Tech analyst John Gantz estimates that in 2007 the world will for the first time generate more "data" than it has storage space for. But that's not really the major kind of crisis it might seem. After all, a lot of the data are things no one intends to store in the first place. (Witness, for example, live, 24-hour video feeds of building construction on many campuses. Nobody plans to store all of that video!)
I wrote recently about a book in which one narrative subplot was the digitization of the entire British museum and library, and then storage of basically all of the world's knowledge, culture, and history on a single chip. That chip was generated, fictionally, in 2025 and had a capacity of 128 petabytes. Gantz calculates that in 2006, humans generated 161 exabytes (164,864 petabytes) of digital data....