Plenary paper: The rise of Exaflood optics

Optics is now in its exaflood stage: with hundreds of exabytes of data swarming around worldwide webs of glass and light. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th, a billion gigabytes, a million billion big books of text or fifty thousand textual Libraries of Congress, enough to satisfy the reading needs of the world´s population for a century. Or one exabyte is just a hundred million high definition movies, hardly enough to satisfy a million teenagers for a year. For the past two decades has raged a war between the rise of Exaflood optics with its video tides and the persistence of a communications infrastructure based on vocal and textual trickles. The trickleware has all gone mobile and wireless. Today the planetary utility of optical glass increasingly carries high definition images, virtual worlds, games, and telephonic telepresence, in a global sensorium, pushing the system toward the Zettabyte era of 10 to 21st. This requires a new optical architecture. It´s first manifestations are inclement and cloudy for the industry. Most optics companies are following an uncreative, modular strategy, fitting components into existing systems. The real opportunity in optics is to create entirely new systems that adapt to a new age of optical entanglement appropriate to the age of telepresence. Don´t solve problems, pursue opportunities.