What is the capacity of humanity to store and transmit information?

On2007, mankind was able to store295 trillion bytesoptimally compressed, communicate nearly two quadrillion megabytes, and carry out 6.4 trillion MIPS (million instructions per second) on general purpose computers. “To put one of those numbers in perspective,If those 295 exabytes of stored information were stored on CD-ROMs, the stack of CDs would reach from Earth to beyond the Moon.“, explain Martin Hilbert, from the University of Southern California (USA), and Priscila López, from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Spain), principal investigators of a study published in the journalScience.

The global capacity fortwo-way telecommunication(Internet and telephone networks) between 1986 and 2007 grew by 28% per year, while the capacity for the dissemination of one-way information through transmission channels such as television and radio grew by 6% annually. “However,this amount of information is still smaller than the number of bits stored in all the DNA molecules of a single human adult? say the experts.

The results show that while in the year 2000 75% of our stored information was in analog format (mainly in video cassettes),94% of the information was in digital format in 2007. From their study it is deduced that 2002 could be considered the beginning of the digital age, since it was the first year that digital storage capacity exceeded analog capacity. Furthermore, the data reveals thatpeople shared 65 exabytes of information in 2007through two-way communication systems such as mobile phones, an amount equivalent to each person in the world communicating daily the content of six newspapers.