We have all heard about the mass of the world and its increasing size. This is a topic that many people are interested in, but what does it mean? How can digital data affect our planet’s mass? This article will answer these questions by explaining how digital data affects the total weight of Earth’s ecosystem.
Analyses of global digital data storage by many authors has led to the conclusion that it is growing at an exponential rate. In 2013, the total amount of global digital data was calculated at 4.4 zettabytes (ZB). This translates into about 2.5 exabytes per day or 672 terabytes per second!
As we’ve seen, data is growing exponentially. The growth rate is accelerating and the best fit exponential model predicts a doubling approximately every two years.
This means that in order for us to keep up with our current level of digital infrastructure, we will need to build more servers and computers every year than were built in all previous history combined. This has significant consequences for our environment: these physical systems use energy and consume other resources like metals, plastics and rare earths which must be extracted from the ground or sea at an ever-increasing rate.
You may have heard that digital information doesn’t weigh anything, but this is only partially correct: while it doesn’t have any physical presence in the real world, every bit of digital information has some weight. For exam
ple, if you were to save a picture of your friend on your computer hard drive–say they’re wearing their favorite hat–the file would add roughly 2 kilobytes (KB) worth of mass to your computer. That might not seem like much at first glance, but consider how many pictures you take with your phone each day and how many times per day those pictures are uploaded onto social media sites like Facebook or Instagram; then combine those numbers with all other people doing similar things around the world…and suddenly there’s an enormous amount of extra material added daily into our atmosphere!
This is a serious problem. The amount of data being created and stored is growing at an exponential rate, which means that it will eventually reach a point where there is so much that it will be impossible to move around without causing huge damage to the environment.