The information age merges human-directed activity into the planet’s 4 billion-year-old information economy. Earth’s biosphere, when considered as a whole, constitutes a global, self-contained infrastructure for copying the digital information encoded in strands of DNA. Every time a cell divides, roughly a billion base pairs are copied, with each molecular transcription entailing the equivalent of about 10 bit operations. Using the rule of thumb that the mass of a cell is a nanogram, and the estimate that the Earth’s yearly wet biomass production is 1018 grams, we arrive at a biological computation of 3×1029 bit operations per second. This is close to the amount of artificial computation we carry out within the span of a year. While the production of biomass has stayed roughly constant for hundreds of millions of years, artificial computation is increasing exponentially.