Information superhighways: the next information revolution.

The United States could benefit greatly - in research, in education, in economic development, and in scores of other areas - by efficiently processing and dealing with information that is available but unused. What we need is a nationwide network of information superhighways," linking scientists, business people, educators, and students by fiber-optic cable. This network would encourage a second information revolution.

In 1979, I proposed a network of information superhighways, and the only person I could find who was really enthusiastic about it was a gentleman from Coming Glass. Executives in the communications industry were at first reluctant to endorse this idea. Indeed, hostile would actually be a more accurate description.

Today, the idea has really taken hold in all of the industries related to communications, computing, and information. The president's science adviser, Allan Bromley, recently said that such a network is the single most cost-effective step America could take to become more competitive in the world economy. It is also the single most important step the United States could take to improve its proficiency in science and technology and research.

We're now drowning in information.

We have not successfully mastered the task of organizing and distilling the information for our productive use. Years ago, I created a new word called "ex-formation,' information that exists outside the conscious awareness of any living being but that exists in such enormous quantities that it sloshes around and changes the context and the weight of any problem one addresses. The problem is to convert "ex-formation' into information and then to convert the information into knowledge and eventually to distill the knowledge into wisdom, the hardest process of all.

For example, the Mission to Planet Earth satellite program will soon send down to the Earth's surface from orbit every day a quantity of information equal to all the bits of data in the entire Library of Congress. We can't even handle the information we now have about Planet Earth.

Some have argued we already have all the information we need to decipher the operations of the climate system and the changes we're making to that system. NASA is proposing to send up a new generation of data-collecting satellites and spend 17 years compiling a lot more information. And yet, just one satellite system, Landsat, in orbit for the past 18 years, can photograph the entire Earth's surface every two weeks. More than 95% of Landsat's pictures are stored in digital form and have never fired a single neuron in a single human brain. Teams of researchers, using the most complicated models now available, cannot communicate with each other and work together productively to solve problems, because in order to communicate they have to find a way to download their models and their results onto magnetic tapes, take the tapes to another lab, and read the tapes so other researchers can review and talk about them.