We Know Little

We know so little.

According to the International Data Corporation, the sum of the world’s data will amount to 175 zettabytes by 2025 (175*10^21 bytes), and it keeps increasing exponentially.

The brain memory capacity is estimated to be anywhere between 1 terabyte and 2.5 petabytes (10^12 to 2.5*10^15 bytes).

In other words, we can at best memorize 0.0000014% of the world’s knowledge at every given time. We would need more than a few additional brains to know everything.

Socrates’ famous maxim never rang truer. We know nothing, and we never will know much more. No matter how advanced we are in life, whether we hold degrees or certificates or countless life experiences, we need to stay humble. Knowledge is a vast ocean we can only sail through, never grasp in its entirety.

The constant, once again, is that we need to be extra careful about our information diet. We are fed junk food every day: the social networks you keep browsing, the TV ads you keep watching, the bad books you keep reading, the fools you keep hearing. If we let every piece of news into our life, we will only drown in it without having done much.