How Much Is 1 Trillion. A LOT

According to Google's reporting, in their index, there are over 1 trillion URL's with unique content on the Internet right now. Are you kidding me? A Trillion?

I don't think that most of us can comprehend 1 trillion. That is such an enormous number I think some quick facts are in order for you to understand the scope.

• The USA has not existed for one trillion seconds yet
• One trillion looks like this - 1,000,000,000,000
• Western civilization has not been around for 1 trillion seconds yet
• 1 Trillion seconds ago Neanderthals walked the Earth
• If you had a trillion dollars and you spent 1 dollar a second, it would take you 31,600 years to spend it all.

Got your head around it yet?

According to the gurus over at the big G, "Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day." Yes you read it right, GOOGLE DOWNLOADS THE WEB. Over one trillion URLs worth of downloading.

Let me ask this. If everyday Google maps out the internet, how many petabytes or exabytes (both bigger than a terabyte) of data does that download represent? What about the future? Since the Internet is growing by billions of pages per day, can one company be big enough to handle it all? Do we want one company to handle it all?

But more importantly, what happens when Skynet takes over after becoming self aware and the machines start to round us all up?