Bill gates showing how much data fits on a CD - 1994 .
Reddit - pics - Bill Gates illustrating the storage capacity of a CD, 1994
Quote
Each piece of paper is about 2000 bytes. 1 tb contains 1e+12 bites bytes of data. 1 trillion divided by 2000 is about 500 million, so 1tb would be about 500 million piece of paper.
Your average piece of paper is about .1mm thick. That means your stack of paper is about 500,000 meters tall. (1640419.95 feet for us freedom lovers). Thats 310 miles tall.
In comparison the ISS is only about 249 miles tall high. But since he's got two stacks of paper, he's only going up about 160 miles. He couldn't breathe and would need a space suit.
His tower would cost a lot. A sheet of paper is about 6 cents. That means for his 500 million sheets its gonna cost about 30 million dollars, however, that pales in comparison to his 85.7 billion net worth. (In fact, its only 0.035 percent of his net worth.)
The tower would also weigh a lot. Each sheet of paper weighs about .16 ounces, making the tower weigh 80 million ounces. Thats 5 million pounds, or about 108 fully loaded 747s. Even more surprising, that surpasses how much OPs mom weighs by about 1 million pounds
edit:
Some disagree on the price. This was the first thing that popped up on google when I searched for price of a piece of paper. On second glance, it appears that it might be including the cost of the ink. (Going off of price of wasted page.) Given that the point of the drive is to store the text, when that text would have to be printed, I think the number is still right; but it includes ink.
Byte was spelled as bite a few times, this has been fixed.
Yes, the ISS is 249 miles high, not tall. (Just like r/trees)
edit #2:
I fat fingered the weight of a 747 when typing into calculator. We are looking at closer to 5 fully loaded 747s.
As some have pointed out there may have been another fat fingering in the 10s place for the weight. working on that right now
edit #3:
There was fat fingering on the weight/height. I am off by a factor of 10. Stack is only 50,000 meters (31 miles) tall, and only weighs 500,000 pounds. The stack only weighs half of a 747, but is still taller than mount everest, the heights your airliner flys at, and pretty much everything that isn't the ISS or a satellite. You would still need a space suit
edit #4:
More fat fingering being done here than OPs mom in an orgy