'Earth' may be the densest source of Brin's predictions about what the future may hold for humanity, but it's hardly the only one! After all, it's nearly twenty years since the novel was released!

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• The Partition of the Soviet Union, didn't quite make it into the novel EARTH in a highly explicit form. Still, it is among the few novels from 1989 that IMPLIED a coming breakup.

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Almost thirty years later, the cover story of the September 2007 Scientific American says that saccades (tiny eye movements) not only allow us to see, but quantify on what we are focused when looking at a scene. Is Citizen-testing far behind? According to Brin: "This tool is either an empowerment for Big Brother, or for the masses. If we all get it, then there will be social problems to solve, but never will tyrants stand a chance, ever again."

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http://arstechnica.com/journals/science.ars/2007/05/18/black-holes-for-everyone

Is David some sort of time traveller from 10-20 years in the future, or just freakishly prescient? Readers of Earth will find the following eerily reminescent.

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Cooperation and Competition in evolution.NYTimes article reminded me of "Earth".

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/31/science/31prof.html

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http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=834

UK Officers Wear Brin's Tru-Vu Lenses.

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EARTH portrays a character grabbing a file folder and pulling out a data sheet and feeding it into a "sheet reader"... a much more convenient for of storage than a spinning disk. Now see: Store 256GB on an A4 sheet Techworld Nov. 24, 2006 - New "rainbow technology" allows data to be encoded into colored geometric shapes and stored in patterns on paper or or plastic sheets at a density of 2.7GB per square inch and and then played back through a computer with a special scanner attached....

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedirect.html?newsID=6119&m=15453

: This is impossible, as some simple arithmetic will show. Assume 600 DPI printing, four colors of ink, perfect accuracy, every single droplet is a bit: 600*600*8.5*11*16/8 = 67,320,000 bytes or 67MB per letter-sized sheet, given ideal, impossible assumptions. "Rainbow" is a hoax.

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You mention at one point that Daisy McClennon's income comes from digital restorations of old movies, and also editing some old "languid classics like The Terminator or Delieverence" into shorter films to fit the time spans of the modern person. So imagine my surprise when I found "The 10 Minute Theater" and its version of The Terminator.