Discover - July/August 2011

“Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or city street; every tsunami on the remotest shore.”

on a single circuit board, for ;;;,;;;. When the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary began digitizing its contents in ;;;; (;;; typists; an IBM mainframe), they estimated its size at a gigabyte. A gigabyte also encompasses the entire human genome. A thousand of those would ;ll a terabyte. A terabyte was the amount of disk storage Larry Page and Sergey Brin managed to patch together with the help of ;;;,;;; spread across their personal credit cards in ;;;;, when they were Stanford graduate students building a search-engine prototype, which they ;rst called BackRub and then renamed Google. A terabyte is how much data a typical analog television station broadcasts daily, and it was the size of the United States government’s database of patent and trademark records when it went online in ;;;;. By ;;;; one could buy a terabyte disk drive for a hundred dollars and hold it in the palm of one hand.

;e books in the Library of Congress represent about ;; terabytes (as Shannon guessed), and the number is many times greater when images and recorded music are counted. ;e library now archives Web sites; by February ;;;; it had collected ;;; terabytes’ worth.

;; ;;; ;;;;; ;;;;;;; ;;;;;;, ;;; ;;;;;;;;;; ;;;;;;;;; ;;;; the pace foreshortening their sense of their own history. ;e computer scientist Jaron Lanier describes the feeling this way: “It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.” A more familiar metaphor is the cloud. All that information— all that information capacity—looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place. Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful. People talk about shifting their lives to the cloud—their informational lives, at least. You may store photographs in the cloud; Google will manage your business in the cloud; Google is putting all the world’s books into the cloud; email passes to and from the cloud and never really leaves the cloud. All traditional ideas of privacy, based on doors and locks, physical remoteness and invisibility, are upended in the cloud.

Money lives in the cloud; the old forms are vestigial tokens of knowledge about who owns what, who owes what. To the ;;st century these will be seen as anachronisms, quaint or even absurd: bullion carried from shore to shore in fragile ships, subject to the tari;s of pirates and the god Poseidon; metal coins tossed from moving cars into baskets at highway tollbooths and thereafter trucked about (now the history of your automobile is in the cloud); paper checks torn from pads and signed in ink; tickets for trains, performances, air travel, or anything at all, printed on weighty perforated paper with watermarks, holograms, or ;uorescent ;bers; and, soon enough, all forms of cash. ;e economy of the world is transacted in the cloud.

Its physical aspect could not be less cloudlike. Server farms proliferate in unmarked brick buildings and steel complexes, with smoked windows or no windows, miles of hollow ;oors, diesel generators, cooling towers, seven-foot intake fans, and aluminum chimney stacks. This hidden infrastructure grows in a symbiotic relationship with the electrical infrastructure it increasingly resembles. ;ere are information switchers, control centers, and substations. ;ey are clustered and distributed.

;ese are the wheelworks; the cloud is their avatar. ;e information produced and consumed by humankind used to vanish—that was the norm, the default. ;e sights, the sounds, the songs, the spoken word just melted away. Marks on stone, parchment, and paper were the special case. It did not occur to Sophocles’ audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show. Now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or city street; every volcano or tsunami on the remotest shore; every card played or piece moved in an online game; every rugby scrum and cricket match.

Having a camera at hand is normal, not exceptional; something like ;;; billion images were captured in ;;;;. You Tube was streaming more than a billion videos a day. Most of this is haphazard and unorganized, but there are extreme cases. ;e computer pioneer Gordon Bell, at Microsoft Research in his seventies, began recording every moment of his day, every conversation, message, document, a megabyte per hour or a gigabyte per month, wearing around his neck what he called a “SenseCam” to create what he called a “ Life-Log.” Where does it end? Not with the Library of Congress.

It is ;nally natural—even inevitable—to ask how much information is in the universe. It is the consequence of Charles Babbage and Edgar Allan Poe saying, “No thought can perish.” Seth Lloyd does the math. He is a moonfaced, bespectacled quantum engineer at ;;;, a theorist and designer of quantum computers. ;e universe, by existing, registers information, he says. By evolving in time, it processes information. How much? To ;gure that out, Lloyd takes into account how fast this “computer” works and how long it has been working. Considering the fundamental limit on speed and on memory space, along with the speed of light and the age of the universe since the Big Bang, Lloyd calculates that the universe can have performed something on the order of ;;;;; “ops” in its entire history. Considering “every degree of freedom of every particle in the universe,” it could now hold something like ;;;; bits. And counting.