![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Based on a "digital footprint" calculator I downloaded, I determined that my digital footprint (as a very heavy user of telecommunications technologies) currently creates 2.4 gigabytes of data each year.
If I live a hundred more years (go me) and my data rate stays fairly constant within an order of magnitude (not an impossible consideration, if you make a rough assumption that compression technologies scale up to match data creation technologies) I'll produce about 240 gigabytes of data overall.
Doesn't seem like a lot, does it? I find it likely that the rate won't be constant, but who can say for sure how the compression/creation ratio will work? So let's open it up a little more, just for fun. Let's say that "lifepods" (a la the film "The Final Cut") come into vogue, and everything I see and hear and say in my life gets recorded as HD video. Assuming a rate of 1 megabyte per second for really high quality video, the calculation comes out to a conservative 40 terabytes per year. Over a very long lifetime, you can upper bound that even more (and easily include the previous calculation as well) and say that a human being can produce 5 petabytes of data over 130 years or so.
So I think the current upper limit of data - if every human being over the next century has access to every data creation technology and uses it at the expert level - is: 50 yottabytes.
That's 60,446,290,980,731,458,735,308,800 bytes. I don't think we'll need more than that for a while... but how long will it take storage technology to reach that peak?
If I live a hundred more years (go me) and my data rate stays fairly constant within an order of magnitude (not an impossible consideration, if you make a rough assumption that compression technologies scale up to match data creation technologies) I'll produce about 240 gigabytes of data overall.
Doesn't seem like a lot, does it? I find it likely that the rate won't be constant, but who can say for sure how the compression/creation ratio will work? So let's open it up a little more, just for fun. Let's say that "lifepods" (a la the film "The Final Cut") come into vogue, and everything I see and hear and say in my life gets recorded as HD video. Assuming a rate of 1 megabyte per second for really high quality video, the calculation comes out to a conservative 40 terabytes per year. Over a very long lifetime, you can upper bound that even more (and easily include the previous calculation as well) and say that a human being can produce 5 petabytes of data over 130 years or so.
So I think the current upper limit of data - if every human being over the next century has access to every data creation technology and uses it at the expert level - is: 50 yottabytes.
That's 60,446,290,980,731,458,735,308,800 bytes. I don't think we'll need more than that for a while... but how long will it take storage technology to reach that peak?