“Claiming to be wise, they became fools."

                                                            Romans 1:22

We are at the point in time where we are the most knowledgeable, most technological, and most advanced in the history of man.

Encyclopedias used to be the “go to” to learn something (our family had the Worldbook set), but the internet has long since taken over. You can find just about anything you want to know there and find it quickly. Videos of how to do just about anything; articles on every topic; history and science and math and any field you want. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, and any of a number of companies fill the internet with all the data available in the world.

I was looking on a website recently called “Starry”, and they broke down some terms so that even I could understand them (and that took some doing).

-        First, storage on the internet is measured in units of digital memory called “bytes”.

-        Oversimplified, each letter on any page is one “byte”.

-        A chart of “byte” values looks like this:

·1 = byte

·1,000 bytes = megabyte

·1,000,000 bytes = kilobyte

·1,000,000,000, bytes = gigabyte

·1,000,000,000,000, bytes  = terabyte

·1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = petabyte

·1,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = exabyte

·1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, bytes = zettabyte

·1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes = yottabyte

The website said to put this in perspective, a three minute song uses about three megabytes of storage, which means that if you just took Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Facebook, those four companies alone hold enough data for 400 trillion songs, or 1.2 quadrillion minutes of music. That’s more than 2.2 billion years of songs. They said that meant if the first single-celled organism on earth hit the “Play” button, we’d still have a few thousand years of music left to play.

The internet seems endless, and we don’t know if it will ever reach full capacity. It is all run on servers. Which means the only way to run out of space is if we cannot add any more hardware. In 2014, Live Science estimated the limits of the internet to be 1 million exabytes. An exabyte is 1 billion billion bytes (that’s 18 zeros after the 1). The King James edition of the Bible contains 3,116,480 letters, so one exabyte alone holds more than 320 billion Bibles’ worth of text. If you stacked them up, you’d have 16,000 stacks of bibles reaching the moon… with some left to spare.

Hard to grasp? It is for me. The website also said that you could store all the data on the entire internet on about half a million 2 terabyte hard drives, and those hard drives could easily fit into a room of 80,000 square feet. A Walmart Superstore is about 180,000 square feet, so folks, with all this technology and information and knowledge we have . . . we can store it all in the place we shop for groceries and have plenty of room left over.

As one preacher said, “our knowledge is truly vast, but it is the height of arrogance to assume we are approaching anywhere near the sum of what can be known.” When compared to God’s knowledge, man’s wisdom is called “foolishness”, and the state of the world today proves that. Isn’t it nice to have the knowledge that our creator and Savior has knowledge that is infinite and eternal?

Now, where are my aspirin. All that “byte” stuff gave me a headache.

"Father, Forgive us when we believe we are so smart as to challenge Your knowledge for our lives.  In Jesus' name, AMEN."