I've been sort-of watching the new series of Doctor Who, with Christopher Eccleston as the new doctor. As someone who was never really a fan of Doctor Who before (I quite liked Tom Baker, but then again I think everybody did), I'm rather enjoying it.

Interesting that an alien Time Lord should come from Manchester. But I suppose it makes a change. It'd be interesting if one of his last 3 incarnations was Brummie / Black Country (my regional accent, which gets no respect from the rest of the UK as it's rather slow and droning, which makes it sound both stupid and boring).

Anyhow, I watched the episode where he meets the last Dalek on Saturday. And in that, when the Dalek hooks itself into a computer terminal panel, the people in the control room respond by saying "It's downloaded the entire internet! It knows everything!"

Which set me to thinking, in the improbable event that some alien intelligence was able to download the entire internet, would it actually know anything?

It'd have a lot of porn. Including a lot of bizarre porn. Would dubious sexual information be any use to an entity that is only interested in exterminating things? Perhaps it would invent itself some kind of fuck-ray?

It'd have a lot of religious information - pro-religion, anti-religion, sectarian. I can't think how this would be particularly useful to a Dalek, since they don't seem interested in acquiring followers or an army of their own- they just want to exterminate.

It'd have a lot of pages people made about their hobbies and pets.

It might be able to find some maps of important security locations, but it would find far more maps of Middle Earth and Hogwarts School on the multifarious webpages belonging to LOTR and Harry Potter fans. How would it know the security maps were real and the Middle Earth and Hogwarts were fake?

News sites, sure, would be linked to a lot. If it worked by following links to see which sites were used the most, then it might be able to prioritise towards factual stories. But breaking news tends to have less pages dedicated to it than events that happened months/weeks ago that have since been analysed to death by every pundit out there.

A human browsing the internet can, in most cases, take things with a pinch of salt and have some chance of telling the difference between fact and fiction.

But an alien intelligence - a mind so different from a human's - looking through the vast, confusing, contradicting, opinionated, sometimes twisted and blatantly untrue mess of stuff that is the internet... How would it be able to turn all that information into useful knowledge?

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Mallanox : "My mother was Irish and my father was an alien. I was an only child and I dress funny."