Data: The Past, the Present and the Future

Digital technology from the early 1990s onwards produced an exponential increase in astronomical data. Within our lifetime, the entirety of the visible universe will have been mapped out: we will have seen everything there is to see. The question will then be: what does it all mean? Solving the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy (which together account for 95% of the universe) and finding life elsewhere in the universe won't be possible without statistical and data analysis methods th...