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Even today the superiority of the computer is shame-making. If our brain is to work at its maximum, we have to concentrate on a specific problem. But the computer can solve millions of different The fastest calculator in use in Europe today is in the Institute for Plasma Physics at Garching, near Munich. It carries out 16.6 million calculating operations per second. In the machine's electronic stomach 750,000 transistors are connected with each other in the shortest way by means of photolithographically produced plug board diagrams. The electromagnetic waves that make the connections move with the speed of light. Computer people talk of access times of | 1/2 nano seconds as mere routine. In | 1/2 nano seconds a light ray covers | ft 6 ins. But when we learn that the newest computer of the Data Control Corporation performs 36 million calculating operations a second, then the fastest machine in Europe is already a rather antiquated model. In comparison, one of the General Electric models, the GE-235, can be called a home computer. It only solves 165,000 problems a second, but you do not have to buy it. Its services can be hired for four cents per second. The ferrite storage unit of a modern computer houses 200,000 digits in a space of one square metre. Magnetic tape storage units swallow up 10 million bits of data. And computers of all kinds are first- class pupils. They check themselves and never make the same mistake twice. Today computers still need interpreters who translate our language, figures and concepts into the various computer languages. Direct conversation with the uncanny creature is expected by 1980. In America, but even more so in England, which is far advanced in computer techniques, they are trying to dissolve human speech into symbolic groups that the computer understands. This is the direction in which all computer manufacturers are working. But for IBM, the biggest producer of computers, language is far too slow a means of communication between man and machine. They are looking for another medium of transmitting information. Ihave said that computer technology is only at the beginning of the great possibilities that lie ahead of it. Future research has an eerie goal: the biotronic storage unit. Nucleic acids appear to possess magnetic properties. Should this assumption prove to be correct, they would be the smallest information carriers of all. If these investigations reached their goal, the processing unit of a computer, which still takes up a lot of room, would be reduced to the size of | the human brain. Biotronic information units would only be as big as chain molecules. I think that this line of research will ultimately succeed, but I am afraid that bio-tronic calculators would be susceptible to infection by viruses and bacteria. Interstellar space travel operates with distances of hundreds of million of miles. At the speeds that are to be expected, the computer will be more than a mere ready Reckoner. Even if computer manufacturers today resist the claim that computers will be able to think and act independently one fine day, that day will come. Then computers will steer space-ships between the planets on their own. Far be it from me to assert that our ancestors knew anything about computers, integrated or electronic measuring apparatus. But since I am convinced that extraterrestrial intelligences visited the earth, their problems at the same time.