If You Stacked All The World's Data on CDs

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According to a bunch of people with a crapload of time on their hands, if you put all the data in the world on CDs and stacked them, it would reach beyond the moon.

How much information is there in the world? Enough that, if we put all the information we have on Earth on CD-ROMs, that stack of CDs would reach beyond the moon. That’s according to a team of scientists who published the first-ever inventory of the world’s capacity to store, communicate, and compute information – including numbers, sentences, images, and texts.
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i bet if you stack the amount of knowledge human kind has gained over our written history, it would go to the sun and beyond.
 
Now multiply that stack past the moon x infinity and beyond and then we'll be getting "in the ballpark" of what our brains store on an almost daily basis. ;)
 
You could probably go the same distance if you stacked up all the AOL free trial CDs ever made.
 
wfalcon said:
How much of that is pr0n? :D
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I was just thinking what a glorious day it will be when we can stack all of the pr0n optical discs together, and they can reach all the way out and touch... Uranus. :cool:
 
Subtract all the video and photographs from that stack and you have almost nothing left.
 
When I'm drivin' in my car
And that man comes on the radio
He's tellin' me more and more
About some useless information
Supposed to fire my imagination - Jagger/Richards

could've been written just yesterday
 
untrueparadox said:
i bet if you stack the amount of knowledge human kind has gained over our written history, it would go to the sun and beyond.
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I doubt that, the growth rate probably looks exponential. Eg last 50 years probably dominations everything before combined.
 
But how many CDs would it take to contain all of the paperwork created from the RIAA/MPAA lawsuits filed against the stack for copyright infringement?
 
It couldn't store Graham's number. Actually the universe couldn't even store that number, even if you got down to the Planck level.
 
the-one1 said:
Speaking of that, I wonder how much floppies it would take to do the same.:eek:
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Was doing a computer job for someone the other day, swore that he had "tons" of old data from his old hard drive. I took it out and it's 10 MB. How many of those would it take to reach the moon?
 
all the information on Earth on CD-ROMs would reach beyond the moon. If you put the same information in books, those books would spread over every square inch of the United States, in 13 layers.
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i'm sorry but i think a stack of cd's that would reach the moon would fill more than 13 layers of books on the US. Think how many books you can fit on a 1 cd.
 
robble said:
i'm sorry but i think a stack of cd's that would reach the moon would fill more than 13 layers of books on the US. Think how many books you can fit on a 1 cd.
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Hard to say. Is the text of the pages just stored as .txt files, or are we talking about high-DPI lossless .BMP scans of the pages? :D

Almost ironic that the picture books are the ones that will take up the most storage space?
 
Better question, how long would it take to download all that info over a 2400 baud modem.
 
Ultima99 said:
Better question, how long would it take to download all that info over a 2400 baud modem.
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I started off @ 300. But I did skip 1200 and went straight to 2400 next.

Man, that was like the difference between dial-up and highspeed internet today!
 
I have never been able to do the conversion to Earth-to-Moon units. Can someone translate this into football fields or Olympic-sized swimming pools? Thanks.
 
Tolyngee said:
I started off @ 300. ...
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As did I.

Pick up the phone, put it into the cradle of the modum that was connected to the IBM 3741 (8" Floppy key-disk), dial up the other end, press a few keys on the 3741, and you could send a whole 256K of data. Leading edge tech at the time :D
 
srangara said:
I have never been able to do the conversion to Earth-to-Moon units. Can someone translate this into football fields or Olympic-sized swimming pools? Thanks.
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American football field or Canadian? Or did you mean soccer?
 
srangara said:
I have never been able to do the conversion to Earth-to-Moon units. Can someone translate this into football fields or Olympic-sized swimming pools? Thanks.
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Perigee: 3,970,947 American football fields or 7,262,080 50-meter pools
Apogee: 4,436,749 American football fields or 8,113,920 50-meter pools
 
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