Digital Data & Human Brain

All the Digital Data In the World Is Equivalent to One Human Brain

Supercomputer An IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer rack. Wikimedia Commons

By Rebecca BoylePosted 02.11.2011 at 6:05 pm13 Comments

If you could put all the data in the world onto CDs and stack them up, the pile would stretch from the Earth to beyond the moon, according to a new study. The world’s technological infrastructure has a staggering capacity to store and process information, reaching 295 exabytes in 2007, a reflection of the world’s almost complete transition into the digital realm. That's a number with 20 zeroes behind it, in case you're wondering.

Martin Hilbert and Priscila López took on the unenviable task of figuring out how much information is out there, and how its storage and processing have changed over time. Some of their findings seem obvious, like the fact that Internet and phone networks have grown at quite a clip (28 percent per year), while TV and radio grew much more slowly. But others are more surprising, like the nugget that 75 percent of the world’s stored information was still in analog format in 2000, mostly in the form of video cassettes. By 2007, 94 percent of the world’s info was digital./.../