All too much

QUANTIFYING the amount of information that exists in the world is hard. What is clear is that there is an awful lot of it, and it is growing at a terrific rate (a compound annual 60%) that is speeding up all the time. The flood of data from sensors, computers, research labs, cameras, phones and the like surpassed the capacity of storage technologies in 2007. Experiments at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory near Geneva, generate 40 terabytes every second—orders of magnitude more than can be stored or analysed. So scientists collect what they can and let the rest dissipate into the ether.

According to a 2008 study by International Data Corp (IDC), a market-research firm, around 1,200 exabytes of digital data will be generated this year. Other studies measure slightly different things. Hal Varian and the late Peter Lyman of the University of California in Berkeley, who pioneered the idea of counting the world's bits, came up with a far smaller amount, around 5 exabytes in 2002, because they counted only the stock of original content.