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Comment by phatfish | Hacker News Reader

"The stored data amounts to 858TB (terabytes), equivalent to 449.5 billion A4 sheets"

Just so we can all visualise this in an understandable way, if laid end-to-end how many times round the world would the A4 sheets go?

And what is their total area in football fields?

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Attached end-to-end, they'd extend almost from the Earth to the Sun [1].

Placed in a grid, they'd cover an area larger than Wales [2].

Piled on top of each other, they'd reach a tenth the distance to the moon [3].

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[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28leng...

[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28area...

[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28thic...

I am shocked that 1 and 2 are both true. I would have guessed 1 would have implied a much larger area than Wales.

Funny how unintuitive N^2 growth can be :D

I know you want to think of this is as a lot of data, but this really isn't that much. It'll cost less than a few thousand to keep a copy in glacier on s3, or a single IT dude could build a NAS at his home that could easily hold this data for a few tens of thousands tops. The entire thing.

Close to 1 petabyte for home server is quite much, honestly. It will cost tens of thousands dollars. But yeah, on government level, nothing.

If you stacked them they would be about fifty thousand Popocatépetls high, give or take a few zeroes.

UPDATE: as sibling pointed out indirectly, it's eight thousand Popocatépetls [0].

[0]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=449.5+*10%5E9+*+%28thic...

I love that people are still trying to put data on A4s and we're long past the point of being able to visualize it.

That said, if I'm ever fuck-you rich, I'm going to have a pyramid built to bury me in and a library of hardcover printed wikipedia.

Double-sided?

190,813,414 and a bit times round the equator if you place them long edge to long edge

Actual football fields please, the International Standard Unit footbal field, used in SI countries.

Regional SI football fields or Cup? ;)

Football or soccer?

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