too much information!

From: John Baez (baez_at_galaxy.ucr.edu)
Date: 01/10/05 

Date: Mon, 10 Jan 2005 05:49:23 +0000 (UTC)

They say we live in the "information age", but how much information
is there, actually? Guess how much information there is in:

1) all the words ever spoken by human beings.
2) the capacity of all the hard disks produced in 2002.
3) the information in the genomes of all the people living in the world.
4) all the photographs taken in 2002.
5) the capacity of all the audiotapes produced in 2002.
6) the information required to precisely describe the position/momentum
   of all the atoms in a red blood cell up to the limits imposed by
   quantum mechanics.

Rank them! Which is the biggest?

(For serious scholars: we're not taking advantage of information
compression in any of these; that would make the figures harder to
compute. So, for example, we don't care about the fact that everyone
has DNA that's very similar to everyone else's.)

If you give up, try this:

http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/information.html

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