{"id":32585,"date":"2014-05-30T15:13:07","date_gmt":"2014-05-30T15:13:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-information-age-merges-human-directed-activity\/"},"modified":"2014-05-30T15:13:07","modified_gmt":"2014-05-30T15:13:07","slug":"the-information-age-merges-human-directed-activity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/the-information-age-merges-human-directed-activity\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The information age merges human-directed activity into the planet\u2019s 4 billion-year-old information economy. Earth\u2019s 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\u2019s yearly wet biomass production is 1018 grams, we arrive at a biological computation of 3&#215;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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<div class='attribution'><a href=\"http:\/\/nautil.us\/issue\/13\/symmetry\/third-data-server-from-the-sun\">Third Data Server From the Sun &#8211; Issue 13: Symmetry &#8211; Nautilus<\/a> (via <a class=\"tumblr_blog\" href=\"http:\/\/wildcat2030.tumblr.com\/\">wildcat2030<\/a>)<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The information age merges human-directed activity into the planet\u2019s 4 billion-year-old information economy. Earth\u2019s 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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[],"tags":[1539],"class_list":["post-32585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","tag-emergent-digital-practices","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6PWot-8tz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32585\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rafaelfajardo.com\/portfolio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}