Guided Tours Six routes through 58 curves, each an argument told in data: from candlelight to fusion breakeven, what cheap launch bought, and how exponentials end. From Subsistence to the Data TorrentThe world got no richer per head for most of recorded history, and then it did. This route follows the compounding out of output and into information, landing on the data the world produces in a year: 2 ZB in 2010, 64.2 ZB in 2020, and everything after that is IDC model rather than measurement.GDP per Capita — Average output per person gained 36% in eighteen centuries, then broke out after 1820. The flat handle is most of the chart.World GDP — Total output rose about 110-fold in the two centuries after 1820, faster than the per-person line because population grew too.Moore’s Law — Representative leading-edge transistor counts have roughly doubled every two years, the rate Moore settled on in 1975 after sketching a yearly doubling in 1965.Cost per GFLOPS — A billion floating-point operations cost over $1 trillion in the ENIAC era. Today it is about a cent, and the decline has been slowing since 2015.HDD Cost Collapse — Keeping a gigabyte went from $87 million in 1956 to a cent, then slowed sharply as flash took the work that rewards speed.Internet Adoption — Internet adoption is a textbook S-curve: 6 billion users by 2025, 74% of the world, and the growth already decelerating.Data Created per Year — Annual data creation rose 32-fold across the measured decade to 2020; everything after is IDC model. Most of those bytes are copies, and almost none is kept.How Exponentials Slow, Stall, and EndA curve that flattens has not necessarily hit a limit. It may be recovering from a shock, the binding cost may have moved somewhere the line never counted, or the source may have stopped publishing. Seven curves here slowed, stalled or ended, and the reason is different every time.Cost per kg to LEO — A record only moves when someone beats it, and this one improved just over twofold in the forty-three years to 2010. It ends in 2018 because nothing in CSIS’s survey beat the record set that year.HDD Cost Collapse — Floods across Thailand knocked out about a third of world drive production and prices sat flat from 2011 to 2014. That was an interruption, not an ending: the decline resumed, more slowly.Genome Sequencing Cost — NHGRI counts a fully loaded production cost, and only the reagents kept collapsing. It stopped publishing at $525 in 2022.Gene Synthesis Cost — Carlson’s table ends in 2017, and not because the data went dark: commercial gene-synthesis prices stopped moving.Global Mobile Subscriptions — Subscriptions passed one per inhabitant and the exponential ended there. Growth has run about 2.5% a year for the past decade.English Wikipedia Articles — English Wikipedia went from one million articles to two in eighteen months. Six million to seven took more than five years.AI Math Reasoning (Mock AIME) — GPT-5.5 Pro scored 100% on the Mock AIME in April 2026, three years after GPT-4 managed 0.6%. A percentage has nowhere further to go.AI: From Silicon to a Billion UsersThe hardware path runs from the transistor to the cluster, and every layer of it compounds. The last three curves leave the hardware behind.Moore’s Law — Representative leading-edge parts passed from CPUs to AI accelerators as frequency scaling hit power limits. Rubin carries 336 billion transistors.Datacenter GPU AI Compute — The gap over transistor counts came from tensor cores, HBM and lower precision. Each generation is plotted at its own precision, so the yardstick moves too.Ethernet Speed Standards — A training cluster is wired with 400- and 800-Gbps Ethernet, a standard that started at 10 Mbps in 1980.AI Training Compute — The largest training run grew 360 million-fold between 2013 and 2026, doubling every 5.8 months.AI Math Reasoning (Mock AIME) — Step-by-step reasoning took o1-mini from single digits to 46.9% in September 2024, and the frontier reached 100% in 2026.Cost of o1-Level Reasoning — The bar is o1’s 76.8% on GPQA Diamond, which cost $26.25 per million tokens to clear in 2024. Among flat-rate providers, that price fell about 150-fold in nineteen months.ChatGPT Weekly Users — ChatGPT reached one billion weekly users in August 2026, less than four years after launch.Energy: From Candlelight to BreakevenSeven