Science · Math & words

Bits to Yottabytes

One selfie-crazy robot. An absurdly enormous amount of data.

Watch on YouTube
Bits to Yottabytes2:39

A song. A few new discoveries.

  • Climb the data-size ladder from bits and bytes to enormous units.
  • Compare the tiny building blocks of digital information with the space taken up by photos and videos.

Keep the curiosity going

What takes more storage: a short text message, a photo, or a video?

Made for curious kids around ages 6–12 and the grown-ups watching with them. Music and animation created with AI tools under Mike Sego’s direction. YouTube’s video description includes the release notes and credits.

Read the sing-along lyrics
Smarty Party! I taught my robot to take a selfie. He took a billion. A bit is a zero, a bit is a one, Eight bits make a byte, and the party's begun. A plain letter A takes a byte in our code, Now here come the selfies! We're ready to load! A thousand bytes? A kilobyte! A thousand of those? A megabyte! Songs and pictures, save them here, My robot took a photo of his robot rear! A thousand of those! A thousand of those! Stack 'em up, pack 'em up, watch how it grows! A thousand of those! A thousand of those! Same little bytes in a much bigger crowd! My little robot is getting quite proud! A thousand megabytes, a gigabyte, A thousand gigabytes, a terabyte. Movies and games in a digital stack, He photographed his front, then he photographed his back! A thousand terabytes, a petabyte, A thousand petabytes, an exabyte! Please stop photographing your bottom. A thousand exabytes, a zettabyte, A thousand zettabytes, a yottabyte! Yotta lotta data! Yotta lotta fun! Are we at the top? Not done! Not done! A thousand yottabytes, a ronnabyte, A thousand ronnabytes, a quettabyte! These are giant numbers, not a box we bought, Real files change size, some a little, some a lot. Eight bits to a byte, then thousands as we go, That's our decimal ladder, now sing the names you know! Kilo! Mega! Giga! Tera! Peta! Exa! Zetta! Yotta! Ronna! Quetta! What a lotta! A thousand of those! A thousand of those! Stack 'em up, pack 'em up, watch how it grows! Great. A quettabyte of robot bottoms. And not one photo of my birthday. Smarty Party Songs! Like, subscribe, PARTY!

Lyrics from the published video’s caption file.

Keep the discoveries coming.

For the grown-ups

Keep the discoveries
coming.

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