An exabyte is a billion gigabytes. Experts from the University of Southern California have estimated that humans have accumulated 256 exabytes of knowledge.  That means that the sum of all human knowledge is 1.2 billion average-sized computer hard drives.  That’s an average of 15 libraries per person on the planet Earth.  That’s a whole lot of information.

The scary thing about this study?  It’s based on 2007 numbers.  If the sum of human knowledge was 256 exabytes in 2007, imagine just how much extra stuff we’ve learned and accumulated since then.  That’s nearly four years ago!  When you add that up, then you have to go back into prehistory and start adding in all the ancient customs and rituals that have been lost to history before the invention of school and permanent records!

Just when we think we know it all, there’s a study that comes along and reminds that for all we’ve learned, there’s still a lot of unknown unknowns out there.  We know so much as a species, but we still know so little.

Tags: 256 exabytes, human information capacity, the sum of all human information stored on hard drives, collected human information, digital archives of all human knowledge, human knowledge as measured in computer bytes, humanity has 256 exabytes of information collected, weird science, USC, unusual studies

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