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The Sum Total of the World's Knowledge: 250 Exabytes
arkenian writes "The BBC reports on an article in Science about scientists who calculate that the sum of all the world's stored data is 250 exabytes. Perhaps more interestingly, the total amount of data broadcast is 2 zettabytes (1000 exabytes) annually. In theory this means that the sum of the world's knowledge is broadcast 8 times a year, but I bet mostly that's just a lot of American Idol reruns."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-to-air - "Free-to-air (FTA) describes television (TV) and radio services broadcast in clear (unencrypted) form, allowing any person with the appropriate receiving equipment to receive the signal and view or listen to the content without requiring a subscription (or other ongoing cost)"
http://www.hulu.com/ (free tv)
http://www.youtube.com/ (free music vids and tv)
http://www.piratebay.org/
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
How much of that is pornographic "knowledge"?
Perhaps some of the knowledge broadcast has a negative value, so the absolute value of the knowledge broadcast is high, but the net information distributed is much smaller?
Nice way to conflate terms for a sensational headline. What a bogus metric. A good chunk of that "stored data" is junk. Probably most of it. Not to mention duplication. (Duplication? I told you not to mention duplication :-)
So, then, get the backlog done.
It is about time we have high definition copies of all old texts, like the all hieroglyphs ever documented, all Babylonian texts, all Sanskrit texts, the Dead Sea scrolls, all Medieval hand writings, etc.
I guess all these together could not muster 1% of all the crap that is out there today. I wouldn't be surprised if all the foolish blabber-blobber-blubber on Facebook a single day outcompete all pre-1700 texts combined.
So, back to work. Get the backlog done.
E=mc^2 represents a lot more knowledge to me than the entire 3,000 episode run of "The View" or similiar programs -- even though it's a lot more concise.
I could take a yottapixel photo of dirt and it sure won't tell me a lot.
The submitter messed up two of the basic details of this story - the number is actually 295, not 250, and this value is as of 2007, rather than the implied present day. (I know, I must be new here.)
no i NEED MOAR
warning pointless sig
The total according to this article is 295 exabytes.
$sig not found
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...not meaningful in terms of the headline. The number is just addressing storage capacity potential available, not as unique meaningful data. All its saying is that the average person has access to x terrabyes of digital storage. That number is just taking manufacturing numbers for electronic hardware, and dividing by number of people.
It's not addressing the actual complexity generated or used by people. It's not actually addressing any actual people or what they do.
There is, however an interesting deeper meaning behind a number like this - the more this number multiplies, the harder it is going to be to control information, as people have more and more diverse options for storing and transferring data.
This means that even as processing power multiplies - it becomes even more impossible to police all the data of the world for improper uses.
That's the more interesting aspect of this number.
Ryan Fenton
Wrong math. At best what you there have 125 exabytes of knowledge and 125 exabytes of anti-knowledge. Ok, probably the knowledge weights more than the antiknowledge, so for each scientific paper could be a hundred pages on ovnis, a thousand lolcat videos, and. well, hundreds of spam pages, but somewhat we keep going forward.
The knowledge of the amount of storage needed to keep all the knowledge increases the amount of storage needed, the knowledge of which increases the amount of knowledge, ad infinitum.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Wouldn't that be 1 zebabyte=1024 exbabytes?
*ducks*
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
the fact that maybe some of us were NOT counted in what is obviously a flawed study? I don't recall at any time being polled about how much secondary storage I have on my MAIN computer system, roughly 5.5TB. Never mind the fact of what I have available to my MacBook for secondary storage too -- and that wasn't asked to me either. I think there's more than what's stated in the article. Pfffttt....!
Only to people who don't understand SI units or the meaning of the word "approximation."
Again the rectal extrusion technique is used to add just a few more bytes to that fantastic number they obtained. I wonder how they classify the 3 dead hard drives sitting in my spares closet. Do they still store data even though I am unable to access it? How did they come up with the algorithm to determine which pieces of paper I left blank, which ones I wrote on both sides, and which ones were printed on one side only. Not to mention the ones I spill coffee on and never end up using. Ahh pseudo-science. It's great when you can just make stuff up. You could even call it a religious feeling.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
It's my understanding that each human brain can store roughly 4-5 PentaBytes (entheogen.com). So if the human population* is about 6,775,235,741 (Google Public Data) then I think this would blow the 250 exabytes estimate out of the water.
