So I was reading a series of articles on Wired about the Petabyte Age.

While I didn’t agree or disagree with the author’s point that massive amounts of data will fossilize the scientific method as we know it, I did start thinking about the future of data and how it will change everything.

Most of the supporting articles talked about existing large databases that are helping people understand immensely complex systems and information. Stuff like a satellite that takes a picture of the entire night sky every three days, unimaginable data from the Large Hadron Collider, years of airline ticket prices, and even the projected agricultural supplies for countries. Some of this stuff has been around since the turn of the century with the others right around the corner. What’s cool about all of this is that we’ve been able to harness huge amounts of data back around same time I was deleting things because I ‘ran out’ of disk space. Back then you had to be able to afford storage to stop worrying about it. Now anyone can get access to more storage than they’ll ever need at almost no cost.

So in comes the Petabyte age. Unlimited data. Not only can we stop worrying about deleting anything ever again, we can now store everything. Literally. Collective human knowledge is growing within Wikipedia and the rest of the Internet daily. We can assume that everything man-made will eventually be cataloged and remembered somewhere. People are blogging and micro-blogging by the minute. They’re shooting videos and taking photos and putting all of this onto digital storage. This is happening now.

Babies being born this very second will have their entire lives digitally recorded once they’ve left the womb thanks to their eager parents. Once they’re old enough to master a language and access a computer, they’ll take over that roll themselves by Facebooking their preschool classmates and emailing around cellphone photos of their boogers and crayon art. None of that sounds too outlandish until you wonder what celebrities or politicians do in the future when their entire lives can be perused by complete strangers. Instantly. Privacy being irrelevant.

That’s all near future stuff though, what’s after that? We could archive every tree on the planet. Then each one of their leaves. Do all the animals while we’re at it. Tracking individual atoms starts to sound less like wizardry when you’re thinking on the infinite storage level. This being the level where things start to get really interesting.

Star Trek brought us science fiction like transporters that memorized our atoms and scattered and resorted them instantly. So in 20 years, or even 10, when every baby’s DNA is coded and their atomic makeup is on file somewhere, we can finally take a crack at thinking about teleportation. THAT’S the future, all of this data and our ability to discover crazy things from it. We’ll be solving problems we never even knew about. Then again, we’ll probably also generate a whole slew of new ones we can’t solve.

Like what happens if all that information starts getting permanently erased…