“Message from Jeremy: To all Tech IT Easy readers, who could obviously not necessarily remember the initial announcement, I have invited my friend Steve to help me try to provide you, dear readership, with everyday better technology insights. Steve’s mission statement is that there’s no mission statement: what matters most here is to raise the right issues on underlying market trends, bringing to light new software, Internet services and consumer electronic devices. Steve, the floor is yours…”

Well, this is not really a scoop indeed. Let us say that to my knowledge, nobody else before us actually performed this very simple calculation. Basically, I have proceeded in two steps :

1)  First of all, thanks to this article from CNN.com, we are told that the well-known research institute IDC has estimated the overall volume of digital information sent last year. Here’s a key excerpt, explaining it all:

“The report, assembled by the technology research firm IDC, sought to account for all the ones and zeros that make up photos, videos, e-mail, Web pages, instant messages, phone calls and other digital content cascading through our world today. The researchers assumed that an average digital file gets replicated three times.

Add it all up and IDC determined that the world generated 161 billion gigabytes — 161 exabytes — of digital information last year.”

Here we are, then. 161 exabytes. Seems rather small ? Well, just think that this represents something like 1 million Libraries of Congress – sorry for our non-American readers.

2) The second step is slightly more subtle. I just recalled an interesting information I had read in Scientific American a couple of years ago: according to Michael Lesker, a researcher from the famous National Science Foundation, a human brain can roughly store 227 MB of information at the same time (and up to 2 GB in a human lifetime). This figure hasn’t been seriously challenged yet, though it still remain uncertain whether there is even the faintest case for comparing brains and PCs, which are really not organised alike.

Well, a simple division and here we go: a “human storage” of all the digital data exchanged in 2006 would require exactly 726 billion humans* – if my assumptions and calculations are correct. You can trust me for the former**, while the latter, of course, remains highly dubious – but wait, who told you this post really meant to be serious ?

Note:

(*): This represents 113 times the actual human population.

(**): Sorry Kari, I have taken for granted that 1 GB = 1024 MB, because I believe both IDC and the NSF to be slightly more scrupulous than disk manufacturers.

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