By the end of World War II a study done by Harvard's librarian indicated
that the sum total of human knowledge committed to paper represented about
10 million books. This translates into 10 trillion bytes (terabytes) of
information.
By 1998 the Library of Congress had accumulated twice the 1945 book count
but new media have now added significantly to the information on earth.
These take the form of sound recordings, 3.5 million of them representing a
million billion bytes (a petabyte). When one estimates the generation of
new text, based upon paper production, the bytes represented by photos
(estimated from emulsion production), films, telephone, television, and the
speech of face-to-face communication, the earth has presently generated 10
exabytes (1000 petabytes=1 exabyte) of information. This is 10^19 bytes of
information generated by human culture.
And the rate of production continues to climb.
One source of information not included above is that from computers. How
to estimate this is beyond me.
But one thing is clear from this, information is not conserved, as some
have claimed. (William A. Dembski, "Intelligent Design as a Theory of
Information", Perspectives on Science and Cristian Faith, 49:3, Sept 1997,
p. 188
glenn
Adam, Apes and Anthropology
Foundation, Fall and Flood
& lots of creation/evolution information
http://www.isource.net/~grmorton/dmd.htm