The 21st century has a new metric. Everything is now measured in billions of units. Another way of saying that is: "GIGAsomething". Jazz entertainers once called their job a "GIG," but now it can refer to any event or "happening."

So we have many GIG-THINGS:

GIGABYTE
Although computer hard drives are measured in a few thousands of gigabytes called Terabytes, it is unlikely that this century most hard drives will hold many thousands of terabytes (possible but unlikely)
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GIGAHERTZ
Radio frequencies in the billions of cycles per second were once only the domain of military radar systems or "microwave" ovens in the kitchen. Beginning at the start of the 21st century, communicating via intelligent cell phones needs "gigahertz" frequencies to carry enough data to display high definition movies.
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GIGAFLOP
For most of the 20th century, the number of instructions that can be processed by a "super" computer in one second was measured in "gigaflops." BUT, by networking massive arrays of rather normal computers running in parallel, "gigaflops" are now defined as too "slow" for the fastest computers (the fastest is not at IBM or in the CIA, but in China).
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GIGABIT
Local computer networks once could interconnect using hundreds of megabits/sec. This 21st century, most computers will need their "Ethernet" Local Area Networks to run at billions of bits per second. It is unlikely that in this century many thousands of billions of bits/sec will be the universal LAN data transfer standard, except in very unique super-computing applications.
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GIGAWATT
Last century, coal fired steam turbines to generate AC electricity that had energy outputs measured in "megawatts" were state-of-the-art. This century, entire "farms" of solar collectors and wind turbines are now expected to produce "GIGAWATTS" of peak power output.
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GIGABUCK
To be really rich, we now have to measure success in billions of dollars, or any new project looking for venture capital needs to forecast GIGABUCKS of profits for the investors.
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GIGABOD
As of this new century, we now must count the world's population in many billions of people. At the beginning of the still-wood-fired 19th century, we had less than a billion. Today there are more than a billion Chinese, and a billion Indians, and a billion Muslims, not to mention billions more desperately poor. Given the world's energy resources it is unlikely that earth will ever support Trillions of people. We are approaching our absolute limits to population growth.
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GIGACAR
With a world population counted in the billions, we now enter the era of having a billion cars on the roads. Each car wants to consume hundreds of gallons of gasoline each year.
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GIGAGALLON
If private transportation in the 21th century is to be permitted for everyone, our world annual gasoline consumption will have to be measured in "gigagallons/year".
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GIGAJOULE
This is a rather old metric measure of total energy in terms of electrical energy equivalents that can also be applied to the energy in a gallon of liquid hydrogen. Most people are familiar with hydrogen bombs measured in "megatons" of TNT, not knowing one ton of TNT equals about 4.2 gigajoules, while about 6 gigajoules equals a barrel of cure oil. (a "barrel" with 42 gallons of oil, has more energy than a ton of TNT?... WOW).
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GIGAMETER
When man began to seriously measure distances, he defined a "meter" to be one ten-millionth of the distance from the earth's equator to the north pole. But now that we can think in galactic terms, we must measure distance in units of time that light travels in the hard vacuum of space. A Photon can travel about 0.3 gigameters per second. And according to a few scientists, their current assumption is that nothing can travel faster than light (any radiated energy).
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GIGAANNUM
According to some cosmologists, the universe did not exist more than 15 billion years ago. So the longest measure of time is not "years" but "GIGAANNUMS." 13.7 of them make up the history of everything, and all things will go away in a few hundred gigaannums (or so "they" predict).
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