You're More than Everyone... and Here's Why

Today, in my Management Information Systems class, we were talking about the various sizes of data that we use in modern computers. Many of you have heard of megabytes and gigabytes, but how “big” are these, exactly? I looked it up, and I was absolutely astounded as to just how much information humans have bothered to record. Not only this, but I found a mind-blowing fact that I’ll remember forever, and you should know about it as well.

A “bit” is the smallest unit of data. Basically, it’s a 1 or a 0; a true or false, up or down. 8 bits make a byte, which is the basic unit of computing, with 10 bytes making a single word and about 100 bytes making a sentence. Next is a kilobyte, which is 1024 bytes (1 kb=one page of text). Megabytes are 1024 kilobytes, with 10 Mb giving a one-minute song and 5 Mb holding the complete works of Shakespeare.

Sorry for all the techy lingo, but stick with me. A Gigabyte is probably what you’re most familiar with. A single GB can contain an entire symphony or a TV quality movie, whilst 10 GB can hold the entire orchestrated works of Beethoven and 50 GB is equivalent to an entire floor’s-worth of books at a library.
Now THIS is where it gets nuts. A Terabyte is 1024 Gigabytes. A SINGLE terabyte can house as much information as 50,000 trees worth of paper, and 1.24 TB is estimated to be the capacity of a human’s functioning memory. 2 TB is how much it takes to store an academic research library, and 10 TB is the amount of information in the Library of Congress.

But it gets BIGGER. A Petabyte is 1024 Terabytes. If you had 100 PB, you could store all printed history in human civilization. That means every book, magazine, newspaper, or anything that’s been published. But it doesn’t stop there; one Exabyte (1024 Petabytes) is the amount of information that has ever been SPOKEN by humans. That means that every word, phrase, sound, song, laugh, or anything that has ever come from the mouth of humanity could be contained in an Exabyte.

And here’s the point that made my jaw drop: a Zettabyte is 1024 Exabytes. This piece of information is so large, if everything humans ever build, said, wrote, designed, and even DID was recorded, you could fit it into a Zettabyte with tons of room to spare. Now here’s the kicker: if you took a single gram of human DNA, it would contain more than 2.2 ZETTABYTES OF INFORMATION. I don’t know about you, but the sheer ‘size’ of all this makes me feel pretty small. Isn’t it amazing that the thing that makes you “you” is greater than the rest of all humanity combined? It’s a pretty sobering thought.

And THAT, kids, is your mind-blowing fact of the day.