Today, data is everywhere. Internet services used by hundreds of millions of users, from every part of the world, generate petabytes, and zetabytes of data. A little part of this vast ocean of data originates from photo uploads, status updates on Facebook, tweets, +1s on Google+ posts, or intentional or unintentional clicks on random links that appear in the news feeds of various social networking platforms. Part of this data originates from websites, where citizens of the internet share their knowledge for free. Be it by answering questions on diverse topics on Quora, or by writing a complete Wikipedia article or contributing to it. Most of this data contributes to the shared intelligence of the internet. Shared intelligence which can be used by amateur astronomers to feed their curiosity about some astrophysical phenomenons that fascinate them or by a math student who is trying hard to write his homework at 1.30 AM and finds the best damn material ever about Normal Distribution on Wikipedia. A part of this data comes from archives of literature that humans have created over several decades in the past. Another part of this data is the genomic data, which itself is a huge mass of data, containing genetic codes of millions of people on earth. All this data combined with other medicinal research data which otherwise would look useless to a common man, is used to steer research to find out cures for the most dreaded diseases that haunt humans. There is actually so much data of this kind out there, which would make no sense to most of the beings on the planet but it helps scientists track that asteroid that they found near Mars, to make sure that they tell everyone on Earth if ever its going to hit us before it actually does, or collect data from the Large Hadron Collider and do some crazy complicated calculations over that data in quest to find new particles. Think about it, the data is so big, that it results in calculations big enough that it might actually take thousands of years to finish on your laptop or mine. The list gets overwhelming, but its just the little beginning of the big list covering some fascinating categories of mammoth sized data that we have stored in large magnetic disks living in large rooms all over the world, full of computers endlessly sucking electricity and generating heat.

So where has all this data led us to? We have so much data and so much we can do with this data. Mathematics and computer nerds have played with data for a long time, and with all that data indefinitely increasing, they have found interesting ways to capture and use this data. Data science is the new science, which is nothing but the interplay of some math and computation systems hackery. Data is now used in ways no one would have thought of in the past. Be it suggesting to you the other crazy people like you on the internet or pop up on your screen those perfect ads which trigger an involuntary urge inside you to click on them. And all this is not just for fun and nerd pride, this earns quite some money for the companies that own and use their data in a smart way. Dozen of big companies make big bucks just out of playing with their mammoth sized store of bytes. So, its safe to say, data is a science and a business.

Looking at the advancements in medical science, and the ability of data scientists to collect and process data, it might be possible in future, that you might have the dump of meta-data of each cell of your body, logs of your nervous activity, et cetera. The outcomes would be fascinating, scientists will have models that predict the behavior of each individual cell in your body and your nervous activity. You can watch in advance, where the trends of your physiological data will take you. A more fascinating situation would be when you can sync the data in your brain to a cloud storage. A snapshot of everything that you have in mind now and things that you have accumulated in past. That would give rise to a new way of measuring people in addition to professional qualifications, and physical attributes. This measure would depict how many bytes of data does a person fit in. Generally, an average figure considering all the data in physiological log data, cellular meta-data, brain data snapshots and DNA data would roughly be a couple of terabytes. Most of this data would be logs, which would increase as the person grows older. DNA data would be more like a constant for all, roughly about half of gigabyte. The brain data snapshot would be a couple hundred gigabytes. Now there could be an interesting concept here. The brain would have the potential to make over a terabyte or two of data, but most of this data cannot be accessible at all times. There would be a thing like an Instantaneous Brain Snapshot which would be the snapshot of the data that can be retrieved from the brain in a one go. This data would be much smaller than the actual data that can fit in the brain. I might appear that one would get IBS from its brain enough times that most of the data from the brain is retrieved. Well yes that would be possible, but it would not be easy. An IBS retrieval operation would be a fairly complicated task. For the computers of the future, it would be much of what mining bitcoins is for the present computer systems. The special software built for the purpose of IBS retrieval would be doing complex calculations on the person’s physiological log data transformed in certain ways every time a new IBS retrieval operation is started. The result would be fairly long hash value that can be used to decode memory location of each byte that can be retrieved from the brain. This would be a few hundred gigabytes of data.

All that wacky imagination leads us to think, are we ready? The answer is definitely not trivial, and only the future will let us know. The outcomes could be diverse. Cancer research involving big-data analysis may totally change how some of the most dreaded diseases are medically treated. While the physiological data, like the IBS (brain data) can take humanity to an entirely different level, where people can synchronize snapshots of their mind to cloud, maybe combine it with a version control system and hence never forget a thing. On the other hand, this technology could be used to duplicate intelligence by embedding IBS images into robotic memory, which would of course create more intelligence on earth and at the same time make intelligence worth much less than now, maybe nothing at all! Even worse, unauthorized access to such intellectual data by bad guys could be lethal, whose outcomes can be well thought of as a long list of crimes and other bad things that can be done. For instance, imagine acquiring the brain dump of the best physician on planet working on next generation nuclear weapons that has the capacity of wiping out a planet twice the size of earth (much worse if we ever inhabit a planet that big).

Whatever the outcomes are and whatever all this data fuss makes us, be it good or bad, it will eventually happen. Humanity is going to keep generating data and finding interesting ways of using it. Internet giants might be using their (your) data to bring some good user experience into their applications but your data might be subject to surveillance by government agencies who want to spy over every internet citizen in the name of detecting real security threats. What our data gives us totally depends on what use the data is put to. When there are awfully amazing applications of data, there will always be equally dangerous applications as well.