Database And Brain

Suppose you can record your whole life, what happens to you, and in the world?

Exabyte is equal to a million tera bytes, or a billion giga bytes. "エクサバイト" is a Japanese word of Exabyte, and also a title of SF novel written by Masumi Hattori.

It is a story around 2025. A storage device called "Unit" is appeared on this planet, which can be embedded into your head to record what you see, your whole life.

In this book, an interesting research result is refered. "all data ever recorded by human beings is only 12 exabytes, according to California University".

Where's the source? Here about "Exabyte" in the wikipedia, some clues are written with exact references. And actually, there is the same estimate.

Earlier Berkeley studies estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human-produced information (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was about 12 exabytes of data.

Then, you can find the other estimate.

International Data Corporation estimates that approximately 160 exabytes of digital information were created, captured, and replicated worldwide in 2006.

No way! 10x more in only one year!?

OK, so how big storage is required to record one's whole life? Say, 100 years.

Down at "Exaflood", it says:

One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.

To record your whole life, 1/500 exabytes is enough. When you think about the growth of technology, you couldn't say that "Unit" is completely unrealistic.

Do you need so much information at all? I don't.

I just got scared of the fact. I think we need Maxwell's Devil, who can prevent entropy from swelling. Otherwise, otherwise...