To accurately perceive the outside world, man came up with a measurement system. We learned how to measure weight, speed, length and other characteristics. The development of computer technology has forced us to count more information. Now its quantity has grown so much that a unit such as petabytes is needed to measure volume. How much this amounts to, we will try to figure it out.
Petabyte - how much is it?
To answer this question, let's immediately decide that we are talking about the amount of processed or stored information. The most used unit in our time has become gigabytes.
The size of physical information storage devices, such as flash drives and computer hard drives, is indicated in these units. Therefore, the question would be more correct as follows: "Petabytes, how many gigabytes of information is this?" The figure is quite large, it is 1048576 GB or 1024 TB (terabytes).
Physical Information
The resulting number in gigabytes, of course, is impressive and even gives some kind of visual representation, but it still looks abstract. So the person is arranged that he needs to compare everything with something to understand and visualize. This can equally be attributed to the amount of information included in the petabyte.
How much can it be in material form, for example, in the same books? After all, the size of the book is clearly presented to everyone. Let's try to make calculations and answer this question. It is believed that a page of text contains about 2.5 thousand characters. Thus, a book of 400 pages will contain 1 megabyte of information. Then a one gigabyte library should contain 1024 books. Multiplying the quantities known to us, we get more than one billion books. For comparison, the fund of the country's most famous Lenin Library is only about 50 million copies. In total, we have almost 22 of these libraries collected in one petabyte.
How much will it be in the space occupied? The storage area of the library is 8.5 hectares. Twenty-two of these buildings will occupy an area of 187 hectares of land. It is comparable to the principality of Monaco, which occupies only 202 hectares.
The amount of information on the Internet
Now, when we imagine what petabytes are and how much information is physically measurable, we can already imagine arrays of information processed on the Internet.
The Cisco Sistems statistics give us the opportunity to look at these numbers, and they are impressive. The combined traffic of e-mail and websites is 260 PB per day, while the human brain can save only 1 PB in a lifetime and under ideal conditions.
This makes us think about what to do with this huge stream of information, how to process it and how to apply it correctly, in order to leave to the descendants a worthy memory of our century of computer revolution.