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Let's suppose that right after you finish this fine episode of Techquickie,

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you want to sit down and binge watch everything that was uploaded to YouTube today.

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Well, I'd advise against that, since it'll take, oh, I don't know, the rest of your life.

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Every minute, over 500 hours of video are being uploaded to the YouTube platform.

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And if you do the math, you would need 82 straight years to watch all the content pushed

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onto YouTube servers over the span of just one day.

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And YouTube is just one site. So how big is the rest of the internet?

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It's estimated by statistic that current worldwide data center capacity is around 2,000 exabytes.

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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

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or 2.5 million terabytes of data every single day.

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Now, not all of that ends up on the internet, but it's still clear that it's not enough to keep up

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with our needs indefinitely, especially as the trend these days is to just throw everything

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into the cloud instead of actually bothering to delete anything.

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And this growth in data is not expected to slow down anytime soon.

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A recent study by IDC projects that in 2025, just five years from now, the data sphere,

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which includes everything from Amazon's cloud servers to your cell phone, will be up to over

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160,000 exabytes of data, with about 40% of that needing to be saved somewhere.

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That works out to about 64 billion terabytes worth of medical records, memes, and tech videos

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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

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as they can, and new technologies like heat-assisted magnetic recording or hammer, which you can learn

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more about up here, are being developed to increase the capacity of traditional hard drives.

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In fact, Seagate is aiming to use hammer to push out a 100 terabyte hard drive

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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

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to accommodate our thirst for data, not to mention find energy sources to power them all,

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what are the alternatives other than just purging some of that information?

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Well, one option is to use algorithms to compress the data.

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But short of some kind of big breakthrough in middle-out compression,

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we're not anticipating huge advancements there.

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So perhaps more interesting is the research that's being conducted on entirely new forms of storage.

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Instead of using magnetic particles, for example, scientists are looking at storage solutions that

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take up far less physical space, such as DNA-based storage, where each base pair represents a bit,

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or nanomaterials like a glass disk that can hold 360 terabytes yet is no bigger than a coin.

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However, even if we find a way to encode data using subatomic particles,

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in other words, we find the most space-efficient way to store data that the laws of physics will allow,

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we would still run out of space in a few centuries if we keep generating digital data

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at the rate that we are right now. So the bottom line is this.

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I wouldn't worry too much for the moment about the internet running out of space.

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But at some point, we might want to collectively think about just how many variants of the jealous

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girlfriend meme we really need to keep on our hard drives. So thanks for watching guys, like, dislike, check out our other videos,

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somewhere, I don't know, I think there's someone over there, right? There should be some.

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Just go find one, just go click on it, and subscribe while you're at it.