Richard Sexton
6 January 2019 ·
Here's a sobering statistic. In the first decade of the 21st century Google began scanning books (some of this was done at U Toronto) and after a few years said if they were to continue at this rate (they stopped instead, copyright issues) then by the end of the 21st century they would have 10% of it online.
By this math it would take a thousand years to get what we know now digitized and put onto the web. A thousand years just to put what we know now, online. That's terrifying.
9Albert Gerhardt Zibell, Tom Barr and 7 others 10 comments
Joel B Levin I would differentiate "what we know" and "what has been written", and using an arbitrary and unjustified guideline (thanks to Theodore Sturgeon) I'd postulate that "what we know" is not more than 10% of "what has been written". On second thought, that estimate is probably way too high, but I love Sturgeon's Law. 3
Simon Higgs What if we got a couple of billion monkeys typing randomly on teh interwebz... oh wait... 1
Robert Reimann Assuming our capability to do it didn’t improve in speed in 1000 years.
Richard Sexton And assuming no new information. OOPS. The rate at which total knowledge doubles became sub-year in frequency some years back.
Rhonda Delles What's kind of sad is that after we're dead usually our web pages will go away, and eventually even the big ones will go away. And while they will likely be replaced with something else, all that will be lost, there will be nothing to reference back to once it's gone,unlike books that are still there. And while if books aren't relevant there becomes less and less of them over time, quite a few have lasted a really long time. 2
Scott Meggison I hope we can find a solution to this. It would be a horrible thing to lose knowledge. Like losing the Library of Alexandria to fire
Richard Sexton Oh it's already happening. Libraries everywhere aren't able to house all the books and every library on the pnet throws away books, usually monthly.
Peter Evans and the chinese pirates could do it in ten lol
Miguel Figueiredo I guess that 90% is fiction, not knowledge.
Edward Johnson The old saying "There's nothing new under the sun" might also come into play on that percentage of what we know. Much of it is regurgitated information. Facebook groups are the most accurate source for information lol. That's why the books are obsolete now.