Eternal Bits

by Mackenzie Smith IEEE Spectrum, July 2005 It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times every day, for a grand total of five exabytes annually. That’s an amount equal to all the words ever spoken by humans, according to Roy Williams, who heads the Center for Advanced Computing Research at the California Institute of Technology, in Pasadena. While this stunning proliferation of information underscores the ease with which we can create digital data, our capacity to make all these bits accessible in 200 or even 20 years remains a work in progress. Read more