By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. Now, the booming growth of the data sphere has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes beyond that magnitude, to describe the outrageously big and small.Representatives from governments worldwide, meeting at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) outside Paris on 18 November, voted to introduce four new prefixes to the International System of Units (SI) with immediate effect. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 1027 and 1030, and ronto and quecto signify 10-27 and 10-30. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram.This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when the organization added zetta (1021), zepto (10-21), yotta (1024) and yocto (10-24). In that case, metrologists were adapting to fit the needs of chemists, who wanted a way to express SI units on the scale of Avogadro’s number — the 6 × 1023 units in a mole, a measure of the quantity of substances. The more familiar prefixes peta and exa were added in 1975 (see ‘Extreme figures’).
Clever college kids will joke about having a quectogram of sympathy...
No doubt many people are disappointed they did not employ the prefix, "hella"
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