the continuation of civilization.
Fortunately, Cai Lun, a famous eunuch recorded in the history books, improved papermaking, which made paper, a common thing nowadays, shoulder the heavy responsibility of storing human civilization, adding power to the continuation of human civilization. Later, together with the compass, one of the four great inventions, paper promoted the great geographical discovery in the new century and pushed human civilization to the stage of industrial civilization.
During the period of industrial civilization, the invention of automobiles, airplanes and ships made the natural moat a thoroughfare and the population moved more frequently. People are often thousands of miles away from their relatives and friends, and countless people's worries about missing have given birth to the great invention of telephone. Sound is the most commonly used form of transmitting information in the world, which has the possibility of being stored and transmitted.
Whether it is the phonograph and record invented by King Edison, or the invention of tape recorder and naismith, the human voice can break through the barrier of time and space and resound through every era. At the end of the 20th century, computers and the Internet brought about a real information revolution, and mankind formally entered the stage of information civilization. Computer-related industries have become upstarts in the market, Internet giants have risen one by one, and even the magical Moore's Law of doubling the performance of processors every 18 months has appeared. ......
It is these amazing phenomena and industries that make up our life today, so that we can know what is happening in the world without leaving home; Relatives on the other side of the world can talk video at any time; Going out with a mobile phone is enough to handle most things; Different styles of architecture and decoration can be simulated in the computer; 3D blockbusters depict a fantasy world that people yearn for.
Such a prosperous civilization is built on expensive giant servers, and such servers are getting closer and closer to the limit, even if the major Internet giants, Billie Billie server downtime, Tencent server crash, Alibaba Cloud server data leakage, not to mention the Weibo and 12306 websites that crashed in three days.
In the past ten years, the data created by human beings is equivalent to the total data created by human beings before, and the momentum of data growth is getting stronger and stronger. However, Moore's law, which has always been believed, has also been shattered. The chip has been studied to the level of 3nm, and below 1nm is the field of quantum mechanics. Humans have not even studied this theory, let alone its commercial application.
It is imperative to increase the data storage capacity for the further development of human civilization. Since the performance improvement of hardware facilities is limited, is there any way to further optimize the configuration facilities?
To understand this problem, we must first understand what the current basic Internet protocols are. The current basic Internet protocol is called http Protocol, which means that what we see at the beginning of the website is "http:". Its biggest feature is centralization, that is, Internet companies have absolute control over data, and users have no rights over their own data. The service quality of Internet companies is also seriously limited by the performance of servers. Especially in today's increasingly developed Internet infrastructure, the home network speed is getting faster and faster, but the online experience has not improved so much. Why?
This is the reason mentioned earlier-centralized storage and centralized servers are close to the limit. For example, at present, the speed of home broadband is generally around12m/s. In order to accommodate so many users, a company with millions of users has purchased telecom services that can satisfy 500,000 users' smooth access at the same time. However, after the company has millions of users, the number of ordinary visitors has exceeded the number of visitors in the previous peak period, and the number of visitors has been limited. If you catch up with holidays or activities, if there are two million users visiting at the same time, your bandwidth can only reach 6M/s, if there are five million users, it can only barely reach 2 m/s. If there are more than one billion users like today's Internet giants, you need to build a larger server cluster. However, the existence of land price and Joule's law today requires huge costs for land grant and heat dissipation of giant centralized servers. At the same time, centralized data storage makes the ability to resist accidents very fragile. For example, in 2008, the Wisconsin data center suffered a fire, and all the massive data stored here were burned.
IPFS adopts distributed storage, that is, there is no central server, and the data stored by users will be divided and encrypted by storage service providers all over the world, and the storage service providers will not know what information is stored, thus putting an end to all personal information disclosure and privacy violations. At the same time, the internet service that users feel will not be limited by the performance of the central server, which means that users will be able to fully enjoy the internet bandwidth service they have purchased; For Internet companies, building giant servers and purchasing Internet bandwidth saves a lot of money, which can effectively reduce the company's operating costs, and will also reverse the distorted status quo in which traffic is king and return to the ecology in which content quality is king.
Nowadays, mankind is at the door of entering the next era-digital civilization, and the HTTP protocol that has completed its mission is also at the time of retirement. IPFS will take over its burden and shine for the inheritance of human civilization. The meta-universe and the all-real Internet are not far away, looking forward to human civilization. IPFS will certainly create a better era for mankind.