SLIDESHOW:  

Interesting from a journalist's perspective, USC puts a lot of its numbers into context by boiling down exabytes into the number of newspapers that would add up to a person reading per day. The 1.9 zettabytes of information exchanged through broadcast technologies like television and GPS equals every person in the world reading 174 newspapers a day (we in the news business wish!). The lead researcher, Martin Hilbert (seen in attached video), is a Provost's Fellow at USC's Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism.

Just so that we humans don't get too impressed with its storage capacities, Hilbert notes that "compared to the information processing capacity of nature they are still very small." If we wanted to give a name to every star, we'd only be able to do it for every 1000th one using all of our storage capacity.

from on .

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