Consider a room, maybe the one you are sitting in at the moment. Write all information, the one you can think of and the information you can find somewhere, on paper and put it in the room. There will be a finite number of paper sheets which is needed to fill the room until it is really packed and you cannot even open the door. For the thought experiment replace the paper with CD-ROMs, USB sticks and further. There will always be a finite number of information expressed in bytes able to be stored in this room. Of course the advanced technologies change the methods on how to store information. While today solid state disks can be called the cutting edge of saving your files, tomorrow there will be something else. So we see, the number of information stored in our room will increase, but is always finite for the technology you choose and use.
An information-room cannot be defined like this.
Now, think of you sitting somewhere, you cannot move, you have your eyes closed, but by talking and listening you can ask questions and get answers. You need to control something available and useful; whatever necessary to fulfill your needs.
For a simple task, like to buy and transport a pretzel from the nearest bakery, on your own without any help, back to your place, you need to know a lot. Where are possible streets, where are you, and at what time there are other people? – everything can happen. The situation has to be clarified in detail so that the task can be done, without hurting other people. With this example we see that the stored information or data needed to support our daily life is infinite.
From this two examples we see that information cannot be expressed in terms of x-y-z dimensions. Only our handling with data is expressed in dimensions. In the information century this is bad news, since information is necessary for our daily live.
The news and data needed by humanity is huge, unless live streamed data is provided by communication. Storing every byte we suck out of the internet per day is not feasible. Not talking about the data we produce everyday by shooting videos, producing music, podcasts etc. To overstate this, similar to garbage, stored information or stored data is endless, and initially it needs a lot of resources to manufacture storage devices. The comparison with trash is not that strange, because there are a lot of people who might consider that the data you are storing is not interesting.
So folks, saving information should be done only with important data. Think twice if you make a copy. No one, absolutely no one needs tons of movies and music saved on their hard disks, because not only in the information age, there is no information-room.
Zapp