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Today’s E+ is on the article from the science magazine Popular Science, “Where Data Lives” by Rena Marie Pacella in the November 2011 Special Issue.

So basically, to sum it up, the article “Where Data Lives” pretty much gives you an in depth listing and explanation of the Worldwide Database. For a summary of that big a topic, it’s only two pages, but if you look into the short explanations of each type of database, you know enough to be able to imagine the never ending, vast, expansive land of data that exists out there. In fact, you know that you couldn’t possibly imagine it at all.

Data, to my opinion, is like a creature. If you know how to tame it, it can become your friend and also a helpful assistant. But if you let it slip or use it for the wrong sort of reason, it might just unleash itself onto the whole world. There is so much data—from genetic information to keeping track of every organism on Earth to even just the code of human relationships—it can be used for good, but it can also be used for bad.

One day, in the future, we will have an unlimited amount of information just put there in front of us, placed ever so conveniently that all we have to do is lean forward and grab it. It kind of takes the fun away from learning, don’t you think? Just the thought that with the right information, nothing can stop you from knowing anything—it kind of scares me. It makes me ask myself, is knowing a lot good? And because of all of this knowledge, we create and discover more and more things, which will, in the long run, probably turn out to be something drastically harmful and devastating (like cars). Of course, after those years, we find and create things that will counter our foolish actions from decades ago using the same knowledge.
It seems that humanity is destroying nature—in fact, if we hadn’t existed, if no intelligent creature had existed (which is technically not possible because one will always be smarter and therefore develop faster), theoretically, the Earth would be much more healthier. Instead, Earth is infested with this cancerous species calling themselves the top of the food and control-the-world chain, and shaking up the Earth’s health and inhabitants without asking a word.
To say, it’s not exactly our fault, nor am I blaming us and telling humanity to commit suicide—it’s in our general nature to want to survive, a very common and probably in many minds, overused phrase. It’s all back to Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection. But with or without biological proof, it’s obvious that inventing is, in a way, our way to survive. But now that we can think, and act upon decisions and counseling, maybe we can harness all of that data, and use it wisely.

This is where my ultimate opinion lies—that we should share data across the world. It should be universal, and unlimited—to every last fact (besides government-involved issues and such). Although we wouldn’t be learning anything if we had all of the world’s information right at our fingertips, but if the whole world—if every single person could see the same information, the world might become more unified. Instead of dividing people into classes of what they know, we would all be equal. And the majority of people may not bother into looking at the subjects of psychological advertising or biomolecular engineering.

Every bit of information, of course, would give credit to the founder of the fact. And although people from other countries may use scientific information to create chaos and disorder (maybe in our healths), we can use the same scientific information to disable that, or even prevent it. If every single capable person could judge what is true and what we should do about a worldwide problem with the same amount of information, we just might get closer to making a wise decision for once.