Enter Light Field Lab, a California-based startup manufacturing the first-ever display technology able to generate those trillions of photons. While their initial displays are only four- by six-inches across, they're capable of projecting a holographic image two inches thick, viewable

To quote computer graphics pioneer Ivan Sutherland who said in 1965: "The ultimate display would, of course, be a room within which the computer can control the existence of matter. A chair displayed in such a room would be good enough to sit in. Handcuffs displayed in such a room would be confining, and a bullet displayed in such a room would be fatal." Sutherland's futuristic vision sounds just like Star Trek’s holodeck!

The Technology of Light will meet all our energy needs in the 21st century. It will need no huge budgets to maintain because it will be devised and controlled by intellectuals who do not look for billions of pounds of profits to satisfy them... Once built, the technology will last for 2,500 years, 'until the next cycle of evolution.'

For me the future of the image is going to be in electronic form. … You will see perfectly beautiful images on an electronic screen. And I'd say that would be very handsome. They would be almost as close as the best reproductions.

As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one television screen, just think of the variety of images you can get. It's so cool. It's like going to the moon.

Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose.

Amplify. ...[W]hen we have a device like this and we put it in the dark... it goes click, click... Every once in a while a light particle comes in: a photon. This is a particle in every sense. ...[I]f you have a very weak light... and... you put two cells out, and there's just a few... [photons] coming, then it goes on one or the other... the particle is either here or there. ...It is particles, in every way, whenever you can detect it. ...If we were ten times more sensitive to light, then in the dark, we would see... little flashes, little tiny... dots of light, the nerves would go off just like the photomultiplier, in spots. But the human eye is not quite that sensitive, and it takes 5 or 6 ...photons ...to make one nerve fiber go off. ...So we cannot detect, with the eye, light quite low enough to notice the fact that it comes in the form of rain drops.

If you imagine the combination of petabytes memories with LiFi and communication at tens of gigabits per second but the combination and like 10,000 Cray-Ones and a little thing like your fingernail everywhere in every single light bulb that’s like an atomic bomb hitting software. What we’re going to do with it, nobody’s got a clue.

Woven deep into the vast communication networks wrapping the globe, we also find evidence of embryonic technological autonomy. The technium contains 170 quadrillion computer chips wired up into one mega-scale computing platform. The total number of transistors in this global network is now approximately the same as the number of neurons in your brain. And the number of links among files in this network (think of all the links among all the web pages of the world) is about equal to the number of synapse links in your brain. Thus, this growing planetary electronic membrane is already comparable to the complexity of a human brain. It has three billion artificial eyes (phone and webcams) plugged in, it processes keyword searches at the humming rate of 14 kilohertz (a barely audible high-pitched whine), and it is so large a contraption that it now consumes 5 percent of the world’s electricity. When computer scientists dissect the massive rivers of traffic flowing through it, they cannot account for the source of all the bits. Every now and then a bit is transmitted incorrectly, and while most of those mutations can be attributed to identifiable causes such as hacking, machine error, or line damage, the researchers are left with a few percent that somehow changed themselves. In other words, a small fraction of what the technium communicates originates not from any of its known human-made nodes but from the system at large. The technium is whispering to itself.

The visible universe seems the same in all directions... larger than about 300 million light years. The ... (...[~]one part in 10⁵) in the cosmic microwave background... radiation... traveling... [~]14 billion years, supporting the conclusion...

There is a single light of science, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere.

The source of all light is in the eye.

Data centers in space are the largest market opportunity ever... by 10 orders of magnitude.

the very beginning of time until the year 2003," says Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, "humankind created five exabytes of digital information. An exabyte is one billion gigabytes — or a 1 with eighteen zeroes after it. Right now, in the year 2010, the human race is generating five exabytes of information every two days. By the year 2013, the number will be five exabytes produced every ten minutes … It's no wonder we're exhausted.