This year, our planet’s digital content will zoom past one zettabyte. Most people would not know what is zetta. Try to imagine an arbitrary large number and write it on paper. You have to write digits one after another and keep writing them until you are bored or tired. But can you count that number or write it in words. Up to 12 digits may be. But try beyond that. You are lost. We know 103 is thousand or kilo, 106 is million or mega, 109 is billion or giga, 1,012 is trillion or tera. Now try beyond that. 1,015 is called peta, 1,018 exa and 1,021 zetta. These are new words in English dictionary. Beyond that they are yet to name.

In contrast, Indian genius had not only invented zero and the decimal system but we also knew how to count much beyond 1,021-such as 1,051 and beyond, thousands of years ago!

In the world of computers, we are now routinely using such large numbers. Our laptops run at gigahertz speed, and compute in gigaflops — flop is floating point operations per second — for mathematical operations per second and have memory of several gigabytes.

One started fiddling with electronics way back in the 70s with kilohertz, kiloflop-kilobyte electronics and in the 80s one was working on megaHz chips, processing speeds of megaflops and memory of MBs. Param 8000, India’s first supercomputer, was a one gigaflop supercomputer. When I was designing Param 10000 in late 90s, its computing power had to exceed a trillion mathematical operations per second. It was a teraflop supercomputer. Today, the speed of supercomputers is measured in petaflop and it will have petabyte memory. That’s 58,292 movies! Exabyte is 1,000 petabytes or one billion gigabytes.

Digital universe is exponentially expanding, quite like our physical universe. Computing speed doubles every 18 months, cost remaining the same. This is called Moore’s Law, invented by Gordon Moore of Intel several years ago. Memory capacity doubles every 12 months at the same cost. That is why the day you buy a computer or a laptop it is already obsolete.

Ray Kurzweil, who is famous for his prophecies in the cyber world, believes that by 2019 a thousand-dollar laptop computer will match the computing capacity of a human brain and by 2045, it will exceed the collective (logical) intelligence of ten billion human beings combined together. But what Kurzweil implies is only logical intelligence, not real human intelligence! Computers can only process symbols whereas humans can process not only symbols but also meanings, values and associated emotions.

Can we guess what is the aggregate computing power on the planet, or ‘smart planet’ as IBM calls it? Here, we have to include the top 500 supercomputers whose speeds are reaching petaflops, 100 million laptops and desktops, and let’s not forget a billion plus mobiles. It would be probably close to several hundred exaflops -- meaning one hundred exa mathematical operations per second.

How about digital storage? We have so much of data in computer storage, hard disks, DVDs and PCs. According to one study, digital storage grew over 60 per cent last year reaching 800,000 petabytes or 0.8 zettabytes! Suppose we have to store all the written or printed words since the human being started using language, all manuscripts, books, periodicals, everything, it would exceed 5,000 petabytes if stored in digital form. That’s less than one per cent that was created by digital computers since they originated just 60 years ago. This year the planet’s digital content will cross a zettabyte, says an IDC survey.

But there is a twist to the story. About 50 years ago, on December 29, 1959 to be precise, Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman had said “there is enough room at the­ bottom. “Why can’t we write the entire 24-volume Encyclopedia Britannica on a pin head?” He had prophesied that one day it will be possible to store entire publications created by man in a tiny space.

A new science was born called nanoscience and the associated technology is called nanotechnology of which we read now every day. This nanotechnology and its sister biotechnology and their combination nano-biotechnology will revolutionise everything in the 21st century.

But will the entire computing power and entire memory of all supercomputers and desktops, laptops and mobiles connected as a ‘cloud’ exceed the intelligence of a single human being in a true sense of human intelligence? The answer is no. Come peta, exa, zetta, all that cannot surpass human quota.

The writer is the architect of India’s first supercomputer Param