How to explain IT to lawyers

Recently I was asked to explain, in plain language, the size of a certain data set that was several terabytes as measured in disk space. I was not allowed to simply state that a byte was a character, a kilobyte a thousand characters, a megabyte a million, a gigabyte a billion, and a terabyte a trillion. This was not plain enough. 

So, I couldn't use the direct approach. After all, if you read this whole article, you will have read about 2,000 characters and it would be 135 kilobytes in size, but that really doesn’t help comprehend what the 7.3 billion copies of this article would look like (it would be a 471 mile-high stack of paper). I'd be surprised if this article was read more than once anyway. 

Forget characters, bytes, and colossal stacks of articles, I had to use seconds instead. (As in, one Mississippi, two Mississippi, … not helpings of a meal). This is how I explained it:

One thousand seconds is over 16 minutes (a KiloSecond). According to Andy Warhol, everyone will be famous for 900 seconds. One million seconds is more than 11 and a half days (a MegaSecond), but one billion seconds (GigaSecond) is nearly 32 years. That's a big jump, but just enough time for one generation to grow up and produce another generation. 

A human life span is typically two and a half billion seconds, unless you are River Phoenix who got way less than one billion, and the oldest lifetime claim is 127 years of age, which means they made it to only 4 billion seconds. Even human life spans don't get you into the trillion neighborhood. 

Imagine this: one trillion seconds (a TeraSecond) is over 31 millennia - a millennium is a thousand years - the year 2000 marked the year that ended the 2nd millennium in the common era. As I write this, there have been about 63 billion seconds so far in the common era, give or take a few.  

So, going back to the life of Jesus is not enough seconds ago, not even close to a tera-second. Even with this conversion, the numbers are too big to think about. The oldest written language dates to 3200 BCE, although Egyptian glyphs date to 3400 BCE, still only hundreds of billions of seconds ago.

The practice of farming is arguably about 12,000 years old, which is not even half a trillion seconds ago. You have to go back to the stone age - before words, before farming, to a time when the human population was just expanding enough to no longer be considered an endangered species - to count enough seconds to add up to a trillion. From cave man to modern man, just a TeraSecond, to get 900 seconds of fame each.

-AR
© Aron Ruthe, 2015