HMCS, thoughts on the decimal system

HMCS 1.2.1 Decimal number system

It is nice to see how the powers of ten are used.

deca
hecto
kilo
mega
giga
tera
penta
exa
zetta
yotta

deci
centi
milli
micro
nano
pico
femto
atto
zepto
yocto

Obviously, mega, giga, tera, micro, nano, pico are all pretty important these days. I was reading about terabyte storage and did see some references to 'exa'

I was reminded about how calcuations in computers have limits. You can only have a certain number of digits because the computer is really just a complicated abacus. A really, really complicated one. But you can't have infinite numbers because a computer is made of hardware. So computers round the numbers, making them inaccurate.

This makes me think about how I do not know anything about the technical limits of cloud computing...not that i really care, but is it possible to make even longer calculations by chaining computers and basically creating and endless chain of computers. Must be. I am sure the mathemeticians are all over that. This is probably the whole grid computing thing. But like I said, I do not care at this moment in time.

'Mega, giga, tera' have grown in popularity as advances in chips have been made. So, eventually we will be talking in pentabytes...though honestly I haven't heard any predictions about what that would mean. I just heard about predictions about how much data it would be to contain all human activity. That was in exa bytes. Whatever. Someone will find something. It is an awful lot of energy expenditure though, and seriously, for what purpose? People can make up urgent needs for data, if we didn't do this, then we would never be able to solve puzzles. Many of us would be very bored, so we would make up something else to do instead. We invent goals, like going to the moon, or (what I wish) cleaning up the pacific garbage patch.

I guess one day there will be databases of the normal positions of all molecules in a human body. This will be followed up by simulations and projections of complete ecosystems, with the eventual goal of teleportation. But I watched way too much star trek when i was little. I just wonder where the star trek myth really came from, where the technological visions came from. I always think about the role that the graphic designers of that show had on the human psyche. And then I think about how itunes was conceived because someone wanted something that they saw on star trek. And then, naturally, how of course any fictional vision of an impossible technology will eventually be attempted. The goals that are most impossible are the ones that will endure and continually be attempted by humans as long as we actually stay homo sapiens.