There aren’t enough atoms

John Parkinson recently wrote in his article Bit By Bit that we are running out of atoms (CIOInsight). It’s an interesting extrapolation based on current progress of information growth measured against potential information storage capabilities of the future.

The trend line reaches 1:1 around 2018 or 2020, by which time we will need nano-manufacturing processes and exotic materials to make this level of storage density work reliably, especially for long-term storage and archival retrieval media, which must preserve stored data for decades or centuries.

The impliciation is that around 2020 or so we will be storing information at the atomic level, one atom to one bit. Based on projections of how much information we’ll need to store — we won’t have enough atoms. This really dashes the “storage is cheap and getting cheaper” theory.

I don’t believe John is right, though. First of all, we can be much, much smarter about what we need to store — we don’t need to make eleven “fat” copies of all our information when one, reliable, compressed copy will do. And there is a huge volume of information that we likely don’t need to store at all. More important, however, we won’t be storing information on a 1:1 basis at the atomic level. Quantum computing theory is well underway and should lead us into new storage technologies very soon — the ability to store bits at the subatomic level, as electrons for example. (Scientific American published a great article on quantum computing).

Still, he’s dead-on about one thing: We are going to see a huge information storage explosion and we absolutely need to improve our ability to handle it.