Extreme numbers get new names

By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 10²⁴ bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. The data boom has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes to describe the outrageously big and small. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 10²⁷ and 10³⁰, and ronto and quecto signify 10⁻²⁷ and 10⁻³⁰. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram. Ronna and quetta might sound strange now, but so did giga and tera once, says metrologist Olivier Pellegrino. This is the first update to the prefix system since 1991, when zetta (10²¹), zepto (10⁻²¹), yotta (10²⁴) and yocto (10⁻²⁴) were added.