Well? How many megabytes does it take to represent the world? I’m curious about this but google and searching here doesn’t help.
A lot. A whole lot.
Hundreds of terabytes is 100,000,000,000,000s of bytes. Crazy.
Google’s not talking, but it’s estimated that they’re over 150 TB now.
Well, the surface area of the Earth is somewhere in the ballpark of 5.1 * 10^14 square meters. If the resolution of Google Earth is a uniform 1 square meter = 1 pixel (it isn’t, but just for the sake of argument…), and it takes 24 bits to represent one pixel (8 bits per each color, red, green, and blue), that’s around 1.4 petabytes before any compression.
If you just consider the surface area of the land surface, ignoring the water, that’s only 1.49 * 10^14 square meters or so. A mere 406 terabytes at the aforementioned resolution and naive encoding.
Just back of the envelope estimates, but I see they’re in the same ballpark as the more informed industry estimates. Anyone specializing in GIS have any better ideas?