centuries of making energy cheap, then making it clean. Candles gave way to gaslight and gaslight to electricity, and each time a falling price pulled deployment behind it. Silicon and lithium are running the same pattern now. The source meant to succeed them is still in a laboratory.UK Cost of Light — Fuel for a fixed quantity of light fell 13,800-fold from 1300, the oldest price on the site. That one line is three technologies stitched together, not one exponential.Solar PV Cost — Modules fell from $132 a watt in 1975 to $0.27 in 2024, roughly 500-fold in real terms, and the fall reversed more than once on the way down.Global Solar Installed Capacity — Under 2 GW in 2000 and roughly 2,400 GW by the end of 2025, doubling about every 27 months across the whole span. A record 514 GW went up in 2025 alone.Global Wind Power Capacity — Wind scaled 76-fold since 2000, but its doubling stretched from three years in the 2000s to six over the past decade. Solar held near three across that decade.Battery Cell Cost — Lithium-ion cells fell from $9,210 per kilowatt-hour in 1991 to $78 in 2024, the decline that made EVs and grid storage possible.Global EV Sales — Sales went from 7,400 EVs in 2010 to 21 million in 2025, near-vertical from 2020 and decelerating since 2022.Fusion Energy Gain — Fusion crossed scientific breakeven in December 2022, and the record gain stands at 4.13. Wall-plug gain is still roughly 0.02, so it is not yet a source.Space: What Cheap Launch BoughtThe price of orbit barely moved for most of the space age. Reusability changed that less than the headlines suggest, but cadence, tonnage and the satellite population all answered within a few years. The route then turns the telescopes outward, to two surveys cheap launch did not drive.Cost per kg to LEO — A kilogram to orbit fell to $1,500 with Falcon Heavy in 2018, where the CSIS record ends. The full 56-year fall is only about tenfold.Orbital Launches per Year — From the 1980s through the 2010s, launches ran 55 to 130 a year. Reusable boosters and China’s expansion broke that ceiling, and 2025 set the record.Annual Mass to Orbit — Reusable Falcon 9 multiplied annual tonnage eightfold in seven years, mostly Starlink. Tonnage counts capability in a way a rocket tally does not.Active Satellites in Orbit — About 1,450 satellites were active in 2015 and more than 17,000 are now, most launched in the last five years and nearly two-thirds of them operated by one company.Confirmed Exoplanets — Two confirmed worlds in 1992, over 6,000 now. Kepler, one launched observatory, confirmed about 44% of them, and discovery has slowed sharply since it retired.Known NEAs, Roughly 1 km+ — 881 kilometre-class near-Earth asteroids were known at the end of 2025, and over 90% of the estimated population has been found. Discoveries are down to two a year.Biology Becomes an Information ScienceBiology became a science of databases. Work that once took a bench now takes a file, and the archives grow at rates usually reserved for semiconductors. The route ends on writing DNA, the half of the trade that never got cheap.Genome Sequencing Cost — A genome fell from $95 million to $525, a factor of 181,453 in twenty-one years. Then reagents stopped being the binding constraint and the read price stalled.GenBank Sequence Data — GenBank grew from 680,000 base pairs in 1982 to 9.4 Tbp, roughly 13.8 million-fold. After 2018 it doubled every eighteen months; 2025 was slower, 2026 faster again.Annual Biomedical Papers (PubMed) — Biomedical papers grew about 21-fold since 1950, reaching 1.77 million in 2025 after holding near 1.6 million through 2024. The sequence archives kept doubling throughout.Cryo-EM Map Archive: Cumulative — The cryo-EM map archive went from 8 released entries in 2002 to 52,921 by the end of 2025. Direct detectors and better reconstruction software set off the resolution revolution, recognised by the 2017 Chemistry Nobel.Protein Structures: Cumulative — Fifty years of lab work built 185,392 experimental structures. One 2022 release added 214 million predicted ones. A predicted structure is not a solved one.Gene Synthesis Cost — Writing DNA fell about 1,250-fold to 2017 and then stalled, while every read-side curve in this tour kept climbing. All curves · Walking a tour in the atlas needs JavaScript. Every stop above is a page of its own.