# Where are we on Carl Sagan's 'Information Mastery' scale? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [October 23, 2015, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550 "2015-10-23T15:55:00Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![TheSeaOtter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ed655f/32.png) [@TheSeaOtter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheSeaOtter)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2015, 3:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/1 "2015-10-23T15:55:00Z")
I was wandering the internet today (as one does), and came across the following on the Wiki article for the [Kardashev scale](http://https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Extensions_to_the_original_scale): > [@](#): > > **Information Mastery (Carl Sagan):** Alternatively, Carl Sagan suggested adding another dimension in addition to pure energy usage: the information available to the civilization. > [ul] > [li]He assigned the letter A to represent 10^6 unique bits of information (less than any recorded human culture) and each successive letter to represent an order of magnitude increase, so that a level Z civilization would have 10^31 bits.[/li][li]In this classification, 1973 Earth is a 0.7 H civilization, with access to 10^13 bits of information.[/li][li]Sagan believed that no civilization has yet reached level Z, conjecturing that so much unique information would exceed that of all the intelligent species in a galactic supercluster and observing that the universe is not old enough to exchange information effectively over larger distances.[/li][/ul] Information storage and processing capacity is one of the aspects of civilization that has improved most dramatically since 1973, so here’s the question(s): 1. What metric exactly was used to get the estimate that humanity had ‘access’ to 10^13 ‘unique bits’ of information in 1973? 2. Using that same metric, how much information do we have access to in 2015? ---
**Author:** ![Snarky\_Kong](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Snarky\_Kong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Snarky_Kong)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2015, 5:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/2 "2015-10-23T17:43:13Z")
All the numbers I see for internet traffic and data storage capacity are in the Zettabyte range. Maybe a few dozen total, so maybe 10^23 bits? ---
**Author:** ![TheSeaOtter](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/ed655f/32.png) [@TheSeaOtter](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TheSeaOtter)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2015, 6:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/3 "2015-10-23T18:20:36Z")
> [@Snarky\_Kong](#): > > All the numbers I see for internet traffic and data storage capacity are in the Zettabyte range. Maybe a few dozen total, so maybe 10^23 bits? Yeah, I’ve seen those estimates as well. I was wondering if those are the right numbers to use, though. 10^13 bits is (if I’m doing the math right) in the range of about one terabyte. That seems fairly low, even for '73, which makes me think maybe ‘unique bits of information’ means something different. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2015, 6:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/4 "2015-10-23T18:22:00Z")
> [@Snarky\_Kong](#): > > All the numbers I see for internet traffic and data storage capacity are in the Zettabyte range. Maybe a few dozen total, so maybe 10^23 bits? [This article](http://siliconangle.com/blog/2012/05/21/when-will-the-world-reach-8-zetabytes-of-stored-data-infographic/) states we hit 8 ZB some time in 2015 (or from the perspective of when the article was written, were going to hit 8 Zb this year… which is almost over). I don’t think it’ll take very long into 2016 to get to the 10 ZB range, so that notches us up one clean order of magnitude. At that stage (1.0x10[sup]22[/sup] bytes), we’d be Sagan Class Q (15 orders of magnitude above Class A). BTW, your link to the [Kardashev Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Extensions_to_the_original_scale) wiki page is badly borked. ---
**Author:** ![gnoitall](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/bb73d2/32.png) [@gnoitall](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gnoitall)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2015, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/5 "2015-10-23T18:30:48Z")
> [@gnoitall](#): > > [This article](http://siliconangle.com/blog/2012/05/21/when-will-the-world-reach-8-zetabytes-of-stored-data-infographic/) states we hit 8 ZB some time in 2015 (or from the perspective of when the article was written, were going to hit 8 Zb this year… which is almost over). > > I don’t think it’ll take very long into 2016 to get to the 10 ZB range, so that notches us up one clean order of magnitude. At that stage (1.0x10[sup]22[/sup] bytes), we’d be Sagan Class Q (15 orders of magnitude above Class A). > > BTW, your link to the [Kardashev Scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale#Extensions_to_the_original_scale) wiki page is badly borked. Missed edit window… but wikipedia article states that the Sagan scale is bits of information, not bytes… that pushes our count up almost an entire order of magnitude, close to **Snarky\_Kong** ’s spitball estimate. But it’s also _unique_ bits of information, and God only knows how much duplication is in the 8 ZB number from the article I cited. So we’ll peel an order of magnitude off again to be conservative. (That means that each piece if information on a computer someplace is replicated 9 times… maybe extreme, but it makes the math easy.) So my guesstimate may be close. