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Thread: All the information in the world: petabytes

  1. #1
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    All the information in the world: petabytes

    Quote Originally Posted by Ghost View Post
    Off-topic (sorry) but does anyone have any idea how many MB the internet actually is?
    What is even more interesting is the question "how much information is there in the world". (And how much is dance related).

    When I was in short trousers I did some research in this - and I quote from my (ahem) white paper on trust (2001):

    "The amount of information available in the world is currently estimated to be “several thousand petabytes[1]” (Lesk, 1999). It is estimated to be growing at a rate of two exabytes (two billion gigabytes) per year (Lyman and Varian, 2000)

    [1] Petabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1015 bytes]
    · 2 Petabytes: All US academic research libraries;
    · 8 Petabytes: All information available on the Web;
    · 20 Petabytes: Production of hard-disk drives in 1995;
    · 200 Petabytes: All printed material
    Exabyte [ 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 1018 bytes]
    · 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated worldwide annually.
    · 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings



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    Re: All the information in the world: petabytes

    not a googlebyte?
    or even googleplexbyte?!?

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    Registered User Beowulf's Avatar
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    Re: All the information in the world: petabytes

    Quote Originally Posted by JiveLad View Post
    The amount of information available in the world is currently estimated to be “several thousand petabytes
    And do you know how hard it is to store that on my IPAQ? any idea the number of SD card I have to carry just so I can say "yes.. actually I DO know everything!"

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    Re: All the information in the world: petabytes

    Quote Originally Posted by Ceroc Jock View Post
    not a googlebyte?
    or even googleplexbyte?!?
    or a nerdbyte?
    Mind you, you'd have to make sure your tetanus and rabies shots are up to date.

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    Registered User killingtime's Avatar
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    Re: All the information in the world: petabytes

    Quote Originally Posted by JiveLad View Post
    · 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated worldwide annually.
    · 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings

    It's interesting that we are stating that each year we generate nearly half of all the information ever generated for the whole of history before it (presumably 2001). Presumably it is all words recorded. A fairly low-res version (video and audio) of a life is somewhere at 200 terabits (1 terrabit = 10^12 bits, or that over eight for bytes). Assuming that audio is 10% of that then we have 20Tb per person audio, obviously people won't be talking all the time but we'll use this for argument sake at the moment. It takes 50 people to have 1Pb or 400 to have 1PB. Therefore you are only getting 400,000 people for 1ExB or 2,000,000 for 5ExB? Now even if you only make noise worth saving for 5% of your life then you've still only got 40,000,000 people. Unless you are just saving the text, but then that's not really doing what is spoken justice.

    Quote Originally Posted by Beowulf1970 View Post
    And do you know how hard it is to store that on my IPAQ? any idea the number of SD card I have to carry just so I can say "yes.. actually I DO know everything!"
    You then have to destroy the known universe so you never need to get new stuff. I know this because I saw it on Futurama .

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    Re: All the information in the world: petabytes

    Quote Originally Posted by Ceroc Jock View Post
    not a googlebyte?
    or even googleplexbyte?!?
    no, these names are set in stone and quite familiar to geeks

    They are :

    bit byte Kilobyte Megabyte Gigabyte Terabyte Petabyte Exabyte Zettabyte Yottabyte


    and heres a geeky calculator

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