About The Data Scale
Created by Nolan Schleiff
Scroll down to go from a single bit to the most information the observable universe could ever hold, about 90 powers of ten. The big number in the top left is the amount of data you're looking at, in bytes (one byte is eight bits). Each stop is shown with how many times bigger the next one is.
What's Simplified
- Sizes use decimal units, the way drive makers count: a kilobyte is 1,000 bytes and a gigabyte is a billion.
- The last two stops are capacities, the most information that much matter or space could possibly hold, not data anyone has stored.
- DNA is counted at 2 bits per letter (A, T, G or C) with no compression. The figure for one person is a rough estimate.
- Many sizes depend on format and compression. A movie, a photo or Wikipedia can be much bigger or smaller depending on how it's saved.
- Data has no size on screen, so every stop is drawn at the same size. The numbers tell you how different they are.
- Animations are illustrations, not simulations.
Sources
- Information capacity of the universe: Seth Lloyd, "Computational capacity of the universe", Physical Review Letters (2002).
- Black hole information: the Bekenstein–Hawking entropy formula.
- DNA in the biosphere: Landenmark, Forgan & Cockell, PLOS Biology (2015).
- Data created worldwide: IDC Global DataSphere estimates.
- CERN data store: CERN (2023). Internet Archive: archive.org.
- Event Horizon Telescope: the EHT collaboration (2019).
- Human genome: the Genome Reference Consortium (GRCh38).
- English Wikipedia: Wikimedia database downloads. Shakespeare: Project Gutenberg.
- Apollo Guidance Computer: NASA and MIT Instrumentation Laboratory documentation.
Get Involved
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A text version of every stop is available for screen readers.
See the other scales on the home page.
Scale Of Everything™ · © 2026 Nolan Schleiff. All rights reserved.