Meet Randall Munroe Who Answers the Ungoogleable Questions

How much physical storage space is needed to store all the data of Google? 

May be you think that it is stupid question rather than excellent, but it’s totally depends on your mind and thinking process. But if you will search this question on Google, so you will find that this question is ungoogleable as there is no specific answer for this. But Randall Munroe, who is man behind popular web comic xkcd take a stand to answer ridiculous questions.

He started with well known datacenters of Google and look for the bills of power and building plan tp estimate the standard area data storage, which could be same in new centers he found. But it’s bit difficult to find out on Google, especially then when Google didn’t want. Well Google still posts its spending reports and recruitment ads in all over the world and still there are few people who love to take the photos of data centers and when they do that, so conveniently they have GPS data embedded and this is the favorite of Randall in recent times. According to Randall, he could search for more data because “Google is very strict about organizational stuff related to companies information”. Like; to order a pizza in city where Google have data centers and later asking them from where tech people order their pizzas and it can be help full to estimate the total number of employees, he says.

According to one of the physicist and one-time NASA roboticist, these calculations are pretty straightforward when he worked on his blog; what if he will regularly answers these types of question? This idea comes in his mind five years ago when in mid-physics lecture he thought that may be interesting equation written on blackboard is not interesting. But his students do care about his blog when recently Randall published his favorite question “what if answers online, for a million of people who still visit his blog xkcd regularly to fix their geeky humor.

The more he added that I wonder that what will happen if we will swim round a nuclear reactor’s waste cooling pool, where you will get the lower dose of radiations that could have both positive or negative effects. And if you will duck your head 5 to 10 feet from the waste level so in lower surface there will be no more radiation. So according to this theory, water above nuclear waste would be the lowest radiation in the world.

But while backing to original question, what is the punch card and it will equivalent to how much data of Google? Well Randall estimated that it will about 10 exabytes or it could be 5 exabytes more for offline storage, which is 3 times more than all words which a single human can spoke ever. A single punch card can contain 80 characters and you can fit maximum 2000 cards in a box which means you need to cover whole area of New England in the US (area which covers 6 states) by punch cards.