Been following the nanotechnology stuff off and on for a while. Fascinating theories. Was painting my house when I read one story that said that some day you would just scoop up the paint from the pail, throw it on the wall and the nano machines that were contained within would turn on and start moving out towards the confines of the walls, celing, whatever and whould stop when they unstacked themselves to the appropriate thickness of the coat that you wanted.....sure would beat climbing that ladder :)

Oh, the database headers in the ADT tables have 8 byte block pointers, BTW. So, 2^64-1 = 16 exabytes.. Your right, I'd say they are safe in having to prove it works to that degree for a few years....



>>Another way to look at it would be going the other way smaller - nanotechnology - check out articles by Eric Drexler on the net. Tracking billions and billons of 'nano machines' produced by molecular production lines might require exabytes to track 'em....
>>
>>>>Current estimates of numbers of stars in the galaxy are around 200 billion, so around 80Gb per star in the galaxy.
>>>
>>>Done it again, 3 extra zeroes this time - that should be 80Mb
>
>Coincidentally, I had just come across this site discussing the same issues :
>
>http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/MITtecRvwSmlWrld/article.html