Researchers calculate the amount of information in the world, move on to calculate how much time they wasted on silly calculations
Have you ever wondered how much information there is in the world? No? Well, someone has. In fact, new research by a team at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, led by Martin Hilbert, has gone ahead and done some calculations to that effect, and the results, while seemingly trivial, are rather interesting. Turns out that there's a ton of information in the world, and the rate of its production is ever-increasing. A few fun tidbits: the current capacity for information, including digital and analog devices, is 295 exabytes, and by their metrics, 2002 is considered the start of the digital age. By 2007, around 94 percent of information was stored digitally. The full research is in the February issue of Science Express, and a video describing their methodology is after the break.
