Joseph Mercola wonders what’s going to happen when we have petabyte-sized hard drives, something that’s expected to happen by the end of the decade. Every book you’ve ever read would only fill 30 gigabytes at best; a lifetime of digital snapshots would be perhaps 30 terabytes; 80 years of MP3s would fill just 42 terabytes; even with all that you’d stull have 928,000 gigabytes left over, which you could fill with 57 years of DVD quality video.
Now it seems we face a curious Malthusian catastrophe of the information economy: the products of human creativity grow only arithmetically, whereas the capacity to store and distribute them increases geometrically. The human imagination can t keep up.
We, on the other hand, have faith that the technology industry will find all sorts of new ways to fill up hard drives. The other possibilty – if they’re not filling up as quickly people will simply stop upgrading their hard drives as frequently. Just like with PCs today, with few people needing a 3GHz processor when 1GHz is just fine for accessing the Internet, using Word, and playing MP3s.
