I made a quick table of reference lengths in meters to figure out if I ever made a data visualization tool for the entire universe, how many zoom levels would it have to support? One zoom level is one power of ten.
| reference length | power | |
| is there anything meaningful that's smaller than planck length? | ||
| planck length | 1.62E-35 | meters |
| nanometer | 1.00E-09 | |
| meter | 1.00E+00 | |
| kilometer | 1.00E+03 | |
| light year | 9.46E+15 | meter |
| diameter of known universe | 4.40E+26 | |
| So the total zoom levels of the Entire Universe are: | 61.00 | 61 zoom levels is way more than Farmville or Warcraft |
So 61 zoom levels.
How do these zoom levels compare to the Big Data Explosion.
| reference quantity of data | bytes | ||
| bit | 1.25E-01 | 1 or 0 and that's it. | |
| byte | 1.00E+00 | base unit for most data types in programming languages | |
| kb | 1.00E+03 | Starting number for web optimized images and javascript libraries | |
| mb | 1.00E+06 | Starting number for a song | |
| gigabytes | GB | 1.00E+09 | This is base unit of $10 USB sticks |
| terabytes | TB | 1.00E+12 | This is where external hard drives start (2015) |
| petabyte | 1.00E+15 | This is where "Big Data" starts | |
| exabyte | EB | 1.00E+18 | |
| All data stored at Google | 10 to 15 exabytes | 1.5E+19 | |
| So to describe all data quantities that humans care about circa 2017 it's only: | 20 | zoom levels |
Wow, we only need 20 zoom levels for all the data that humans care about circa 2017, 40 fewer zoom levels than building a map of the universe.
Comments