Alpha Centauri, Secret project 31 - Voice of Planet:

Imagine the entire contents of the planetary datalinks, the sum total of human knowledge, blasted into the Planetmind's fragile neural network with the full power of every reactor on the planet. Thousands of years of civilization compressed into a single searing burst of revelation. That is our last-ditch attempt to win humanity a reprieve from extinction at the hands of an awakening alien god.

        -- Academician Prokhor Zakharov,
           "Planet Speaks"

I think that it was in Douglas Coupland's book, "Microserfs" that he stated that the bulk of the sum of human knowledge is not contained in the brains of human beings but rather in recordings (books, CDs, etc.). We have accumulated so much knowledge that it cannot be stored in the memory of all the people on Earth. Cool.

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