*Excluding Gwyneth Paltrow
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
The aliens will invade after they get sick of so many reruns of friends reaching them.
Wrong, they'll invade earth to watch the end of Single Female Lawyer
_ actually it is:
250 exabytes - "my HDD, gone for good, without a previous backup" = phuckedagainbywesterndigitaltechnology
Only to people who don't understand SI units or the meaning of the word "approximation."
No, to anyone other than SI fanatics. Metric megabytes are hopelessly painful in the IT world where everything is measured in powers of two: saying my laptop has 6 binary gigabytes of RAM is far more useful than saying it has 6.442450944 metric gigabytes.
I think they'll invade earth to enact the end of Single Female Lawyer.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I learned a while back that for reasons having to do with the event horizon of a black hole and the conservation of entropy/information, a bit does not have mass but it does have area. One bit requires an area of 2 Planck lengths on a side, which is 4 * 16.163e36 m = 6.4652e35 m^2
So 'all the information in the world', multiplied by 1,000, would require an area about 2 femtometers on a side. :D
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
Replying to self - yes, I know I'm playing fast and loose with the terminology. IANA physicist. But the concept stands. See black hole entropy.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
And of that "knowledge", how much of it is correct? And of the correct knowledge, how much is relevant. I'd say that 250 exabytes will shrink rapidly if usefulness was taken into account.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
38 Gigabytes per person is enough? I don't think so.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
We were all set to record the 250 exabyte mark, and then you posted this story. No one cares about the 250.000000000001st exabyte. Way to spoil things for everyone.
When the SI system was established, back during the French Revolution, they also started the calendar over at year one again. And did further irrelevant things. You know, all the sorts of things you do when you've achieved total power and can be arbitrary.
But wait, now that we know this hasn't the sum of stored knowledge increased? And now that we know it has increased, doesn't that make it increase again? And wait, now that we know it increased again, doesn't that make it increase again? When will it ever end?
Say no to XKCD!
I figure so long as Lrrr is further away than Altair, we're safe... for now.
If God forks the Universe every time you roll a die, he'd better have a damned good memory.
Will Britannica be publishing DVD's with all of it? If so, who needs the internets?
Wouldn't that count as negative information?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Yay!
I didn't rtfa, but uh, how do you determine the value in bytes of one piece of knowledge?
Q: Deep Thought, what is the ratio of the number of porn files to atoms in the universe?
Just so long as they don't keep it all in one place.
------
MS Fnd in a Lbry
HAL DRAPER
From: Report of the Commander, Seventh Expeditionary Force,
Andromedan Paleoanthropological Mission
What puzzled our research teams was the suddenness of collapse
and the speed of reversion to barbarism, in this multigalactic
civilization of the biped race. Obvious causes like war, destruction,
plague, or invasion were speedily eliminated. Now the outlines of the
picture emerge, and the answer makes me apprehensive.
Part of the story is quite similar to ours, according to those who
know our own prehistory well.
On the mother planet there are early traces of *books*. This word
denotes paleoliterary records of knowledge in representational and
macroscopic form. Of course, these disappeared very early, perhaps
175,000 of our yukals ago, when their increase threatened to leave
no place on the planet's surface for anything else.
First they were reduced to *micros*, and then to *supermicros*,
which were read with the primeval electronic microscopes then extant.
But in another yukal the old problem was back, aggravated by colonization
on most of the other planets of the local Solar System, all of which were
producing *books* in torrents. At about this time, too, their cumbersome
alphabet was reduced to mainly consonantal elements (thus: thr cmbrsm alfbt
w rdsd t mnl cnsntl elmnts) but this was done to facilitate quick reading,
and only incidentally did it cut down the mass of Bx (the new spelling)
by a full third. A drop out of the bucket.
Next step was the elimination of the multitude of separate Bx
depositories in favor of a single building for the whole civilization.
Every home on every inhabited planet had a farraginous diffuser which
tuned in on any of the Bx at will. This cut the number to about one
millionth at a stroke, and the wise men of the species congratulated
themselves that the problem was solved.
This building, twenty-five miles square and two miles high, was buried
in one of the oceans to save land surface for parking space, and so our
etymological team is fairly sure that the archaic term liebury (Ibry) dates
from this period. Within no more than twenty-two yukals, story after story
had been added till it extended a hundred miles into the stratosphere.
