…and somehow, it’s probably possible within the next decade or so.
From Boing Boing Gadgets:
BLDGBLOG does some fascinating navel gazing on the subject of hard drive storage on the planetary scale: if ferromagnetically charged minerals can be arranged to make hard drives, what’s stopping us from turning Earth into one giant binary storage capsule, short of the technology?
I kid you not. In years to come – we might be using the earth as our hard drive. I’m not talking about terabytes here, not even petabytes – nope, if we used the earth as our hard drive, I couldn’t even begin to imagine the amount of data a hard drive of that size would hold.
If a 1.8″ drive can hold a quarter of a gigabyte, then the earth, measuring 6371km in diameter, would hold a hell of a lot more – obviously.
Good luck with those seek times, though. You random access times would be shot to pieces (unless you had heads that travelled at the speed of light). 😛
Cool, huh?