In case anyone is wondering, yes this is a fake headline.
But it does make one think about how hard it is to imagine such large amounts of data. While porn probably does take up most of the Internets Tubes, the massive numbers of non-porn data that we are producing can boggle the mind.
The fastest data transfer rate achieved to date is 1.25 Terabit per second from an experiment from University College London in 2016. That is 156 Gigabytes per second. That's a bit (megabit?) faster than what consumers can get.
Just for funnies, Lets assume that this individual in the fake headline had the UCL data capability. How long would it take to download 13 Zetabytes of anything?
One Zetabyte is one Trillion Gigabytes.
To download 13 Zetabytes using the UCL capability will take 83,333,333,333.3 seconds. That would be 2642.4 years.
How about cost of storage?
I think that cloud storage is running about $0.01 per gigabyte. Just for fun, lets go with that figure.
13,000,000,000,000 @ @0.01 per gigabyte is $130,000,000,000
I am not sure how many clouds would have multiple zetabyte storage capacity. Perhaps it would be a cloud of clouds.... of clouds?
I don't think that this gentleman would be saving all that much money downloading instead of just paying the current rates for porn, which are approximately zero.... so my friend tells me.
A fun thought experiment, but as the amounts of data being produced and transmitted keeps increasing, these figures won't be so absurd in the future.
Yikes.
I remember when DEC came out with the first consumer hard disk drive. It contained 5 megabytes! At the time, I thought that no individual would ever need 5 megabytes of storage. Perhaps only the biggest corporations. 5 megabytes? There would be no way any individual would ever be able to have 5 megabytes of data to store.
I was mistaken.
