I recall reading a news story in 1957 about how the United States Army had sold off the last of its homing pigeons. Recently, I read that the number of text messages sent and received daily exceeds the total population of the planet. Assuming the old technology, that would have taken a lot of pigeons.
As for newspapers, a week’s content of the New York Times contains more information than was available to anyone in the entire 18th century. That was more than six centuries after homing pigeons were used for long distance communications first by the Persians and then by Genghis Khan, but less than a hundred years from the invention and implementation of Morse code.
The USSR launched Sputnik 1 in 1957. It was the first artificial Earth satellite. One year later, we heard the first radio broadcast from space, President Eisenhower’s wish for “peace on earth and good will to men everywhere.” Today, satellites not only relay our television and radio signals and show us to the nearest restroom close to an interstate highway exit, but also to direct our precision guided missiles to presumably enemy targets where we render human bodies into small, bloody chunks of retribution for crimes religious or political, the lack of reliable intelligence or, simply the result and bad luck of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As it happens, in 1957 that I was assured by a beloved English teacher that if I read every title on a list of the one hundred most influential books ever written, I would prepare myself for a life of literary success. Now, there are 3,000 books published daily. It is estimated that 1.5 exabytes (1.5 x 1018) of unique data will be produced in 2007, and going forward, this number will double in two years, ditto every 72 hours by 2010.
In the mid-1960s when I fancied myself a pioneer in data transmission, I successfully transmitted and recovered sixteen simultaneous channels of data over a rudimentary fiber optic device that used a combination of frequency modulation and color filters. It was quite impressive at the time. Alcatel recently tested a third-generation system that can transmit 10 trillion bits per second over a single strand of optical fiber, which is the equivalent of almost 2,000 CDs or 150 million simultaneous telephone calls. Talk about pigeon power.
Almost 50 million laptop and notebook computers were manufactured and sold throughout the world in 2007. With the $100-175 computer, millions of school children throughout the world are expected to soon have the power of computing at their desks. By 2015, super computers will have more computational power than the human mind, and within a short ten years thereafter, a laptop costing around today’s equivalent of a $1000 desktop will have the same power.
Given another fifty years, it is entirely possible that a $1,000 computer will exceed the computational capacity of the entire human race. Perhaps by then we will know how little we really know about each other and how much we need to learn, the latter being the most important and essential element of humanity.
It may turn out that computational capacity is merely one measure of our intellect and that our true inner essence cannot be measured by bits and bytes and data points, but by our boundless spirit, our unending search for knowledge and order, our respect of nature and eternal appreciation of art, and most importantly, our respect, appreciation, and love for each other.
Citizen Poet 