One silly question. How much information can the world transmit, process, and store? Estimating this sort of thing can be a nightmare.
Computing capacity is converted into MIPS, and estimates for the total number and class of chips are available. The big question mark here is mostly in embedded controllers; it's hard to estimate both their computational capacity and how many are out there.
STORAGE
Some trends are very, very obvious. Analog video accounted for over half the data stored in 1986, and video held 86 percent of all stored data by 1993.By 2000, CDs and digital tape started pushing back, but analog video still stood at 70 percent of all stored data. By 2007, analog video had plunged to a tiny six percent, eclipsed by hard disks, Blu-ray and DVDs, and digital tape.During that time, total storage capacity grew at about 23 percent annually, and it topped out at 2.9 x 10 <<to the power>> 20 bytes—that's about 300 exabytes, or 61 CDs for everyone on the planet.
A similar shift to digital occurred in broadcast media and two-way communications. Back in 1986, 80 percent of broadcast capacity was used for terrestrial TV, although analog cable was already a presence. Today, broadcast TV has fallen to 50 percent; a quarter of the broadcast data is now some form of digital, and analog cable is declining from its peak in 2000.
Now about two-way communications,it underwent a far more dramatic shift. In 1986, analog phones handled 80 percent of the data, with digital phones taking the other 20 percent; everything else was a rounding error. By 2000, analog telephony was down to two percent of the world's two-way transmissions.Digital telephony peaked in 1993 at 67 percent; fixed Internet connections accounted for one percent of usage that year. By 2000, it was up to 50 percent, and it's now at 97 percent.while broadcasting is increasing at a linear rate, the advent of the Internet has given two-way transmissions a big boost, increasing the bytes transmitted by a factor of 29 in just 7 years.
COMPUTATION
When computation comes to concern, back in 1986, pocket calculators represented about 40 percent of all computer capacity, beating out PCs at 33 percent and servers at 17 percent. Even then, gaming hardware held a nine percent share.
Calculators were gone by 2000, when the PC peaked at 86 percent and the mobile phone/PDA first appeared at 3 percent. By 2007, phones held six percent of world processing power, but the big story was gaming hardware, which shot up to a quarter of the total computational capacity, pushing the PC back down to a two-thirds share. Supercomputers are apparently rare enough not to measure.
One surprising result of the research is the amount of total horsepower found in the application-specific space, where the authors considered only DSPs, microcontrollers, and GPUs (GPUs alone account for 97 percent of this category's capacity). And that capacity is huge, about 30 times that of all the general purpose computation hardware. GPUs account for the lion's share of the 6.4 x 1018 operations a second that the planet can now perform, and they showed a compound annual growth rate of 86 percent over the study period.
Now after figureing out all these data the authors make some comparisons with biology. "To put our findings in perspective, the 6.4*1018 instructions per second that human kind can carry out on its general-purpose computers in 2007 are in the same ballpark area as the maximum number of nerve impulses executed by one human brain per second," they write.
Our total storage capacity is the same as an adult human's DNA. And there are several billion humans on the planet.