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [October 23, 2015, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/6 "2015-10-23T20:29:05Z")
If anything, I’d say that ninefold repetition is far too low an estimate. Think about what takes up the most space on a hard drive: Increasingly, it’s commercial media files, games and other commercial software, and the operating system. Millions of computers run the same operating system mine does, anywhere from hundreds to millions have the same music in their collection, millions play the same games I do, and so on. Now, to be sure, I also have some information on my computer that’s duplicated few or no times on other devices: Mom’s vacation pictures exist only on my hard drive and a few CDs I burned for her, most of the labs I use are only had by a handful of professors, and I’ve produced a few things myself and never bothered to share them. But those things, all together, make up only a small fraction of my hard drive. ---
**Author:** ![Ponderoid](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ponderoid/32/19221_2.png) [@Ponderoid](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ponderoid)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/7 "2015-10-25T16:09:46Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Now, to be sure, I also have some information on my computer that’s duplicated few or no times on other devices: Mom’s vacation pictures exist only on my hard drive and a few CDs I burned for her, most of the labs I use are only had by a handful of professors, and I’ve produced a few things myself and never bothered to share them. But those things, all together, make up only a small fraction of my hard drive. How much of that information is actually available to our civilization as a whole? I think that’s what Sagan was counting. How much unique information is in our libraries accessible to all. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [October 25, 2015, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/8 "2015-10-25T16:38:30Z")
> **[Computing - The UK leading source for the analysis of business technology](https://www.computing.co.uk/?v3)** > > Computing is the leading information resource for UK technology decision makers, providing the latest market news and hard-hitting opinions. > [@](#): > > The Internet of Things will generate a staggering 400 zettabytes (ZB) of data a year by 2018, according to a report from Cisco. A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes. So about 10^23 bytes a year from that. However, how much of that is redundant information? Also I wouldn’t really put that as ‘quality’ information. Doesn’t quality of information play a role in this scale? I guess I don’t know what counts as a ‘bit’ of information, or what role quality plays in that bit. Now that reading a genome is becoming cheaper (it may drop to less than $1 in 15-20 years, at least hopefully if costs keep depreciating) that will open up an explosion of genomes being read. However if we end up collection 10^20 base pairs worth of information each year, I’m going to assume 95% of that will be redundant since you are mostly reading the same life forms. ---
**Author:** ![MattDaveBowron](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/3be4f8/32.png) [@MattDaveBowron](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MattDaveBowron)\ **Post date:** [October 11, 2022, 9:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/where-are-we-on-carl-sagans-information-mastery-scale/735550/9 "2022-10-11T09:05:49Z")
There’s a whole series on all Information Mastery stages A to Z on YouTube under the group Critically Selected. Here’s a link [Information Mastery (Alternate Kardashev Scale) | Introduction - YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCJiLhFkMLU&list=PLVxAxdw4ctDaefaRPyG11nfs97dSLYhaz) According to the group, it’s where each individual in Stage A begins with 10^6, which CS (both Critically Selected and Carl Sagan) relates to the 20 questions a person can ask to find out about something, so the individual starts with basically 10^6 or 1 million known objects/concepts from the 20 questions game, even though yes the game didn’t exist in prehistoric times. Basically H was like 1970s stage, and ours would be a Civilization I (as in letter i not I in Roman Numerals). They have like a 3-4 minute video for each stage if you’re interested.