"Far, far below the deepest delving of the Dwarves, the world is gnawed by nameless things. Even Sauron knows them not. They are older than he. Now I have walked there, but I will bring no report to darken the light of day."

― Gandalf

FYI: Example image

https://www.eurekalert.org/multimedia/pub/194320.php

Paper: https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/gsa/geology/article-abstrac...

I have never seen so many motorcycle helminths.

One minor nit on article, pretty sure multicellular life existed hundreds of millions of years before Cambrian.

> The sea bed in the deep ocean during the Cambrian period was thought to have been inhospitable to animal life because it lacked enough oxygen to sustain it.

They're only talking about the deep ocean, not the whole world.

It could be also described as a series of tubes, like the Internet.

Is a series of tubes a sufficient abstract definition of the Internet? I'm not trying to be pedantic; rather, I'm asking myself what would a good abstract (literary) definition of internet be? The minimal and maximally general definition that distinguishes internet from, say, the animal blood vessel system or a plumbing system (or youtube (joke)) and other things that fit the definition of series of tubes.

Having never thought about this before, I'm still surprised that this question bewilders me a bit. I guess I don't know that much about the internet.

Oh my goodness.

> It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.

I didn't realise this was a pop reference, thanks.

A Traffic net in a city, but every car is forced by traffic lights where it has to turn based on it's target address that is printed on its hood

That't not unlike how the dynamic adaptive local traffic routing works in the procedural Distributed City Generation rule for the Moveable Feast Machine.

Robust-first Computing: Distributed City Generation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkSXERxucPc

>A rough video demo of Trent R. Small's procedural city generation dynamics in the Movable Feast Machine simulator. See http://nm8.us/q for more information. Apologies for the poor audio!

Here's the fascinating paper that describes exactly how that works:

Local Routing in a new Indefinitely Scalable Architecture, by Trent Small.

https://www.cs.unm.edu/~ackley/papers/paper_tsmall1_11_24.pd...

>Abstract: Local routing is a problem which most of us face on a daily basis as we move around the cities we live in. This study proposes several routing methods based on road signs in a procedurally generated city which does not assume knowledge of global city structure and shows its overall efficiency in a variety of dense city environments. We show that techniques such as Intersection-Canalization allow for this method to be feasible for routing information arbitrarily on an architecture with limited resources.

Worm superhighway... sounds like a commute on 237.