Data Transmission Speed Goes To 1,840,000,000,000,000 Bits Per Second.

The new chip is 42 times faster than the fastest chip just two years ago.

New Atlas has reported that engineers in Denmark and Sweden have been able to send 1.84 petabits per second down a 4.9 mile fiber optic cable with a new optical chip. A peta is 10 raised to 15 or a thousand trillion. A petabit is 1,000,000,000,000,000 bits. This is almost twice the global internet traffic per second. The researchers claim that it could eventually reach speeds of up to 100 petabits per second, or 54 times faster. This new speed record is over 80 percent faster than the previous record set just five months earlier. In mid 2020 the speed record was 44 terabits per second. 1.84 petabits is 1,840 terabits, so this new chip is 42 faster than the fastest chip just two years ago. George Gilder prophesied a worldwide webs of glass and light over 20 years ago. The speeds have been far in excess of Gilder’s most optimistic predictions. The learning curve for transmitting information is going exponentially exponential.

Human beings process around 39 bits of speech per second. The new chip can send 1.5 million years of human talking in one second. Our ability to share bits is truly wonderful. With 8 billion human beings on the planet now and almost 7 billion smart phones with inexpensive access to the world’s knowledge, we have never had a time where our ability to learn and communicate has been better. Thanks to dedicated engineers and entrepreneurs and the freedom to innovate, our world is about to experience astonishing creativity.

If you find this article valuable, please share with a friend.

You can learn more about these economic facts and ideas in our new book, Superabundance, available at Amazon. Jordan Peterson calls it a “profoundly optimistic book.”

Gale Pooley is a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute and a board member at Human Progress.