If you put global information on CDs

How much is global information? If you put all this information on a CD, and then pile up one by one, the height of the tower will exceed the distance between the Earth and the Moon.

The above is the conclusion drawn from the global information capacity report. The report was written by a team led by Dr. Martin Hilbert of the University of California in the United States. It is the first "inventory list" for storing, communicating and calculating information all over the world. They surveyed more than 1,000 sources of information and estimated the total amount of global information as of 2007. Here are some very interesting results.

- If one bit of information is compared to a star, then each of us has the same amount of information as the Milky Way. This figure is 315 times the total amount of sand in the world, but it is only less than one percent of human DNA storage information.

-2002 should be regarded as the first year of the digital era. In that year, globally stored information in digital form surpassed analog information for the first time. By 2007, 94% of the world's information was stored in digital form.

- In 2007, humans sent a total of 1.9ZB (1ZB=1,000EB=1,000,000PB=1,000,000,000TB) of information through broadcasting technologies such as television and GPS. This number is equivalent to reading 174 newspapers per day per person per day.

- Through two-way communication technologies such as telephone calls, humans shared a total of 65 EB of information in 2007, which is equivalent to the global exchange of six newspapers each day.

- In 2007, the total number of instructions per second for all general purpose computers worldwide was 6.4x10^18. This number is basically the same as the total amount of nerve impulses produced by a human brain. If calculated manually, the time required is 2200 times the time since the Big Bang.

- During the period from 1986 to 2007 in this report, the global computing information capacity increased by an average of 58% every year, and the growth rate was 10 times that of the US GDP growth rate. At the same time, the total amount of communications information has increased by 28% annually, and storage information has increased by 23% annually.

The report finally shows that the total amount of information created by humans so far is 295 EB. In addition to being stored on a CD-ROM and stacked above the moon, if printed on a book, it will cover the entire US territory with 13 floors.