I went looking for a recent estimate of the number of transistors that have been manufactured. It appears to be in the range of 10^23. I'm pretty sure there in nothing else anyone has invented that has been replicated in such volume.
It's amazing to think of a thing someone has made or has helped make be so numerous. And a physical thing too not software or words or an idea an actual thing.
Transistors on a CPU are actual things. Intel or AMD CPUs having billions. One CPU the Cerebras Wafer-Scale Engine (WSE) as they describe it "has 2.6 trillion transistors, which make up 850,000 AI-optimized processing units". That's one big chip!
I'm not so sure. Last time I followed the field, modern HDDs were nanostructured, such that each magnetic domain was literally a physically distinguishable object, in a sense. I'm not sure if that's still the case, and I'm also not 100% sure that ever made it in to production, but I'm pretty sure it did.
At least as of the last time I read the domains were a pretty uncontrolled result of the crystalization and each bit is covering a few statistically. Nanopatterning of the sort your describing would let you make the bits smaller and hence weaker by ensuring a separation and friendlier magnetic environment.
Be careful with large numbers: 10^23 shoes would be roughly 854B shoes for every (~117B) human that have ever lived, that is about 14 million pairs of shoes per individual and per day. I am pretty sure there has never been a market for that many shoes.
An average paper clip is 204.8mm^3. 10^23 of those would be 2.048x10^19 L in volume[1]. That would be only two orders of magnitude less than total volume of oceans 1.33x10^21 L [2]. So I think not.
