Ask HN: Human Kind's available digital storage?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3990916

by fsniper • 14 years ago

4 4 14 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Considering every cloud store and personal devices, How much digital storage is available to human kind?

clarification edit: Of course, I'm not looking for a definitive answer. just asking for fun. Think of this as a estimation/guesstimation question.

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Are you asking for a definitive figure or perhaps even a tentative figure? Because the answer is infinite. Once we hit the ceiling of storage, we just add more space to accommodate our needs, there's no definite figure. I'm sure perhaps a statistician could maybe work out some kind of vague figure that would be invalidated the moment it's published. It's like asking how much oxygen is available to the human race, trees are being planted and contributing oxygen all of the time, there's no figure on how many trees there are exactly, only estimates.

Piskvorrr• 14 years ago

There are petabytes of storage media rolling off the assembly lines as you are reading this; are they relevant? Also, the estimate will doubled in several months.

lumberjack• 14 years ago

How do you define digital storage?

There is an astonishing (2^70B) bits of data just from the digital (open/closed) state of all the fingers of the living people on earth.

Sorry if a tad bit irrelevant.

meric• 14 years ago

That is only 430 gigabytes or so.

Ask HN: Human Kind's available digital storage?

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