Tuesday 1 March 2011

Brain - storage capacity

It’s easy to feel both amazed and utterly overwhelmed by the amount of information that humans have created in the digital age. And now, researchers have calculated a number to go with those feelings. A big one.

As of 2007, humans had the capacity to store 295 exabytes. An exabyte is 1018 bytes. If you think of the gigabytes (a billion bytes) in which your hard drive space might be measured, an exabyte is a billion of those gigabytes. Another size comparison: Astronomers, by necessity, are designing new information processing techniques to help them grapple with the coming age of “petascale” astronomy, because they’re starting to get more information than they can handle. “Exa” is the prefix after “peta”; it’s a thousand times more.

Or, simply, a stack of CDs storing 295 exabytes of information would reach beyond the moon.

unfortunately, a lot of people you meet will not be using their full potential, this generally cannot be attributed to 'bad sectors on the storatge device'

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