But using some of these same methods,
we can look at the NSA's data centers,
and figure out, you know, we
don't know what's going on there,
but it's pretty clear that their operation
is not the size of Google's.
Adding all of this up, I came up with
the other thing that we can answer, which is,
how many punch cards would this take?
And so a punch card can hold
about 80 characters,
and you can fit about 2,000 or so cards into a box,
and you put them in, say,
my home region of New England,
it would cover the entire region
up to a depth of a little less than five kilometers,
which is about three times deeper
than the glaciers during the last ice age
about 20,000 years ago.
So this is impractical, but I think
that's about the best answer I could come up with.
And I posted it on my website. I wrote it up.