118Progress toward CyberimmortalityComputer archived human personalities will live again on the grid. The grid is more than the net or the web. The Internet is a network of connections that allows one computer to send data to another. The World Wide Web is the most promi-nent of the many data exchange systems that lie on top of the Internet, consisting of a vast number of data files connected by hypertext links. The Cyberinfrastructure Grid includes the net and the web, but by definition it also includes a variety of physical resources such as sensors and other input devices, actuators and other output devices, memory, and computers. Today, grid computing is chiefly a method of simulating the performance of a supercomputer by linking together a number of more ordinary computers that carry out calculations in par-allel. Computer scientists are beginning to imagine a future grid that unites every imaginable resource, which would make it an ideal environment in which to be reincarnated.Once a personality has entered the grid, it may use a variety of resources located at vast distances from each other, which could require it to separate into a number of fairly autono-mous pieces that intermittently communicate or rejoin with each other. No longer contained within the confines of the skull, intelligence will distribute itself dynamically across the information network, becoming potentially ubiquitous. [31] On the one hand, identity diffusion means that the person becomes scattered, possibly incoherent but certainly com-plex – no longer a star but a nebula. On the other hand, this also means that the person can become greater than any con-ventional individual, a distributed intelligence that pervades civilization.
