how big is humanity's knowledge?

摘要

NO ONE CAN KNOW EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME-BUT WE HUMANS SURE like to pretend we do. So it's no wonder our species has a long-standing tendency to compile information. What started with some old dudes writing down their own observations morphed through the years into compendia, libraries, and now vast repositories of digitally gathered knowledge. Here's how much space our worldly understanding took up, in bits and bytes, as we chewed off bigger and bigger chunks.