How much information fits in the world?

You think you're overloaded with information?

So maybe you can console yourself by looking at the world around them.

Researchers have now disclose the first study to try to plot a series of global technological capacity to handle data.

In other words, they claim to have measured how much information mankind is capable of storing, communicating and processing.

How much information is in the world?

After making an estimate of 60 memory devices, both digital and analogue - which includes books, magazines, photographs, records and paperwork in general - the researchers calculated that humanity is capable of storing at least 295 exabytes of data.

An exabyte can be represented by the unpronounceable and hard to imagine 295,000,000,000,000,000,000 number of bytes - or 29,518, to facilitate.

Just try to give a dimension that, if a star represents one bit of information, there would be a galaxy of information for each person on earth.

This is 315 times more than the estimated number of grains of sand on the planet.

But there is almost nothing compared to the amount of information stored in all the DNA molecules of a single human being - the 295 exabytes correspond to approximately 1% of our biological records.

According to the survey, 2002 shall be considered the true beginning of the year of the digital era by being the first year that the total storage capacity has outstripped the capacity of digital storage analog.

In 2007, nearly 94% of our planetary memory was in digital format.

This year, mankind has sent 1.9 zettabyte information via broadcasting technologies such as TV, radio and GPS - that's every human being to read entire newspapers for 174 days.

On the intercom, we share 65 exabytes of data - equivalent to every person in the world to dictate the complete contents of six newspapers by mobile phone to your best friend.

World capacity computing

Also in 2007, which was the last year that covered the study, the computers computed global 6.4 x 1018 instructions per second.

Although the nerve impulses from your brain to do something equivalent in the same second, if it was necessary to do all these calculations by hand, the researchers calculate that it would take 2,200 times the time elapsed since the Big Bang.

From 1986 to 2007, the period covered by the study, the computing capacity worldwide grew 58% annually. Telecommunications grew by 28% per year and storage capacity, 23%, while broadcasting - radio and TV and the like - were content with 6% increase.

"These numbers are impressive, but still tiny compared with the order of magnitude with which nature handles information," said Martin Hilbert of the University of Southern California, who made the calculations with his colleague, Priscilla Lopez, University of Catalonia .

"Compared with nature, we are humble learners. However, while the natural world has a scale of fried mind, it remains almost constant. Moreover, the technological capacity to process information is growing at exponential rates," concludes.