From Alpha-Bits to Zettabytes!

[This post was supposed to go out yesterday...may post again later to stay on track...]

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Haven't you heard?! We're entering the zettabyte era!

I would double the exclamation point if I could explain what a zettabyte is, but I really can't, other than to say that it is the new frontier of cyberstorage capacity... Here, I'll let this excerpt from a post to the technology blog at The Guardian explain it for me:

Each zettabyte is 1,000 exabytes. No? One exabyte = 1,000 petabytes. One petabyte = 1,000 terabytes. One terabyte (you may be starting to feel the ocean floor now) is 1,000 gigabytes. See, you can find your way to the shore now.

Cisco sees the movement towards the exabyte as an inevitable endpoint of the growth in video traffic online. Its analysis suggests that we'll have shifted into the zettabyte age by 2015: by then, it reckons, '"the majority of global Internet traffic (61 percent) will be in some form of video—Internet video-to-PC, Internet video-to-TV, mobile video, et al.The 'dawn of the Zettabyte era' will be an unprecedented online milestone that will occur in our lifetime... 

Part of the problem of course is that it's almost impossible to wrap your head around the physical or temporal ramifications of these numbers. For example, from the Cisco blogpost: 'A zettabyte is roughly 1000 exabytes. To place that amount of volume in more practical terms, an exabyte alone has the capacity to hold over 36,000 years worth of HD quality video…or stream the entire Netflix catalog more than 3,000 times. A zettabyte is equivalent to about 250 billion DVDs.'"

There you have it. I guess.

There is so much to know in this life, how can we know it all-- or even keep up?  The answer is, we can't. There is much in life that we need to know, the rest is, well, what keeps us curious. And talking. And interacting with others (we were made relational beings, after all).

God-- as revealed to us through Scripture-- is like this. There are many things in the Bible we need to know, there are many other things in Scripture worth knowing, and there are more than a few things in Scripture that pick up where the zettabyte leaves off-- beyond human reasoning (if I may allude to my January 2 post). How can we know it all?  Again, the answer is, we can't.

Our Creator has bestowed many a gift upon His creations; however, omniscience wasn't one of them.

So the concept of a zettabyte (like the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, gas at the pump priced at 9/10's of a gallon, and the sheer number of stars in the night sky) keeps me humble before an all-knowing God (who knew me before I was a zygote)-- a humility that keeps me centered on the things in life that are truly important, such as faith, family,friends, etc.,. When I scratch my head (more and more as I grow older), I'm often in awe of what we humans are capable of (the good and the bad), even more so of what God is capable of (always good!)!

“Look among the nations, and see;
wonder and be astounded.
For I am doing a work in your days
that you would not believe if told." (Habakkuk 1:5 ESV)