How big is a mole? A group from the University of California has for the first time estimated the total amount of information stored digitally in the world. In a recent article published in Science Magazine they estimated that currently (well actually in the year 2007) 94% of the information in the world is stored in digital format. They concluded that people are storing almost 295 exabytes of information - that is almost 300 billion gigabytes or 3.0 x 10²⁰ bytes of information.

It is not often you see numbers of this sort of magnitude bandied about – unless, of course, you are a chemist. Maybe in this era, where students are often more at ease with technology that their teachers, we have finally got a concept we can use to try impress upon our students exactly how massive the value of Avogadros’ Constant (L) really is.

We would only need another 1999 planets identical to Earth to store and communicate just one mole of bytes of information. Put another way that is 602 zetabytes or 0.602 yottabytes of information.