The Brainhole

A particular piece of trivia floated my way this morning and sent me off on a little thought experiment. It doesn’t mean anything, but I guess that’s kind of the point. Anyway, we begin with the original piece of trivia:

If you compare an Amazon Kindle’s mass from the point of purchase to when it’s been filled to its 2GB capacity, the difference is 1.0e-18 grams.

By Amazon’s own math, 2GB is equivalent to around 1,400 books.

Our best guess (thanks to some helpful minds at Google) is that in the entire course of human history, we’ve generated close to 130 million books, or approximately 92,857 times the capacity of a 2GB Kindle.

In other words, the entire recorded history of human knowledge can now be stored in a unit with a mass of around 0.0000000092857 grams (I’m pretty sure I counted those zeroes correctly).

To provide some context, the mass of the observable universe is estimated at anywhere between 30,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 grams (or 3e52) to 8e52.

So the next time you’re struck with the feeling that you’ve figured something out, get back to work.