# How many bytes are there? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [August 17, 2004, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287 "2004-08-17T20:00:46Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![gonzoron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a6a055/32.png) [@gonzoron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzoron)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2004, 8:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/1 "2004-08-17T20:00:46Z")
Suppose some catastrophe was headed toward earth, and the only way to survive it would be to store some vast amount of data and reconstruct ourselves star trek replicator-style after the disaster. If we pooled together every hard drive, RAM, floppy, CD-R, DVD-R, Flash RAM, tape backup, zip drive, jazz drive, and any other kind of electronic memory storage device on the planet, how many millions of exabytes would we have? Anyone got an educated guess? ---
**Author:** ![Jake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/f475e1/32.png) [@Jake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jake)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2004, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/2 "2004-08-17T20:22:33Z")
Can’t answer the OP but I’ve read that if the entire Universe was a computer it wouldn’t be big enough to forcast (accuratley) the weather just on this Planet. (_The Matter Myth_, Davies and Gribbin, Simon & Schuster) Jake ---
**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2004, 9:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/3 "2004-08-17T21:02:04Z")
> [@gonzoron](#): > > Suppose some catastrophe was headed toward earth, and the only way to survive it would be to store some vast amount of data and reconstruct ourselves star trek replicator-style after the disaster. If we pooled together every hard drive, RAM, floppy, CD-R, DVD-R, Flash RAM, tape backup, zip drive, jazz drive, and any other kind of electronic memory storage device on the planet, how many millions of exabytes would we have?Anyone got an educated guess? How many hard drives, RAMs, floppys, CD-Rs, DVD-Rs, Flash RAMs, tape backups, zip drives, jazz drives, and any other kind of electronic memory storage devices are there on the planet and what is the size of each and every one? The OP calls for speculation and/or opinion. It is not a factual question nor relasistic and should be consigned to the dust bin or??? A COUNTER QUESTION: Suppose the moon was made of green cheese. A colony of six male and six female mice are placed thereon. How long will it take for the colony and its progeny to eat themselves out of “house and home.” ---
**Author:** ![Shalmanese](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/45deac/32.png) [@Shalmanese](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shalmanese)\ **Post date:** [August 17, 2004, 11:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/4 "2004-08-17T23:13:36Z")
Well, we can make a reasonable guesstimate. Restricting it to Hard Drive storage alone, the revenues and units of major manufacturers is publically availible. I don’t have recent data but a Scientific American article from 2000 claims that as of 1998, there was a total revenue of $30bn at 4c/Mb or 680Pb (680,000,000Gb). Extrapolation from that point leads to around $70bn at around $1/Gb or 70Eb of storage sold per year. Given that HD sales are exponential with a doubling rate of about 12 months, you can expect 140Eb of HD space to exist around the world. Space on CDR and DVDR are harder to quantify since it depends on the number of unburnt CD’s around. All other forms of storage would be trivial compared to these two IMHO. ---
**Author:** ![bibliophage](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bibliophage/32/7615_2.png) [@bibliophage](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bibliophage)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 3:25am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/5 "2004-08-18T03:25:59Z")
> [@spingears](#): > > It is not a factual question nor relasistic and should be consigned to the dust bin or?? I disagree. Simply disregard the speculative part and the following is the factual question: > [@](#): > > If we pooled together every hard drive, RAM, floppy, CD-R, DVD-R, Flash RAM, tape backup, zip drive, jazz drive, and any other kind of electronic memory storage device on the planet, how many millions of exabytes would we have? bibliophage moderator GQ ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 4:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/6 "2004-08-18T04:01:04Z")
