Our friend David Duff posted an item today in which he quoted an article from James Bamford at Wired about a new U.S. data-storage facility:
Given the facility’s scale and the fact that a terabyte of data can now be stored on a flash drive the size of a man’s pinky, the potential amount of information that could be housed in Bluffdale [the site of the facility] is truly staggering. But so is the exponential growth in the amount of intelligence data being produced every day by the eavesdropping sensors of the NSA and other intelligence agencies. As a result of this “expanding array of theater airborne and other sensor networks,’ as a 2007 Department of Defense report puts it, the Pentagon is attempting to expand its worldwide communications network, known as the Global Information Grid, to handle yottabytes (1024 bytes) of data. (A yottabyte is a septillion bytes””so large that no one has yet coined a term for the next higher magnitude.)
It needs that capacity because, according to a recent report by Cisco, global Internet traffic will quadruple from 2010 to 2015, reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.) In terms of scale, Eric Schmidt, Google’s former CEO, once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes. And the data flow shows no sign of slowing. In 2011 more than 2 billion of the world’s 6.9 billion people were connected to the Internet. By 2015, market research firm IDC estimates, there will be 2.7 billion users. Thus, the NSA’s need for a 1-million-square-foot data storehouse. Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
This rang a very old bell: a short story that I’d read as a boy in a science-fiction anthology called 17 x Infinity, published in 1963. This prescient tale, MS fnd n a Lbry, was written by Hal Draper in 1961, and was in the form of a report, written far in the future by alien archaeologists, on the collapse of our civilization (always a hot topic, of course, here at waka waka waka). The cause? Well, it’s short enough that you might as well just go read it yourself.
14 Comments
Not enough info: yottabytes (10^24 bytes)
Here is something from Martin Gardner.
Create a code in which A = 0000, B = 0001, etc. The code has every alpha, every number, every special character. Now, every book ever written can be stored in that code. That is, a sufficient long string of numbers can hold all the books of all the libraries.
Now get a piece of metal one inch long, and chip it at a fraction. The fraction is a non-repeating decimal. And there you have it — every book ever written, and every book that can ever be written, all on that single one-inch piece of metal.
I’ve been a big fan of Martin Gardner since I was a boy.
Is the idea here that the length of the piece of metal, expressed as a decimal, is such that the first four digits of the decimal expression of the length represent the first letter of the first book, the second four digits the second letter of the first book, and so on?
That would mean that to encode the content of all the world’s books, the decimal representation of the length of the piece of metal would have to be hundreds of billions of digits long, and to read it you’d need to measure the length with perfect resolution. Any error, either in measurement or caused by variation of the length itself, would turn all those books into gibberish, starting with the ones down at the least-significant-digit end of the decimal representation.
Indeed, long before you got all the world’s books encoded you’d probably have got down to resolutions where quantum uncertainty would scramble the text.
Interesting idea though!
“The fraction is a non-repeating decimal.”
Interesting idea, but aren’t non-repeating decimals all irrational numbers and thus not renderable as fractions?
Kevin,
I think (please correct me if I’m wrong) that “chip it at a fraction” implies marking some arbitrary point in the interior of the metal rod (the rod being exactly, with perfect precision, one inch long).
Then, if the chip is infinitesimally thin (thereby allowing for a classically perfect measurement to it from one of rod’s endpoints, given a perfect ruler) the perfect measurement will yield an irrational decimal of infinite extent.
The perfect measurement (in units of inches) will be less than one inch, and some portion of that infinite string of decimal digits will include all the combinations of decimal digits that correspond to the ultimate library of books.
As Malcolm pointed out, however, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle disallows perfection in measurement.
TBH,
That makes sense. I was inattentive to context in my reading of Dom’s comment.
TBH got it right. I meant fraction as in “less than whole”. I wonder what the right word is?
You know what’s interesting? Somewhere on that one-inch piece, there is a chip mark that contains the exact sequence of digits that can render every book ever written and every book that will ever be written.
Does Heisenberg really figure into this? The perfection of the measurement is not important, what is important is the the measurement can be replicated — that is, every time you measure the chip, you arrive at the same sequence of digits.
