1
00:00:00,000 --> 00:00:03,680
Let's suppose that right after you finish this fine episode of Techquickie,

2
00:00:03,680 --> 00:00:08,000
you want to sit down and binge watch everything that was uploaded to YouTube today.

3
00:00:08,000 --> 00:00:12,560
Well, I'd advise against that, since it'll take, oh, I don't know, the rest of your life.

4
00:00:12,560 --> 00:00:17,520
Every minute, over 500 hours of video are being uploaded to the YouTube platform.

5
00:00:17,520 --> 00:00:22,400
And if you do the math, you would need 82 straight years to watch all the content pushed

6
00:00:22,400 --> 00:00:25,840
onto YouTube servers over the span of just one day.

7
00:00:25,840 --> 00:00:31,200
And YouTube is just one site. So how big is the rest of the internet?

8
00:00:31,200 --> 00:00:38,560
It's estimated by statistic that current worldwide data center capacity is around 2,000 exabytes.

9
00:00:38,560 --> 00:00:46,480
And that's a lot of storage space. But these days, it's also estimated that the world produces about two and a half exabytes

10
00:00:46,480 --> 00:00:51,520
or 2.5 million terabytes of data every single day.

11
00:00:51,520 --> 00:00:56,800
Now, not all of that ends up on the internet, but it's still clear that it's not enough to keep up

12
00:00:56,800 --> 00:01:01,440
with our needs indefinitely, especially as the trend these days is to just throw everything

13
00:01:01,440 --> 00:01:04,960
into the cloud instead of actually bothering to delete anything.

14
00:01:04,960 --> 00:01:08,800
And this growth in data is not expected to slow down anytime soon.

15
00:01:08,800 --> 00:01:15,040
A recent study by IDC projects that in 2025, just five years from now, the data sphere,

16
00:01:15,040 --> 00:01:21,440
which includes everything from Amazon's cloud servers to your cell phone, will be up to over

17
00:01:21,440 --> 00:01:28,160
160,000 exabytes of data, with about 40% of that needing to be saved somewhere.

18
00:01:28,160 --> 00:01:34,480
That works out to about 64 billion terabytes worth of medical records, memes, and tech videos

19
00:01:34,480 --> 00:01:41,760
that will need a server to call home. So it's not surprising, then, that big tech is trying to get more data centers built as quickly

20
00:01:41,760 --> 00:01:47,120
as they can, and new technologies like heat-assisted magnetic recording or hammer, which you can learn

21
00:01:47,120 --> 00:01:52,080
more about up here, are being developed to increase the capacity of traditional hard drives.

22
00:01:52,080 --> 00:01:57,520
In fact, Seagate is aiming to use hammer to push out a 100 terabyte hard drive

23
00:01:57,520 --> 00:02:05,040
sometime around the middle of this decade. But if we can't churn out high-capacity hard drives and build enough shiny new data centers

24
00:02:05,040 --> 00:02:10,080
to accommodate our thirst for data, not to mention find energy sources to power them all,

25
00:02:10,080 --> 00:02:14,560
what are the alternatives other than just purging some of that information?

26
00:02:14,560 --> 00:02:18,560
Well, one option is to use algorithms to compress the data.

27
00:02:18,560 --> 00:02:22,800
But short of some kind of big breakthrough in middle-out compression,

28
00:02:22,800 --> 00:02:25,920
we're not anticipating huge advancements there.

29
00:02:25,920 --> 00:02:32,080
So perhaps more interesting is the research that's being conducted on entirely new forms of storage.

30
00:02:32,080 --> 00:02:36,800
Instead of using magnetic particles, for example, scientists are looking at storage solutions that

31
00:02:36,800 --> 00:02:43,760
take up far less physical space, such as DNA-based storage, where each base pair represents a bit,

32
00:02:43,760 --> 00:02:50,880
or nanomaterials like a glass disk that can hold 360 terabytes yet is no bigger than a coin.

33
00:02:50,880 --> 00:02:54,960
However, even if we find a way to encode data using subatomic particles,

34
00:02:54,960 --> 00:03:00,000
in other words, we find the most space-efficient way to store data that the laws of physics will allow,

35
00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:04,960
we would still run out of space in a few centuries if we keep generating digital data

36
00:03:04,960 --> 00:03:08,080
at the rate that we are right now. So the bottom line is this.

37
00:03:08,720 --> 00:03:12,800
I wouldn't worry too much for the moment about the internet running out of space.

38
00:03:13,520 --> 00:03:19,280
But at some point, we might want to collectively think about just how many variants of the jealous

39
00:03:19,280 --> 00:03:25,120
girlfriend meme we really need to keep on our hard drives. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out our other videos,

40
00:03:25,120 --> 00:03:28,240
somewhere, I don't know, I think there's someone over there, right? There should be some.

41
00:03:28,240 --> 00:03:31,360
Just go find one, just go click on it, and subscribe while you're at it.