a) Well, to start with, the matter that directly consitutes all those hard drives and CDROMS and DVD-ROMS and other storage media would take up way way way way more storage space to encode their physical material states in binary code than they themselves have available, so if you want to store everything in that fashion and not just the humans you’ve got one heck of a bootstrap problem. b) Ignoring that, there’s a basic “where you gonna store it, bub?” question that inheres from the impending _loss_ of the world’s supply of hard drives and CDROMS and whatnot along with the rest of the world. Unless you can get Cosmic FedEx to transport all this storage media to a safe planetoid before the cataclysm, storing everything in that fashion isn’t going to help you much, now is it? c) I seem to recall an IBM experiment in which a subatomic particle’s relevant information was beamed to a receiver which was capable of recreating an identical subatomic particle based on that information. [Here’s](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a5_198.html) the Master’s discussion thereof. **Cecil** says: > [@](#): > > Physicist Samuel L. Braunstein points out that a fairly coarse scan of the human body (one atomic length in each direction) would require 10^32 bits of data. I think 10 to the 32nd power is a hundred nonillion. Divide a hundred nonillion by eight to convert bits to bytes and you’re looking at 12 nonillion 500 octillion bytes. Convert bytes to exabytes — umm, will you forgive me if I use the decimal approximation here? — an exabyte appears to be 10^18 bytes, so we’ll just rip 18 zeros off the end. Looks like a hundred and twenty five trillion exabytes per person, if my math is worth a damn, and if the resolution Braunstein describes as “fairly coarse” is sufficient to restore them from backup. And as **Cecil** points out in the above-referenced article, that’s going to put your fastest FireWire 800 card through its paces for a very very prolonged performance test. Hope this helps. ---
**Author:** ![Meeko](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/e495f1/32.png) [@Meeko](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Meeko)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 4:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/7 "2004-08-18T04:12:45Z")
This vast international project is put off indefinetely when one asks; “MAC or PC?” ---
**Author:** ![Lobsang](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lobsang/32/4067_2.png) [@Lobsang](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lobsang)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/8 "2004-08-18T04:18:29Z")
Not enough to fit all your computer games on. (that always happens) ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 4:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/9 "2004-08-18T04:24:59Z")
> [@Jake](#): > > Can’t answer the OP but I’ve read that if the entire Universe was a computer it wouldn’t be big enough to forcast (accuratley) the weather just on this Planet. > > (_The Matter Myth_, Davies and Gribbin, Simon & Schuster) > > Jake Can you elaborate on their arguments? ---
**Author:** ![gonzoron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/a6a055/32.png) [@gonzoron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gonzoron)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/10 "2004-08-18T15:26:03Z")
> [@bibliophage](#): > > I disagree. Simply disregard the speculative part and the following is the factual question: Precisely. Please forgive my bit of whimsy. What use I have for all this storage is irrelevant, and shall remain a secret evil scheme, loosely covered by the “Postapocalyptic Reinstallation” propaganda. I’m not interested in the feasibility of transporters, or the theoretical information limit of the universe; just curious about the sheer bulk of storage that humans have thus far produced. **Shalmanese** is on the right track for what I’m looking for. The percentage of CDR’s and DVDR’s that have been burned vs. unburned is probably not easy to answer, but I’ll settle for a total on those. (We’ll assume that I can perfect some handwaving process to restore burned CD’s to a blank state by restoring the dye layer.) ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/11 "2004-08-18T16:32:34Z")
I misunderstood the question. You were asking how many exabytes to we _have_ and I misconstrued you as having asked how many exabytes you would _need_. In other tangents: **II Gyan II:** > [@](#): > > Originally Posted by **Jake** > > > [@](#): > > > > Can’t answer the OP but I’ve read that if the entire Universe was a computer it wouldn’t be big enough to forcast (accuratley) the weather just on this Planet… > > Can you elaborate on their arguments? I’m not **Jake** nor have I read the specific book that **Jake** references, but it’s the same point made by Ed Lorenz as long ago as 1963. Google “chaos” and “weather” and “butterfly effect” and “Lorenz”. Essentially even very simplified equations of the sort that would be necessary would be extremely dependent on exact initial starting values for all the point measurements, to the point that if between one measured point and another taken a meter away one unmeasured butterfly flapped its wing and changed the air current ever so slightly it would introduce a tiny fractional difference a few seconds later which would make a bigger difference a few iterations beyond that until by the end of the month you have calm where your computer model predicted a hurricane. So to overpower that problem with the brute force of data you’d have to have data tables for temperature airspeed humidity etc etc for every (let’s say) cubic millimeter of atmosphere and crust (perhaps necessarily all the way down to the earth’s core) along with sunspot activity and info on every living creature and its activity and who knows what else —an overwhelming amount of sheer information. Then you’d have to calculate the effect that every single one of those variables would have on the corresponding value of each of the others a (let’s say) tenth of a second later, a massively rendering feat. In short, it’s no easier than predicting what an as-of-yet-unborn girl will eat for lunch in the year 2047 and whether or not she’ll put the fork down before reaching for the salt shaker. ---
