Knowledge As We Know It.

I’m at the library. To me, the library is strangely hard to understand. It’s just a building stocked with books for all ages, and interests. A house of knowledge, told on paper. I can still remember the wonderful feeling of excitement I found when entering the library as a young child. Not only was it an adventure into a million worlds at once, but also it was quite overwhelming. It still can confuse me. I think of the extent of human knowledge, and realize that this relatively large library I am sitting in doesn’t even break the ice. For example, The Library of Congress’s collection simply blows me away. According to their website, over 32 million documents are stored there. The items there include most everything you’d find at a public library, and more, in many different languages. What I cant understand though, is how all of these physical documents take up room in libraries allover the world, when every single book on the face of the earth could undoubtedly be backed up digitally to take up a millionth of the space. This is truly unbelievable to me, but what does it mean? If we look at history, the past has been filled with the destruction of human knowledge. The Nazis conducted a book burning in Berlin on 1933, which was one of the largest modern examples of how physical paper copies of books can be destroyed. Yes, they burned books, but look at the technologically advanced modern world we now live in. We are connected more easily then ever before, and in some cases-- we are too connected. If the Nazis tried to destroy knowledge and censor the masses today, they would be faced with an even more daunting task. We have reached a point where information can spread to every country on the planet in a matter of hours. Digitized data will eventually help immortalize the past. Information may be kept from certain people, by their governments, but no matter what, it is there. It exists, in one of mankind’s millions of libraries- or it’s single most accessible database, the Internet. History and information of all types will forever be kept in our grasp. Everything will surely be stored away, so that it could survive the end of the world. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault has done it for plants, and contains 400,000 seeds and counting. If organic matter can be stashed away to evade nuclear fallout, digital data could be too. It’s just strange to think about how much information there is in this world, and how much we can now do to store it. Digital backups are obviously in no way foolproof, but will they be someday? With the countless advances I've already witnessed in my short fifteen years of life, I sure think so. Human knowledge may be ever expanding, but our mediums of storing our knowledge will continue to get smaller and smaller.