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Topic: Big brother^inf (Read 2800 times) |
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towr
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Big brother^inf
« on: Nov 28th, 2006, 3:16am » |
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Supposing we could get the life of every person that ever lived on digital video (presummably some time travel might be involved).
Give a best estimate of the year in which there's enough data storage capacity in the world to store this. And show how you arrive at that answer.
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ThudnBlunder
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #1 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 4:19am » |
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Let 2-hour XviD require 833MB
Then 1 day requires 10GB
Then 1 year requires 3.65TB
Let present world population = 6 x 109
Let ratio of dead to living = 9
Let average overall life span = 50 years (probably too high)
Multiplying, I get total storage required
= 1013TB
= 283 bytes (roughly)
Let present storage capacity = x
Let storage capacity double every 2 years
Let n = in how many years we will have enough capacity
Then x*2n/2 = 283
So n = 2(83 - log2x)
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 5:18am by ThudnBlunder » |
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towr
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #2 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 4:29am » |
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Interestingly, I think it's been said that there are more people alive now than in all of history put together.
We still need an estimate for current datastorage. I think there's abotu as many computers as people these days. Assuming 160GB harddisk for each, that'd give about 109TB.
So plugging that into Thud's estimate, we get some 25 years, then.
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 4:29am by towr » |
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ThudnBlunder
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #3 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 4:41am » |
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on Nov 28th, 2006, 4:29am, towr wrote:Interestingly, I think it's been said that there are more people alive now than in all of history put together.
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Depends how far we want to go back, but I would have thought it was vice versa. Anyway, that's what I have used in my estimate.
I doubt if there are yet as many computers as people. And 160GB HDs are relatively new.
It was estimated that by the end of 1999, the sum of human knowledge (including all audio, video recordings and text/books) was 12.5747 exabytes....Research at the UC Berkeley School of Information suggests that 5 exabytes of storage space was created in 2002 alone, 92% of it on magnetic media, mostly on hard disks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exabyte
109TB = 1000EB
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 1:48pm by ThudnBlunder » |
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Sameer
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #4 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 10:41am » |
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But if time traveling is allowed you can go in the future and get the ultra dense storage and recording devices too!!! So are we sticking with Xvid format?
Edit: and I just realised with this post, I gained Uber status... eeks that feels weird. I need to definitely record this day!! 
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 10:41am by Sameer » |
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ThudnBlunder
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #5 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 12:46pm » |
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Congrats, Sameer. you deserve it for your infectious enthusiasm alone.
Anyway, how about one of these:
http://www.hiptechblog.com/2006/05/11/fancy-a-million-gigabtye-hard-driv e/
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 12:54pm by ThudnBlunder » |
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towr
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #6 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 1:08pm » |
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on Nov 28th, 2006, 10:41am, Sameer wrote:| But if time traveling is allowed you can go in the future and get the ultra dense storage |
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We're only in charge of the storing (just calculating storage, even), not the videorecording. 
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| « Last Edit: Nov 28th, 2006, 1:08pm by towr » |
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Sameer
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #7 on: Nov 28th, 2006, 1:20pm » |
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on Nov 28th, 2006, 12:46pm, THUDandBLUNDER wrote:
There was also this article recently on rainbow storage:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/26/140240&from=rss
on Nov 28th, 2006, 1:08pm, towr wrote:
We're only in charge of the storing (just calculating storage, even), not the videorecording.
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Hmm well since we are in charge, we need to know the storage format because of future predictability as well as current needs. Because we would also need to factor in the increase of storage we need in the time spent to achieve that capacity. Of course in that time if we find a good compression we might be able to cut down on the storage needs. As for e.g. the ferrite or the rainbow techniques becoming commercial.
In either sense I guess we need to ignore these facts to calculate the answer to this riddle... drawing board.. 
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Benny
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Re: Big brother^inf
« Reply #8 on: Jan 31st, 2008, 3:46pm » |
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According to the following website http://www.math.hawaii.edu/~ramsey/People.html
2,402,000,000,000 (2.4 trillion) years of human life have existed on Earth up to 2000, where the site stops its estimate. Let's pretend we want to record everything onto hard drives at standard DVD quality, up to the year 2000. That requires about 4.7 GB of storage for two hours. That's about 2.35 gigs for every person-hour. The total gigs needed would be around 5,644,700,000,000 then, or about 5.6 trillion. If a terabyte is around one thousand gigs, we'd need about 5,644,700,000, or 5.6 billion, terabytes of storage. Let's pretend (because it's a stretch!) in 2000 the average tech-savvy person had around a terabyte in total storage available in different formats. Let's also pretend that 5% of people in 2000 were tech savvy by these standards (this is completely made up). That gives us about 300 million people with a terabyte each, giving us 300 million terabytes. Since the population is growing at a rate of about 19% per decade and the size of storage (according to Kryder's law) is doubling ever year, a gross estimate might be that there's enough storage a few years after the millenium. So, let's say 2010.
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