The Processing Numbers of the World

A recent paper estimated that 9.57 zettabytes (a million million gigabytes, or 10^21 bytes) of information was processed in 2008 by the world’s ~27 million servers. Sales figures, interviews with IT professionals, server-industry reports, and performance standards were used to generate this gigantic number. Books are often used to compare computer information to compare computing into physical terms, and the paper (no pun intended) says that, with these numbers, by 2024 the information would be enough to fill from here to Alpha Centauri (4.37 light years) with books that are 4.8cm thick and contain 2.5 megabytes of data. The number isn’t totally accurate, however, as there is no way to exactly measure every server in the world and combine the data. Per year, the business world could stack the same books from Earth to Neptune (5.6 billion miles) 20 times. With Moore’s Law and the rate the tech industry is expanding, it will be very interesting to see what these numbers are 5, 10, or 15 years down the road