stars in the universe
My new iMac has a one terabyte hard drive (1024 gigabytes). When I started doing graphic design in 1995, my state-of-the-art Mac had 500 megabytes of hard-drive space. Everyone was like, “Dawwwg… nobody needs that kind of power, you’re crazy, dude!”
That’s a difference of about 2000x, but that’s not important now.
I hear about petabytes from time to time (1024 terabytes). I may have heard of an exabyte or two, but I thought that was it.
There is something bigger: a zettabyte (1024 exabytes) and a yottabyte (1,048,576 exabytes).
To give you an idea of how much that is (as if that were possible), a yottabyte is 8 bits of information multiplied by a number best described as 1 followed by 24 zeros plus some dust. The approximate number of stars in the universe is 10^20, so we could give each star a nice long name, take a snapshot of it, and store all that on our 1-yottabyte hard drive.
In “researching” this article, I discovered an astounding fact. The number of possible chess games (played according to the rules) is 10^120. This is enormously greater than the number of atoms in the universe, which has been estimated at around 10^80, give or take five or six.
Here is another astounding fact: in French, they don’t use bytes because byte rhymes with a naughty word (think octopussy but for a guy). Insteady they use octets, which are pronounced octay (even if they’re plural).