Maichael Lesk speculates in this 1997 article:
How much information is there in the world? This paper makes various estimates and compares the answers with the estimates of disk and tape sales, and size of all human memory. There may be a few thousand petabytes of information all told; and the production of tape and disk will reach that level by the year 2000. So in only a few years:
- we will be able save everything — no information will have to be thrown out
- the typical piece of information will never be looked at by a human being.
Later in the article, he estimates that the average human being can store (remember) around 200 MB of data.