Out of Bytes

“Who gave you that numb?”

- James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake

            Are we running out of bytes?

            Bytes, of course, are units of measurement and therefore, like inches, they are limitless as long as there is a way to figure them and a place to store them…head, book, file.  The problem is not in our measures but in our nomenclature and even more in the scope of our imagination.  To be more accurate, what we are coming to the limit of is words…our ability to describe the realities of the Gizmos in meaningful chunks that resonate with ordinary life.

            Imagine bean counters of the Roman Empire trying to measure their expanding turf, much less comprehend it, by pacing out the terrain in inches.  What to make of the distance between Rome and the Bosporus as 1,258,329,587,989 unciae, the Roman equivalent of the inch?  To make their conquests comprehensible (and save papyrus) the Romans had to create another order of magnitude and so invented the mile.  The word comes from milia passuum, Latin for a thousand paces.

            Now imagine us trying to cope with the distance from here to the star Arcturus in miles.  The measure happens to be eight million million million...but who can grasp such a number?  Hence the invention of the light-year, which is the six million million miles that light travels in single year and brings us back to a graspable number…Arcturus is 36 light-years away. 

            But in the realm of data we go way beyond even those vast numbers and into

trillion, quadrillion, quintillion, sextillion, septillion, octillion.  And centillion which, in American usage at least, is a 1 followed by 303 zeros.  The philosopher Rene Descartes invented the idea of exponents to collapse all those zeros into a single number and our unwieldy centillion becomes simply 10 ³⁰³.  But that does not solve our problem because as a matter of comprehension, how can those 303 zeros be understood?   The answer is…only in a mathematical, which is to say abstract, sense.

            Ordinary language is filled with words that try to humanize big numbers.  The word “myriad” comes from the Greek word myrias meaning ten thousand, and the word million comes from the Italian milione meaning a thousand thousand.  Simple words are good but as we move into the expanding universe of cloud computing, we will need a whole new lexicon just to keep up.

            I read somewhere that there are 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars in the universe and that a proton has a mass of 5/3,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 of a gram, which of course can be summed up by the single word…gazillions or maybe even scads.  Once we run out of room on the paper or in our heads, we need to develop a new layer of numbering, a quantum kick to the next level to keep pace with expanding frontiers.  Already the lowly byte has already given way to the kilobyte, which represents a thousand characters or the equivalent of less than a page of text.  Then came the megabyte, a million characters representing an entire novel.  We quickly developed the gigabyte which is a billion characters or an entire library of 1,000 novels.  Lately we have the increasingly common terabyte; that's one trillion bytes, the presumed size of Stephen King’s oeuvre.

            Beyond that the terabyte (a one followed by twelve zeros), the petabyte (fifteen zeros) and the exabyte (eighteen zeros) should hold us for a while.  But what are we to make of these numbers besides some obvious questions: are 1,000 mockingbirds equal to one kilomockingbird?  If the average electric toothbrush uses 3,000 lines of computer code, why can’t it tell me if I need a root canal?  What can it possibly mean to know that fiber optic cable can carry 20,000,000,000 bits of information per second and there is still nothing on TV worth watching.

            Makes you admire those happy tribes with names for only “one,” “two,” or “many.”

            Over and over again our basic measures are being outstripped by the needs we have to measure things and the string of zeros that measures perfectly but becomes entirely detached from life.  At a certain factorial the numbers become numbing.  What we need now is a new order of magnitude and the words to express it.  Chomp and megachomp?  Gulp and gigagulp?  Or perhaps we should we turn to some Hindu texts that have words for the infinite lifetimes of the cosmos?  Or simply go through the alphabet and let 1 trillion bytes equal one cyte, then proceed through kilocytes, megacytes, and gigacytes until we reach 1 trillion again and reset to dyte.  Kilodyte, megadyte, gigadyte.  Then fyte, gyte, hyte and on and on into unimaginable realms of data.

            But obviously I have no good answer here.  All I keep thinking about is a geeky bumper sticker I used to see that read “Byte me.”

            How many zeros is that?