World Brain: The Idea of a Permanent World Encyclopedia

Text Exploration

H. G. Wells is best known for The War of the Worlds, one of the first science fiction stories to gain popular visibility; the story is less recognized for its plot as it is for inciting mass panic, when it was read aloud on a radio show and listeners did not realize that the alien invasions being described were fictional. Several months before this occurred, Wells offered another fictional view of the future, but one much less dramatic and slightly more banal: a vision of all of the information in the world catalogued in a “Permanent World Encyclopedia,” a digital archive freely shared globally and offering instant access to the details of everything that has ever happened.

Wells describes, operationally, how the encyclopedia will work, and then explains the immense value of such an innovation. Described as an “all-human cerebrum,” it will cure many woes and vastly improve the human condition: it will provide humanity with “a common understanding and the conception of a common purpose and of a commonweal such as now we hardly dare dream of.” It is to be a global unifier, a world organ, and will be a “real intellectual unification of our race.” It is through a searchable index of all knowledge that we will reach an end game of harmony and cooperation.

Most telling of Wells’ vision is the simplicity with which it will be implemented, as “there is no practical obstacle whatever” to realizing this universal index, and “its creation is a way to world peace that can be followed without any very grave risk of collision with the warring political forces and the vested institutional interests of today.” A searchable index of all knowledge, for Wells, is nothing less than the “only means of dissolving human conflict into unity.”