Do you know what 5 exabytes are?

Ever wondered how much information there is out there. Well, according to a 2003 estimate made by two professors at the University of California at Berkeley? Peter Lyman and Hal Varian, roughly 5 exabytes. Sounds a bit hard to figure out how much this is! You can read the executive summary the two professors and their research team have put together there. If you want to get the full story download the full report here.

Here is a hint:

"Exabyte = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes OR 10 to the power of 18 bytes
2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999.
5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings. "

To be even more specific:

"How big is five exabytes? If digitized with full formatting, the seventeen million books in the Library of Congress contain about 136 terabytes of information; five exabytes of information is equivalent in size to the information contained in 37,000 new libraries the size of the Library of Congress book collections."

To make this number even more palatable, another metric is useful: How much new information is produced per person on earth?

Answer: "How much new information per person? According to the Population Reference Bureau, the world population is 6.3 billion, thus almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper. "

No need to add that this year bloggers will add more than their share to this mind-boggling number!

PS: This story is on Simon Garfinkel's blog at MIT Technology Review