Those numbers probably aren't as absurd as you think. 16 9s is, I think 10 bytes lost per exabyte-year of data storage.
There's perhaps the additional asterisk of "and we haven't suffered a catastrophic event that entirely puts us out of business". (Which is maybe only terrorist attacks). Because then you're talking about losing data only when cosmic-ray bitflips happen simultaneously in data centers on different continents, which I'd expect doesn't happen too often.
