I'm in Boise, Idaho, of all places, at the moment, getting ready for a talk tomorrow (Jefferson's moose, the Internet, and all that), and I'm just wandering around and wondering about something (and I've found that when I'm wondering about something, VC readers can sometimes help me out). Has the Internet been the fastest-growing thing on the planet over the past 30 years or so? It's a funny question, but an interesting one, when you ask it like that. The Net's been growing pretty steadily at a rate of around 4-5% a month at least since 1980 or so — say 30 years, going from a couple dozen machines to over 550 million. Is there anything else on earth that can match or better that, over that long a period? I can't think of anything.
At least, I can't think of anything tangible. There may be intangible things — like "computing power," for example, or maybe "human knowledge," or the like — that kept up a growth rate this high over this long a period. But is there anything with real, material existence — any population of bacteria, or grains of sand on a beach, or leaves on trees, or houses on a stretch of road, or ... that did so?
And if not, that's got to amount to a pretty remarkable achievement — to have built the fastest-growing thing on the planet? How did we do that? And who do we give the medals to?
Update: Thanks for all the ideas -- keep 'em coming. Many of the suggestions, though, fall into the "interesting, but not really close" category, e.g. kudzu, bamboo, human population, bacteria . . . The Net's growth rate, 4-5 % a month, implies doubling every 14 months or so — if the amount of kudzu on the planet had been doubling every 14 months or so, for 30 years, we'd be covered with it. Literally. Like many organisms, it can grow really, really fast - but it does not keep it up, year after year after year after year. And human population isn't even close - if it had been doubling every 14 months since 1980, the total population would be over 150 trillion.
Other networks are interesting - I don't have the data for railroads, telephones, cell phones, etc., but I seriously doubt they can match it for this long a period - adding that much capacity is incredibly costly, and doubling capacity every year or so starts getting expensive after a while . . . but I'm going to look into it.DavidP
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Not since 1980, as your question implies, but in human history I'd look at telephone and electrical power distribution networks.
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For natural things, the re-greening of Mt. St. Helens (just a piece of wild speculation, as it re-greens from a bleak condition; starts from scratch, etc.)
The original Internet was ARPAnet--which I hacked into about 1972, when I was in high school. It was growing fast throughout the 1980s, but the real takeoff happened when the "non-commercial use only" requirement went away in the early 1990s.
Too bad I am on call tonight, I would have offered to buy you dinner.
The Internet might very well qualify as the most complicated machines that humans have ever built. Especially if you count every node that accesses it as part of the machine. Even more so, since it requires cooperation and agreement between all involved parties to function.
What's amazing to me (having written code for some of them) are how well so many different network routers manage to cooperate. Partly this is because of the RFC process for defining how different components are supposed to cooperate.
It's not really that complicated.
Phone usage in general. Microwave ovens, radios, auto's (minus the last 6 months)?
The answer is yes. A small number of companies provide the bulk of everything having to do with the internet.
The standards make everything work together. That is one reason Apple is small time. They wanted to go with appletalk which nothing else worked with, so companies/govt did not want to use them for anything. Now they are regulated to people who want to think they are special.
Depends on your level of abstraction. Watching videos streamed from Europe on your CDMA cell phone in Playa Vista is the culmination of everything we as a people know—from physics,mathematics,computer science, engineering, business administration, finance, law, statecraft, psychology, aesthetics, design, etc. Nobody understands the whole kit and kaboodle at a deep level.
On the flip-side: the core internet protocols probably still fit on an 800k floppy. But most programmers, much less human beings, don't understand them well enough to make good use, much less implement them.
Building an aircraft carrier is more complex. Watching a video is no different then reading a webpage. Data is data. You are mistaking devices for the internet. I know 99% of people out there are "laymen" when it comes to the net but it really is pretty simple.
I don't understand this distinction. Without roads, traffic laws, and automobiles, there is no interstate highway system, either. As an artifact, aircraft carriers are likely more complicated than the notion of the internet; as notions, they're at about the same level of complexity ("float an airfield" or "connect two networks").
How about the number of people infected with AIDS. If you assume about 100 people were infected in 1980, and 35 million will be in 2010, the rate of growth, averaged over the whole 30 year period, is pretty close to the Internet's.
That's "sneakernet"—an ad hoc, faith-based protocol stack kept alive by the thumb drive—with enterprise ("loafernet") and academic ("birkenet") variants.
Besides the examples of Kudzu and bacteria, what about Bamboo? I've heard it's remarkably fast growing.
Not so fast (especially as compared with kudzu), but very 'aggressive.' In garden-talk, that means "impossible to limit and nearly impossible to kill.'
Then there are the books, supplies, appliances, equipment I order (and track) on line, and which are now delivered to my door, not picked up at local stores in person. It seems to me that such chains of events could arguably be included in any assessment of the internet's reach and extent.
Similarly, you could factor in the internet's depository/archival capacity for knowledge/news/games/music -- perhaps in some sort of units of information for example, perhaps simply by calculating the explosive growth in "things" like KBs of information both stored and transmitted.
I'm also a bit confused by exactly what "the Net" is in this question. If one binds it by the same requirement of tangibility, then it presumably is the actual infrastructure. In which case the global total length of copper wire and equivalents would readily exceed the Net. If the Net is something more like the amount of data available, then I'd suggest that there is a lot more storage not accessible via the net than is accessible. Or the total amount of heat generated by electrical devices.
This is a little faster than the rate of doubling for the Internet (14 months) and Moore's law for transistor density (18 months).
But, we would be covered over - in the U.S. South, at least - if humans were not doing daily battle against kudzu.
Your original question sought the 'fastest growing thing on this planet' - not 'the thing that has had the fastest unhindered growth.' Really, it's not a fair competition: so many folks are busy trying to stop kudzu, bamboo, and bacteria. The Internet has been nourished and supported. Kind of a wimp, if you think about it.
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