Aiden and Michel, who met at Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and dubbed their field of research “culturomics,” contextualize the premise:

At its core, this big data revolution is about how humans create and preserve a historical record of their activities. Its consequences will transform how we look at ourselves. It will enable the creation of new scopes that make it possible for our society to more effectively probe its own nature. Big data is going to change the humanities, transform the social sciences, and renegotiate the relationship between the world of commerce and the ivory tower.

And big data is indeed big — humongous, even. Each of us, on average, has an annual data footprint of nearly one terabyte, and together we amount to a staggering five zettabytes per year. Since each byte consists of eight bits — short for “binary digits,” with each bit representing a binary yes-no question answered either by a 1 (“yes”) or a 0 (“no”) — humanity’s aggregate annual data footprint is equivalent to a gobsmacking forty sextillion (40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) bits. Aiden and Michel humanize these numbers, so challenging for the human brain to grasp, with a pause-giving analog analogy:

If you wrote out the information contained in one megabyte by hand, the resulting line of 1s and 0s would be more than five times as tall as Mount Everest. If you wrote out one gigabyte by hand, it would circumnavigate the globe at the equator. If you wrote out one terabyte by hand, it would extend to Saturn and back twenty-five times. If you wrote out one petabyte by hand, you could make a round trip to the Voyager 1 probe, the most distant man-made object in the universe. If you wrote out one exabyte by hand, you would reach the star Alpha Centauri. If you wrote out all five zettabytes that humans produce each year by hand, you would reach the galactic core of the Milky Way. If instead of sending e-mails and streaming movies, you used your five zettabytes as an ancient shepherd might have—to count sheep—you could easily count a flock that filled the entire universe, leaving no empty space at all.

It's kind of an awesome thought to think of every human as a "computer" generating lots of data.

And when we interconnect these "computers" into a hive mind, it accelerates the creation and spreading of knowledge. Knowledge is data in formation.