at 42 zettabytes if digitized as 16 kHz 16-bit audio. This was done in response to a popular expression that states "all words ever spoken by human beings" could be stored in approximately 5 exabytes of data (see exabyte for details). Liberman did "freely confess that maybe the authors [of the exabyte estimate] were thinking about text." [12] Research from the University of Southern California reports that in 2007, humankind successfully sent 1.9 zettabytes of information through broadcast technology such as televisions and GPS. [13] Leo, it's from 1997. I had more text describing the timing but for some reason it messed up the RSS feed so I just removed all the nonessentials. I also added some more modern stats from wikipedia for some of the larger values. yeah but ... most of the information being transmitted today is redundant. ain't no optimal compression going on and almost all of it is just copies of something somewhere else. it all compresses down to something smaller than google trends. 1024 bytes is a "kibibyte", at least since 1998 or so. I can understand the mistake though, if you are old and haven't really been keeping up with the news. A lot of people became programmers in the early 90s and kept the bad prefixes our forefathers invented. Those people in the past didn't really understand how SI units work.