The Predictive Power of Big Data
This post has been viewed 2,640 times.
The following is an excerpt from Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture, by Erez Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel.
In computer science, the unit used to measure information is the bit, short for “binary digit.” You can think about a single bit as the answer to a yes-or-no question, where 1 is yes and 0 is no. Eight bits is called a byte.
Right now, the average person’s data footprint—the annual amount of data produced worldwide, per capita—is just a little short of one terabyte. That’s equivalent to about eight trillion yes-or-no questions. As a collective, that means humanity produces five zettabytes of data every year: 40,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (forty sextillion) bits.
Such large numbers are hard to fathom, so let’s try to make things a bit more concrete. If you wrote out the information contained in one megabyte by hand, the resulting line of 1s and 0s would be more than five times as tall as Mount Everest. If you wrote out one gigabyte by hand, it would circumnavigate the globe at the equator. If you wrote out one terabyte by hand, it would extend to Saturn and back twenty-five times. If you wrote out one petabyte by hand, you could make a round trip to the Voyager 1 probe, the most distant man-made object in the universe. If you wrote out one exabyte by hand, you would reach the star Alpha Centauri. If you wrote out all five zettabytes that humans produce each year by hand, you would reach the galactic core of the Milky Way. If instead of sending e-mails and streaming movies, you used your five zettabytes as an ancient shepherd might have—to count sheep—you could easily count a flock that filled the entire universe, leaving no empty space at all.
This is why people call these sorts of records big data. And today’s big data is just the tip of the iceberg. The total data footprint of Homo sapiens is doubling every two years, as data storage technology improves, bandwidth increases, and our lives gradually migrate onto the Internet. Big data just gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
Read original articleTags: data footprint, Erez Aiden
