Someone has estimated the amount of digital data that represents the sum total of human information in the 21st century, and the figure is 295, doesn't sound like much but that's 295 exabytes, which is 10 raised to the power of 18 or 295,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes. A byte would represent something like a single letter of the alphabet or digit and normally consists of 8 binary digits, i.e. 1's or 0's. The estimate includes things like music and video, as well as text, things like video take up millions of times more space than plain text; anyway suffice to say that's a heck of a lot of 1's and 0's!
However uncomprehendingly vast this amount of information is it's peanuts compared with the potential storage capacity that our DNA has, which is estimated to be around 300X the total amount of information we currently store in all our technological devices per human body! or in other words about one third the amount of information transmitted during each telephone conversation between my Wife and her Mother ;-)
and I still can't find a decent book to read ...
2 comments:
But when the entire universe - and many worlds universes - are all part of a huge quantum computer, then even that palls into insignificance.
And the answer is 42...
CB, our computers will become self aware and finally we'll have someone else to talk to in the universe, at that moment the asteroid will hit, I just know it...
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