**Author:** ![rjk](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/ed655f/32.png) [@rjk](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rjk)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/12 "2004-08-18T17:09:57Z")
Just to continue the tangent, **AHunter3** ’s post seems to assume a strictly Newtonian or relativistic world, and ignores the randomness of quantum mechanics. What if a wing-flapping neuron in that butterfly’s brain is just not quite firing, and a carbon-14 atom decays and pushes it over the edge? As for the real question, all I can say is “Lots!” ---
**Author:** ![II\_Gyan\_II](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/bbe5ce/32.png) [@II\_Gyan\_II](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/II_Gyan_II)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 5:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/13 "2004-08-18T17:27:56Z")
> [@AHunter3](#): > > Then you’d have to calculate the effect that every single one of those variables would have on the corresponding value of each of the others a (let’s say) tenth of a second later, a massively rendering feat. Oh, I’m aware of the concept of chaotic systems. Jake’s paraphrased statement says the Universe can’t be a computer because it wouldn’t even predict Earth’s weather, if it were. I just want to know the chain of reasoning that leads to the conclusion that the Universe can’t indeed be precise and accurate enough to predict the weather. **rjk** , as I understand it, the formalism of QM does not definitely rule out determinism at the fundamental level, illustrated by the Bohm interpretation or Nobel laureate Hooft’s [beable-changeables](http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/citations?id=oai:arXiv.org:hep-th/0003005) . ---
**Author:** ![CurtC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ce73a5/32.png) [@CurtC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CurtC)\ **Post date:** [August 18, 2004, 10:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/14 "2004-08-18T22:08:54Z")
There’s only 256 different bytes. I can just write 'em all down. ---
**Author:** ![spingears](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ebca7d/32.png) [@spingears](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spingears)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2004, 1:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/15 "2004-08-19T01:26:35Z")
This thread seems to have drifted to the computer needed for the task. So if you want the utlimate computer to handle ALL of your computing needs for a long time… [url=http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~westside/quantum-intro.html]Qubit Computer[\url] ---
**Author:** ![Tuckerfan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/eada6e/32.png) [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2004, 2:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/16 "2004-08-19T02:21:08Z")
An article on the sum total of human knowledge can be found [here.](http://web.media.mit.edu/~saul/windup/wub/windup/0798wonders.htm) > [@](#): > > One plausible estimate of all text is based on the production of paper for writing and printing. Fresh text is less than 100 terabytes every year, 10,000 newspapers (by UNESCO count) included. Just about as much is held in all recorded music–the original sound, not copies, but not the mere scores either. Cinema contributes its flickering gallery of images: 5,000 films each year now, but over the century since the Lumière brothers only about one petabyte, mostly black-and-white and brief. People’s own images, their personal snapshots, are many. Their number worldwide can be estimated at 50 billion a year from the production of photographic emulsions (digital snapshots are still few). Even in highly compressed approximation, these images of cute kids and family gatherings amount to half a petabyte a year–perhaps 10 petabytes summed over the years. That’s just a _portion_ of the amount of data you’d need to store. ---
**Author:** ![Pasta](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/ecccb3/32.png) [@Pasta](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pasta)\ **Post date:** [August 19, 2004, 3:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-bytes-are-there/260287/17 "2004-08-19T03:07:36Z")
Here’s a lecture related to the topic. Its title is “Everything Digital: Converting the World in 2 Exabytes”. [http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS\_Site\_02/Lectures/Colloquium/Lesk/index.htm](http://vmsstreamer1.fnal.gov/VMS_Site_02/Lectures/Colloquium/Lesk/index.htm)