Dom,
Replication of an infinite string of digits relies on perfection in measurement.
Why not use the infinite-series definition of pi, which can be perfectly replicated? I think the first few billion non-repeating digits have already been computed (which is analogous to a perfect measurement-in-progress).
At this rate, perhaps a good portion of all the books ever written will be computed before our sun becomes a red giant. Or not …
And talking of REALLY BIG NUMBERS, that is, for me, anything in excess of my fingers and toes, I am still slightly stunned by a talk I heard recently on the BBC in which a physicist was explaining particle physics. I knew from my previous and (very) amateurish investigations that an electron cannot share a ‘flight path’ round the core of an atom with another electron, each must find its own. But according to this physics swot, no electron can share that same path, that is, that specific distance from the core, with any other electron anywhere. They each must, as it were, find a unique slot. Quite apart from the obvious question: how do they know? there is a secondary one as to just how many possible paths there are?
Now my brain is hurting so I’m going to take a nap!
DD,
The physicist was explaining the Pauli exclusion principle, albeit in non-technical terms. All the atomic electrons bound to the same atomic nucleus (i.e., “core”), must have unique sets of quantum numbers to be distinguishable from one another, and from all other electrons that are not bound to this same nucleus.
As to “just how many possible paths there are”, that is nicely summarized by Mendeleev’s periodic table, which shows that there are 92 naturally occurring atomic (i.e., bound) “paths”, corresponding to the naturally occurring elements hydrogen (with one electron “path”) to uranium (with 92 electron “paths”).
As far as your “obvious” question, “how do they know?”, such a philosophical question is best answered by Barack Obama, who is reputed to know everything, ranging from “how many states comprise the United States of America” to “what is the intent of the Constitutional checks and balances between the Legislative, Executive and Judicial branches of the U.S. federal government”.
BTW, have you heard what the difference between Jesus an Obama is? It turns out that Jesus doesn’t think he’s Obama.
Henry, as always, informative and witty, for which many thanks. And, yes, now you mention it, he did call it the Pauli exclusion principle. The chap giving the lecture was Brian Cox, a physicist who has made himself a considerable reputation ‘over here’ for explaining these complexities to dummies. The irritating thing about him is that he only looks about 16 years old! Anyway, even mentioning the name Pauli is bringing on another headache – time for a nap, I think!
Thanx, DD.
Did you know that Brian Cox was a rock star before he traded up to high-energy physics? He is the chap who said, “People who believe Cern’s Large Hadron Collider will suck the universe into a black hole are twats.”
Some people subsequently accused him of making racist remarks, not knowing that “black hole” and “twat” are technical terms that high-energy physicists bandy about all the time. I have used such terms myself in the course of my own research.
The ‘black hole’ is the place up which I disappear when I try from time to time to get to grips with this physics stuff. A couple of years ago I tried Cox’s book “Why does e=mc2” thinking that at last, after several previous and fruitless attempts, I would at last understand it. Halfway through it – exit stout party left up a ‘black hole’! Oh well, ‘E’ for Effort!
Of course, it says more about me than him. Actually, I blame ‘mind boggling’! Every time I try to get my head around this modern physics stuff my mind boggles. In fact, I think ‘mind boggling’ is God’s way of telling us to mind our own business, but humans are just so nosey!
Well! I wondered why that SchrÁ¶dinger fella’ was so fascinated with pussies but I didn’t know until today that it was not just the pussy he kept in his black box! No, no, according to a review of John Gribbin’s latest book, “Erwin SchrÁ¶dinger and the Quantum Revolution”, the rascal was pussy mad!
“In 1926, the year that he published his Nobel-prize winning monograph describing quantum – or particle – effects as a wave equation, he was chasing the neighbour’s 14-year-old daughter.” And apparently this was neither the first nor the last of his, er, pussy fascination, he had to be warned off a friend’s 12-year-old niece!
I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!
(The review is in today’s Daily Telegraph but alas they are not showing a link – at the moment.)