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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.
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.)
The total according to this article is 295 exabytes.
$sig not found
...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?
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
38 Gigabytes per person is enough? I don't think so.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
You're revealing a pretty heavy bias there. I'd guess a geologist would find the dirt photo much more valuable than either the view or the mc^2, and a bored housewife whose life has been closed down to the point where her only social outlet is tv would find the view more valuable than the other two.
"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.
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?
I didn't rtfa, but uh, how do you determine the value in bytes of one piece of knowledge?
I hear Mexico has surpassed 420 Esebytes.
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.