All the Information in the World
1 exabyte = 1 billion gigabytes
Kilobyte = 1,000 bytes or 10^3 (half a typewritten page)
Megabyte = 1,000,000 bytes or 10^6 (a small novel)
Gigabyte = 1,000,000,000 bytes or 10^9 (a pickup truck full of books)
Terabyte = 1,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^12 (1/10th of the Library of Congress)
Petabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^15
Exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or 10^18
This video explains that in 2007, we had the capacity to store around 295 exabytes of information and that this capacity doubles in a little more than three years. Some later estimates project doubling in about a year and a half.
Here is the timeline of our data storage capacity:
1986 – 2.6 exabytes
1993 – 15.8 exabytes
2000 – 54.5 exabytes
2007 – 295 exabytes
2012 – 2,596 exabytes
2017 – 16,000 exabytes (projected)
How much total information is there in the world?
– [vimeo.com]
