Ronnabyte and quettabyte are the two new names added to the International System of Units (Si) to describe the gigantic quantities of data that will soon be produced in the Big Data era: after the yottabyte, which stands for 10 to the 24th byte, a amount of data that would require a stack of DVDs as high as Mars, we will now have the ronnabyte (10 to the 27th) and the quettabyte (10 to the 30th), as stated in an online analysis on the Nature magazine website.
For symmetry, two new prefixes have also been introduced at the other end of the scale to describe extremely small quantities: ronto and quecto, which stand for 10 to the -27th and 10 to the -30th, respectively.
To give an idea, 1 ronnagram would be approximately the weight of the Earth, while an electron is equal to 1 quctogram.
The four new prefixes were voted on Nov. 18 by representatives of governments from around the world meeting at the General Conference on Weights and Measures held outside Paris.
This is the first update of the prefix system since 1991, when the addition was however made necessary by the field of chemistry, which needed to be able to express much smaller numbers.
The proposed change, presented by Richard Brown of the UK's National Physics Laboratory after five years of work, was also necessary because informal names began to circulate to express those quantities, such as hellabyte and brontobyte.
“I was horrified,” comments Brown, “because they were completely unofficial names.”
In the past, terms born informally were then adopted by the International System, but this time this was not possible since the symbols associated with these two names are already used within the metric system for other prefixes or other units of measurement.
Now, says Richard Brown, there are no other letters of the alphabet left available for new prefixes, so what will happen when, and if, any scientific fields manage to push themselves to magnitudes beyond their current ones remains an open question.
