When you’re sitting down in your living room sipping on some hot chocolate, where does your mind drift to? How about this – how much information is stored by the entire world’s population? Bear in mind that this is not the exact figure, but surely you can give some credibility to scientists’ efforts in measuring the colossal amount of information in the world. Published in the journal Science, it seemed that the calculated amount of data stored in the world by 2007 as 295 exabytes. On average, that amounts up to 1.2 billion hard drives – isn’t that mind boggling? The figure came about by estimating the amount of data held on 60 technologies from PCs and DVDs, as well as paper adverts and books. To put things in perspective, that is the equivalent of covering the whole US or China in 3 layers of books.
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