1 exabyte of data (1 billion gigabytes) could fill 1 trillion (1 million million) books (and for an idea of just what 1 trillion is, this is pretty enlightening), or 26.5 million miles of shelving, enough to stretch to the moon how many times?1) 50
b) 250
c) 110
d) 95
e) None of the above
Answer here.
And while we are on the subject of colossal numbers (although I should talk about this separately sometime because it is absolutely fascinating) – it was estimated that back in 2007 internet users created over 160 exabytes of new data. I'm not sure about 2008, but as of May 2009 the internet has been estimated to be comprised of some 500 exabytes (oh, and – umm – one exabyte is equivalent to roughly 50,000 years of DVD-quality video). A fun analogy has been made that all the words ever spoken by every human being could be stored in about 5 exabytes (which, coincidentally, is roughly the amount of monthly global internet traffic).
And this is all child's play when it comes to ginormous amounts of data. What about zettabytes and yottabytes? Like I said, someday I'll post something interesting about exponential equations and mind-boggling numbers and leave this mostly just for that little quiz (which is of course easy to answer with simple math provided you know the distance from the earth to the moon).
5 comments:
(C) I knew that. It's a quarter-million miles to the moon; the rest of the math is child's play.
Another fun big-number exercise I've always enjoyed: take a piece of paper, tear it in half, and stack the two halves. Then tear the stack in half and stack them so you now have four sheets. Tear that in half, stack, repeat. Assuming the paper is 0.1mm thick, after 100 tears how thick would your stack of paper be?
(I did the calculations for this in high school and have remembered it ever since.)
Uh, 1.27(to the 27th power) centimeters? I dunno, that seems really big - I took 2(to the 100th power) * 0.1mm / 100 (to convert to cm) ... might be wrong but I'd be interested to find out the answer.
Your math is right. Converting the units to something with fewer zeros, the answer is roughly 13.6 billion light years, or a third of the way across the known universe. That's a big stack of paper to rip in half.
Actually, I take that back-- you're off by an order of magnitude. There are 10 mm in a cm, so you need to divide by 10 not 100.
Ah yeah, duh. Good stuff.
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