For four billion years evolution has been accumulating knowledge in its library of genes. You can learn a lot in four billion years. Every one of the 30 million or so unique species of life on the planet today is an unbroken informational thread that traces back to the very first cell. That thread (DNA) learns something new each generation, and adds that hard-won knowledge to its code. Geneticist Motoo Kimura estimates that the total genetic information accumulated since the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago is 10 megabytes per genetic lineage. Now multiply the unique information held by every individual organism by all the organisms alive in the world today and you get an astronomically large treasure. Imagine the Noah’s Ark that would be needed to carry the genetic payload of every organism on earth (seeds, eggs, spores, sperms). One study estimated the earth harbored 10^30 single-cell microbes. A typical microbe, like a yeast, produces one one-bit mutation per generation, which means one bit of unique information for every organism alive. Simply counting the microbes alone (about 50% of the biomass), the biosphere contains 10^30 bits, or 10^29 bytes, or 10,000 yottabyes of genetic information. That’s a lot.