SPACE

How much space does all of humanity’s knowledge take up? (Click here)

No one will apprehend everything all the time—but we tend to humans positive wish to faux we do. thus it’s no surprise our species encompasses a long-standing tendency to compile info. What started with some recent dudes writing down their own observations morphed through the years into compendia, libraries, and currently immense repositories of digitally gathered information. Here’s what proportion area our worldly understanding took up, in bits and bytes, as we tend to chewed off bigger and larger chunks.

1. explanation three.06 MB
   Over thirty seven volumes, Pliny chronicled the nature, as well as quite an few elementary misunderstandings. Did you recognize that fennel root somehow helps snakes shed their skin? It doesn’t. Sorry, Pliny.
2. Original reference Britannica three.59 MB
   The first edition, printed in 1768, comprised simply 3 volumes, free in weekly installments. It enclosed such ­scintillating six-word articles as “Woman: the feminine of man, see homo.”
3. Canon of drugs seven.5 MB
   Persian pundit Avicenna’s compendium served because the definitive medical textbook from its publication in 1025 all the method through the start of the eighteenth century.
4. Wikipedia (English) twenty seven,000 MB
   The internet’s proverbial monkeys have tapped out quite five.5 million articles in our native tongue alone, showing no signs of stopping.
5. Encarta 1,600 MB
   Microsoft’s brush with CD encyclopedias lasted from solely 1993 to 2009, however masochists will still get the complete set of compact discs on eBay.
6. the net (in 2014) one,000,000,000,000,000,000 MB
   We can solely estimate the Web’s total size, and it’s growing too quick to stay up. however some consultants suppose it’s zipping on at concerning one.1 zettabytes (1,100,000,000,000,000 MB) each year. A two015 study calculable it might take 2 % of the Amazon timberland to print out the entire factor.

This article was originally printed within the Spring 2018 Intelligence issue of well-liked Science.