A Transcript of All Words Ever Spoken

Cisco.com has a neat report showing the growth of the internet over time. They also have a chart explaining the size of various somethingsomething-bytes.

1 petabyte is 1,000 terabytes. 400 Petabytes is supposedly the amount of data contained in "A digital library of all books ever written in any language." Any language?

1 exabyte is 1,000 petabyte. "A transcript of all words ever spoken" would take up 5 exabytes. 100 Exabytes would allow you to store, "A video recording of the all the meetings that took place last year across the world." Transcription sounds pretty efficient.

1 zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes. 66 Zettabytes might contain, "The amount of visual information conveyed from the eyes to the brain of the entire human race in a single year." Hmm, how much of that visual information conveyed the meetings that were recorded and/or transcribed? I guess nanotech brain mites would replace court reporters any time soon. Unless you could compress that information....

 Unfortunately, this part of the table casts some doubt on the rest of it: "150 Exabytes The amount of data that has traversed the Internet since its creation 175 Exabytes The amount of data that will cross the Internet in 2010 alone." Er, time to update your graph Cisco?

 Finally, 1 yottabyte is 1,000 zettabytes and 20 Yottabytes gets you "A holographic snapshot of the earth’s surface." Yes, and "In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography." (Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658)