(Feel free to check my math!)
Recent news events have brought publicity to the NSA’s “Utah Data Center” currently being built to store vast amounts of digital data. How much data? According to sources, the storage capacity is on the scale of a yottabyte. And how much is that? A yottabyte is 10^24 bytes. Also known as one trillion terabytes. And what does that mean in physical terms? According to Wiki:
To store a yottabyte on terabyte sized hard drives would require a million city block size data-centers, as big as the states of Delaware and Rhode Island.[1] If 64 GB microSDXC cards (the most compact data storage medium available to public as of early 2013) were used instead, the total volume would be approximately 2500000 cubic meters, or the volume of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
That’s a lot. But what if you tried to print it out? Well, the first question is “how many pages equal how much data?” According to THIS site, one megabyte gets you about 60 pages of email/word processing; 250 pages of text; 20 pages of presentations, PDFs, images. Let’s just settle on 60 pages/megabyte, or thirty sheets of paper (printed double-sided) per megabyte. There are 10^18 megabytes per yottabyte, so one yottabyte would score you 3X10^19 sheets of paper. What’s that in other measurements? If the sheets were standard 8.5X11 and were put end-to-end, that’d be 5,208,333,333,333,333 miles. Since one astronomical unit (AKA AU, the distance from the Earth to the Sun) is 92,955,807 miles, this strip of paper would stretch from the earth to the sun 56,030,209 times. A bit much. OK, rather than taping the sheets end to end, simply stack ’em up. I just measured a 500-sheet ream of paper; it came out right close to 2 inches thick. So, each sheet would average 2/500 inches thick = 0.004 inches. Multiply that by 3X10^19 sheets and you get a thickness of 1,893,939,393,939 miles. Much more manageable… this would only stretch to the Sun 20,374 times. Put a bit closer to home, this stack of paper would stretch from the Earth to the Moon (238,900 miles) 7,927,749 times.
Put another way: weight. One ream of cheap copy paper weighs about 5 pounds… 5/500 = 0.01 pounds per sheet. Multiply by 3X10^19 sheets and the total weight of the stack 9not counting ink) would be about 3X10^17 pounds, or 136,363,636,363,636,363 kg. This is a pitiful 2.28×10^-8 times the mass of Earth. However, a closer match was the Chicxulub asteroid that hit the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago. It was *about* 1.6×10^15 kilograms, or 3.5×10^15 pounds. So the Utah Data Center, once full, could theoretically have enough data that, if printed out, would mass on the order of 100 times the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.
Your tax dollars at work!
