The greatest epic in the history of the human race, The Mahabharata, traces its origins to the 8th or 9th century BC.
Legend has it that the sage, Vyasa, was able to observe the entire passage of events described in the tale and needed to record it for posterity. He petitioned the elephant god, Ganesha, to write down his words as he recounted them. Ganesha agreed to do so on condition that Vyasa tell the story in its entirety without stopping. Vyasa realised that he would not be able to do this, so he in turn agreed to do so if Ganesha would take time to understand what was being said before writing it down. The god smiled and agreed.
The longest version of the Mahabharata today consists of more than 100 000 slokas. (A sloka is a couplet of two individual verse lines.) About 1,8 million words tell a tale that is ten times the size of the great European epics of the Iliad and the Odyssey combined.
The Mahabharata was written more than 2 500 years before 1965 when Intel co-founder Gordon E Moore noted that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles biennially. He expected that this would continue for at least the next ten years.
That prediction, which became known as "Moore's Law", proved to be broadly accurate for many decades afterward. In plain speak, what that means is that computers get twice as powerful every two years and have done so for the past 40 years.
Think about this: the cellphone in your pocket probably has more processing power than was available to the entire Apollo space programme.
But it was not only the speed of computers that increased – it has been followed by the ability to store increasingly huge amounts of information at cheaper prices.
For example, three years ago, I bought a 1-terabyte disk for around R1 200. The following year, I bought a 2-terabyte disk at the same price. Last year, it was a 3-terabyte disk. Today, I note that a 4-terabyte disk is now available at the same price.
Now this probably sounds boring. Hear me out. What this means is that our ability to store information today completely outpaces the ability of the human race to produce new information.
A single blank CD holds roughly 150 million words which is enough to hold the entire Mahabharata 80 times over. A 4-terabyte disk can hold more than 5 500 CDs.
So the end result of this is that every minute of every day, 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube alone.
Edward Snowden two weeks ago blew the whistle on the fact that the US government was stockpiling information on just about anything most people in the world are doing in the digital space. The world gasped in disbelief. Now, he is on the run – supposedly heading for Ecuador via Cuba but fell off the map somewhere in Moscow.
It's a stupid thing to do. If I were the Russian premier, I would have pounced upon the fugitive immediately he touched down in Moscow and spent the next year interrogating him about what exactly the NSA knows.
Now on the off chance that this is not the case and the Russians are actually good guys, Edward Snowden should turn himself in.
Think about it: we know that if the US is spying on everyone, so are the Russians and so are the Chinese and so are the Indians. (I'm reluctant to speculate as to whether or not our own NIA is doing something similar in case Mac Maharaj accuses me of treason.) This is the world that George Orwell predicted. Anything and everything about everybody and everything is being recorded somewhere somehow for always. This is not going to go away.
Snowden has done the world a favour by blowing the lid off this operation. The trouble is that he has nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
The best thing he can do is to go back to the US and face trial in an open court before a jury of fellow Americans where the machinations of the intelligence world can be thrown open to public scrutiny.
The alternative is that if he takes refuge in a country that is openly hostile to the US (such as Venezuela), all it takes is one well-placed drone and he is toast.