The Decade of Data | Digital Technology

Zoom away from our planet on a spaceship, and it fades into insignificance, a grey-blue speck with 8 billion people fighting over insignificant things. But that pale blue dot near an average sun is building up quite a database. By 2020, the amount of data on Earth should reach 44 zettabytes, each making up a billion terabytes. That's 40 times more bytes than there are stars in the observable physical universe, 90 billion light years across.

When the history of this millennium is writt­en, it's very likely that its second decade will be remembered as the one when data exploded, driven by smartphones, 4G and the internet. Over 4.5 billion internet users are churning out a couple of trillion photos every