Stephen Hawkins tells us that if we were able to determine the position and volocity of every particle in the universe, we would be able to predict all future events…
The problem is the closer you look at something, the harder it is to pin point it’s actual position. Add to that, the fact that everything is moving away from everything else – as the saying goes, it’s all relitive – as in speed and position of a particle is relative to where it is observed from….
Stay with me, I do have a point!
So, even if you were able to determine the position of every particle, which you can’t, you then need to crunch the numbers…
Hawkins tells us that the computing time required to work out the future state of every particle in the universe, would take until the end of time…
This is the crux of it – what he is actually talking about is ‘recording’ the state of the universe…
Which brings me to my point!
The National Security Agency collects a lot of surveillance data from satellites and by other means. How much? A LOT… The NSA estimates it will have enough data by 2015 to fill a million datacenters spread across the equivalent combined area of Delaware and Rhode Island. ( I don’t know how big that is, but it sounds BIG.)
They want to store yottabytes of data, (one yottabyte comes to 1,000,000,000,000,000 GB.)
Online storage startup Backblaze breaks down the mind-boggling numbers. Assuming that hard drives continue to expand their storage space until 2015, the agency would require either 100 billion hard drives or 2 billion Backblaze storage pods — all for an estimated cost of $88 trillion, or just slightly less than today’s global GDP.
Which begs the question… what are they going to do with it? I mean, I have a bookshelf at home with unread books that I keep buying, but dont have the time to read…which makes me a bit narky, imagine trying to get through a
yottabyte of data.
By my wreckoning one yottabyte would equate to 15,000 GB of info for every man woman and child on earth to get through. But thats just one yottabyte, and they’re talking about more than one…
My hard drive at home is only about 500GB and it’s chockablock! It would take me an age to sift through 30, 60, 90 times that ammount of data… and then what? I have to make some kind of sense of it… no chance!
So, what then? Computers?…maybe, maybe we could use computers to sift through the raw data and then determine what constitutes a threat, bit that would still be a massive task…
Which all begs the question… What is the point? Surely the time, money, and energy, required to sift through this stuff could be better utalised in other ways. Like, I don’t know… healthcare, the environment, space exploration, world aid, anything in fact! Anything would be better that this waste of time and resources….
But what do I know.
