24/7 video of your entire life 24/7 audio of your entire life Everything you've read GPS data of every place you've been Every email you've gotten Every picture you've ever taken Biometric data of your entire life
So I set out tonight to make a wild ass guess at how much storage it will take to store a life. I'd like a number in bytes. So, let's break this down:
1) We need to know how long you'll live for. In the interest of being conservative on the estimate I'll choose the longest possible realistic value. The American average life expectancy for a male is 73 years.
2) Video of your entire life: What quality? What codec? Early cd-rom video ran at about 1.5Mbit/sec. Typical DVD data rates are from between 3 and 10 Mbit/sec. We'll certainly use a variable bit rate compression of some sort. And compression technology will certainly advance. Let's choose 5Mbits/sec. This translates to 1438.83Tb/life. But wait... we don't just want to see what's going on in front of us... we want to see what's happening on all four sides. So let's multiply that number by 4. We're now up to 5755.32Tb/life.
3) Audio of your entire life: We don't need full CD quality. Most of our life isn't lived in a concert hall so MP3 quality will be just fine. MP3's do a data rate of between 128 and 265Kbps which translates to 73.66Tb/life.
4) Everything you've read: How much do you read in a day? Wow, there are a lot of speed reading sites on the web... who knew? Apparently the average college student reads between 250 and 350 words per minute. We'll use 350. That's 21000 words per hour. But how many hours on average does a person read? Gotta love the internet... the Canadians in 1998 read an average of .4 hours per day. And Canadians are smarter than Americans. But let's assume some sort of librarian bookwork worst-case-scenario. 5 hours of reading. Hey, it's her job. That's 105000 words. But how long is a word? Wikipedia has some metrics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Words_per_article where they mention that "200 readable characters (roughly equivalent to at least 33 words)" so the average word is about 6.06 letters long. We'll use 7. So we're up to 735000 bytes/day... not much really. We'll call it 1Mb.
5) Ah, email: I did some quick searching and then decided to just use my Outlook PST file. In the last year my pst has collected 4Gb of girth. I do a good bit o' the old email, but it's really not the text of email that's the problem... it's the attachments. And this is largely dependent on whether your friends spam you with fart videos (keep 'em comin' guys!) and whether your mom sends out a bunch of digital pics. Let's assume that over a lifetime we'll start doing more video email and file sharing. I'll choose 10Gb/year.
6) GPS data: Let's say that you want to record your lat/lon ten times a second throughout your life. Each lat/lon will be roughly "+41.4053339525534/-73.9705181121826"... or 35 bytes... or 350 bytes/sec. That's .805Tb/life.
7) Pictures: I take a lot of photos. I have a 6 megapixel camera (it's not the size of the sensor... it's how you use your lenses). And a 1Gb storage card. I probably download the card an average of once a week. That's about 142Mb of high quality photos per day. Seems a little light for the future. Let's assume 500Mb/day. That's 13.3225Tb/life.
8) Biometric data: A heart rate reading every second. And a core body temp. And, I don't know... a bunch of other biometric data. Skin voltage levels to tell when you're lying. Bladder fullness. Tear duct fluidity. Fingernail length. Nanotech people... it's coming. Similar to GPS data... let's give a little more room for data though. Instead of 350bytes/sec, let's do 1K/sec. That's a lotta bio data... but we're talking about putting your life into data. That's 2.3Tb/life.
And the grand total... drumroll please... 6,499,335,712 Terabytes!
Or 6,499,336 Petabytes.
Or 6,499 Exabytes.
Or 6.5 Zettabytes.
How much would that cost today? I went to dell.com and configured a 3Tb storage area network machine with RAID (I want my life backed up) for roughly $15K. So I'll say 1Tb costs $5K. Scaling up to 6,499,335,712 Tb I certainly wouldn't expect to see that cost stay linear.
Google's estimated total storage in its farms is 4.5 × 10^16 bits... five orders of magnitude less than the storage required for our human life.
At my house I counted roughly 1020Gb... a little more than 1Tb or 1/6,499,335,712th of what I'd need to store my life.
I'd like to throw down some Moore's law into this equation to see what a reasonable cost for this would be.
This is just a wild ass guess. Nothing scientific about any of it.
I'd suspect that within 50 years we'll have another important data stream: mental. We'll be able to record brain signals and mine them somehow. That could take up a lot more space than video.
Compression would also improve. I've chosen some pretty hefty data levels for video and audio. I'd settle for a lot less. Very quickly on the spreadsheet I dropped the video rate to 1Mb/sec and audio to 64K/sec... 971,007,834 Terabytes.... quite a bit less... but still a lot for 2006.
Personally, I'd want to have my entire life in 4-way video. But some people wouldn't want to pay for that so I suspect that tools to crop daily data either automatically or manually will grow. For example, stop recording while I'm sleeping.
Other aread of the discussion could center on social effects from such data capture. Governmental surveillance, interpersonal effects, etc.
And battery technology would have to progress... or dissappear... I'd love these devices to run on ATP... an extra burger a day and I'm good to go.
Just some fun for the evening. Feel free to shoot holes in this.
SoCon08