Information Overload

A person standing in front of an enormous stack of A4 papers that stretches beyond the clouds, symbolizing the overwhelming volume of information created daily across print, digital media, social platforms, and scientific research.

Illustration of a person facing a towering stack of A4 pages, representing the vast amount of information created every day across digital media, print, and science.

Imagine all the new information overload created in a single day across print, digital media, social platforms, and scientific research. If you stacked A4 pages representing this information one on top of the other, the pile would stretch from the Earth to the Sun hundreds of times over. This overwhelming volume is why we often refer to the modern world as being flooded by information—our brains simply weren’t designed to process this much data.

Assumptions:

Distance from Earth to the Sun:
The average distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 150 million kilometers (150,000,000 km).
Thickness of an A4 page:
The thickness of a standard A4 paper is around 0.1 millimeters, or 0.0001 meters.

Step-by-Step Estimation:

Pages Required to Reach the Sun:

To find the number of pages needed to span the distance from Earth to the Sun, we divide the distance by the thickness of a single page:

Number of Pages = 150,000,000 km ÷ 0.0001 m = 1.5 × 10¹² pages = 1.5 trillion pages

So, approximately 1.5 trillion A4 pages would be required to create a stack from Earth to the Sun.

To find the number of pages needed to span the distance from Earth to the Sun, we divide the distance by the thickness of a single page:

Amount of Information Produced Daily:

According to some estimates, the total global information production per day is in the range of 2.5 quintillion bytes of data (2.5 × 10¹⁸ bytes).

The average size of a printed A4 page (assuming it contains standard text and images) is about 2 kilobytes (2,000 bytes).

Converting Data into Pages:

To convert the daily data production into A4 pages:

2.5 × 10¹⁸ bytes ÷ 2,000 bytes per page = 1.25 × 10¹⁵ pages = 1.25 quadrillion pages

This means that the amount of information produced in a day, if converted to printed A4 pages, would be around 1.25 quadrillion pages.

Comparing the Numbers:

With 1.25 quadrillion pages produced per day, and approximately 1.5 trillion pages needed to reach the Sun:

1.25 × 10¹⁵ pages ÷ 1.5 × 10¹² pages to reach the Sun ≈ 833

This suggests that the amount of information produced in a day could create a stack of A4 pages that reaches the Sun 833 times!

Why Can’t Our Brains Handle the Modern Information Overload?