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And Almost All of It Is YouTube Videos of Teenagers Making Fools of Themselves
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Tuesday, March 6, 2007
10:06:00 AM EST
Hearing Yellow -- Petra Haden
How much electronic data did humanity create last year? 161 exabytes' worth. Well, that's swell, you say. What's an exabyte? Well, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes. As a comparison, the hard drive on your computer might be able to store a couple hundred gigabytes. Need more comparisons?
That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as three million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than two billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.
Yeah, that's a lot. But a lot of it is apparently duplicated data: All those people forwarding funny pictures of cats to everyone they know. If you only look at original data generated, it's "only" 40 exabytes, or about 300,000 Libraries of Congress. That's hardly anything!
So much data. How much of it is worth saving? How much of it will ever be experienced more than once? As someone who writes on electrons, this is not a trivial question.
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10:06:00 AM EST
Hearing Yellow -- Petra Haden
And Almost All of It Is YouTube Videos of Teenagers Making Fools of Themselves
How much electronic data did humanity create last year? 161 exabytes' worth. Well, that's swell, you say. What's an exabyte? Well, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes. As a comparison, the hard drive on your computer might be able to store a couple hundred gigabytes. Need more comparisons?
That's like 12 stacks of books that each reach from the Earth to the sun. Or you might think of it as three million times the information in all the books ever written, according to IDC. You'd need more than two billion of the most capacious iPods on the market to get 161 exabytes.
Yeah, that's a lot. But a lot of it is apparently duplicated data: All those people forwarding funny pictures of cats to everyone they know. If you only look at original data generated, it's "only" 40 exabytes, or about 300,000 Libraries of Congress. That's hardly anything!
So much data. How much of it is worth saving? How much of it will ever be experienced more than once? As someone who writes on electrons, this is not a trivial question.
Written by johnmscalzi Blog about this entry |
Add to del.icio.us | digg this
This entry has 3 comments: (Add your own)
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I actually know the guy who counted all those exactobytes... I used to walk by his office window and yell "7234560000 dubbabytes," and he'd lose count and have to start all over. He threw his pen at me, but missed by one Angstrom Unit.
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You write on electrons? Wow, you must use a really teeny pen!
-Paul
http://journals.aol.ca/plittle/AuroraWalkingVacation/
3/7/07 12:18 PM
*hugs*