At this level, cosmic radiation defarraginated the scanning diffusers,
and it was realized that another limit had been reached. Proposals were
made to extend the liebury laterally, but it was calculated that in three
yukals of expansion so much of the ocean would be thus displaced that the
level of the water would rise ten feet and flood the coastal cities.
Another scheme was worked out to burrow deeper into the ocean bottom,
until eventually the liebury would extend right through the planet like
a skewer through a shashlik (a provincial Plutonian delicacy), but it
was realized in time that this would be only a momentary palliative.
The fundamental advance, at least in principle, came when the
representational records were abandoned altogether in favor of *punched
supermicros*, in which the supermicroscopic elements were the punches
themselves. This began the epoch of abstract recs - or Rx, to use the
modern term.
The great breakthrough came when Mcglcdy finally invented mass-
produced *punched molecules* (of any substance). The mass of Rx
began shrinking instead of expanding. Then Gidbg proved what had
already been suspected; knowledge was not infinite, and the civilization
was asymptotically approaching its limits; the flood was leveling off.
The Rx storage problem was hit another body-blow two generations later
when Kwlsk used the Mcglcdy principle to develop the *notched electron*,
made available for use by the new retinogravitic activators. In the ensuing
ten yukals a series of triumphant developments wiped the problem out for
good, it seemed:
(1)
n/t
38 Gigabytes per person is enough? I don't think so.
How much data storage do people in rain forests need? How about nomads, bedouins and bushmen?
There are a lot of people in the world who have lower storage requirements than you.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Another good chunk of what would be considered "knowledge" ... my suspicion is "chunk" is woefully inadequate and perhaps this 295 excabytes pales in comparison ... is what humans know but have not committed to another recorded form.
Call me crazy, but "the sum total of the world's knowledge" doesn't imply just "some form" of it; it pretty much states boldly that it's the works.
From TFA: ... The researchers calculated the figure by estimating the amount of data held on 60 technologies from PCs and and DVDs to paper adverts and books. ..."
"
Secondly, that's the data that once existed in 2007 ... three years is a VERY long time in the modern world of data accumulation.
In 1992, when the Net was young(ish), I used a 300 baud modem on a 486DX2 PC with DOS and with a new text browser called "Lynx" (wiki link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_(web_browser)). I would make descions on whether I would download the pictures with Zmodem or Kermit to view them. My patience dictated 11kb as the size limit. A year later, I used to envy those uni poeple connected to the main network using MOSAIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) ,a precursor to Netscape and other browsers which showed you the pages in HTML form - usually on X on unix minicomputer.
Happy days. Not much porn on the net back then. Says something about what "mainstream" means.
Tthe bits needed to store all this will outnumber the atoms on Earth.
I hear Mexico has surpassed 420 Esebytes.
One byte per person on an average.
Because some of them have been registered through scientists.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
It will be interesting to know how lower this figure will go taking away all the useless copies of the same files 10 MB? :P
Never say never... because that's what they said when they used two char for the year field in old banking databases and programs. And so many database that overflowed because they got to the point that should never be encountered.
Assuming one bit per atom, and assuming carbon atoms being used for storage, a memory of 2^128 bytes (assuming 8 bit/byte) would have about the same mass as the world oil production of 14 years (using the data for 2001 from Wikipedia as estimate of the average yearly oil production). A silicon-based storage (again, assuming one atom per bit) of that size would have more than twice that mass.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Data, not knowledge. big difference. mostly anti-data. distracting from reality. lies. bs (see politicians).
Pure cr_p. un-analyzed photos and movies. pron. dups.
totally bogus figures (see above)
wake up and hold your nose
One of these things is not like the other.
Knowledge is the art of filtering the relevant data out of this inflated mess.
By that definition, there is very little knowledge around.
Technically I don't need any storage either. The real question is how many bytes would a bush tribesman want if he could get them.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Nice to see we can fit all of the info on one piece of paper, as a number and say ok, if we need to back up the internet, this is how much space we need.
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to subscribe to your banana-powered, zebra byte newsletter.
NO, now you've done it! Within a couple of seconds, the universe will collapse and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexplicable! Noooooooooooo...
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.