Hitting the Books: Why we like bigger things better
We know that life began small , and that, eventually, evolution took a decisive turn toward larger sizes with the diversification of animals during the Cambrian period, which began more than half a billion years ago. Large size offers such obvious competitive advantages as increased defense against predators and access to a wider range of digestible biomass, outweighing the equally obvious disadvantages of lower numbers of offspring, longer gestation periods , and higher food and water needs.
The genesis of this trend is unmistakable: size enlargements have been made possible by the unprecedented deployment of energies, and by the truly gargantuan mobilization of materials.
But nothing has seen a size rise comparable to the amount of information we have amassed since 1900. In 1897, when the Library of Congress moved to its new headquarters in the Thomas Jefferson Building, it was the world’s largest depository of information and held about 840,000 volumes, the equivalent of perhaps no more than 1 terabyte if stored electronically.
A Ford Model T — the first mass-produced car, introduced in 1908 and made until 1927 — is the obvious baseline for size comparisons. The 1908 Model T was a weakly powered , small , and light vehicle, but some Americans born in the mid-1920s lived long enough to see the arrival of improbably sized and misleadingly named sports utility vehicles that have become global favorites.
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