300 years or bust

CNET reports that Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told a conference in Phoenix that it would take about three hundred years in order for the search engine company to index all of the world's information. Which if true would make for an interesting coincidence, because that's roughly how long it took the Arabs to translate the corpus of (nonfiction) Greek literature into Arabic in Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate. The translation project, which spanned from the 8th to the 10th centuries A.D., was one of the greatest intellectual endeavors of all time -- on par with the Apollo Missions or the decoding of the human genome.

Astute readers of The Jersey Exile will remember that I've talked about "The Baghdad Project" before, which I learned about through Dimitri Gutas' excellent book Greek Thought, Arabic Culture. What Google is currently trying to do is in my opinion worthy of comparison to the Abbasid translation movement, for just as the preservation and promulgation of Greek texts in Arabic lead to an intellectual explosion in the Islamic world and ultimately lead to the Renaissance in Europe when these texts were rediscovered by the West via Muslim Spain, the folks at Google by digitizing and indexing the world's knowledge will make it searchable and usable by all. Look at what the corpus of Greek wisdom could do for the world when the Arabs made it available to a wider audience. Just imagine what we'll do with the whole enchilada!