[extropy-chat] how many exabytes?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Fri, Jan 14, 2005 at 11:44:55AM -0600, damien wrote:
> At 08:28 PM 1/12/2005 +0100, Serafino wrote:
> 
> >... 5 exabytes: all the words ever spoken
> >    by human beings.
> >... 6 exabytes: information in the genomes
> >    of all the people in the world.

Not to mention
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&q=human+ejaculation+bandwidth&btnG=Search
...
 
> Yeah, but Baez admits:
> 
> <this compression issue is especially important in my guess at the 

It's not particularly difficult to fit the human genome on a single CD:

	http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&safe=off&c2coff=1&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=human+genome+compression&btnG=Search

No doubt this coding can be much improved, as genes are long strings, and
modifications typically involve translation, permutation, insertions,
deletions, and single mutations.

You'd represent invididuals as encoded diffs against a hypothetical ur-genome.

While we are at that, why stop at people? We can pull in the whole cladogram.

> information in the human genome, and the genomes of all the people in the 
> world. I didn't try to take into account the immense overlap in genetic 
> information between different people, nor the repetitive stretches in human 
> DNA. Here's how I did the calculation. Each of us has chromosomes with 
> about 5 billion base pairs. Each base pair holds 2 bits of information: A, 
> T, C, or G. That's 10 billion bits, or 1.25 gigabytes. Times the roughly 
> 6.5 billion people in the world now, we get about 8 x 10^18 bytes, or 8 
> exabytes. They only built 2 exabytes of hard disks in 2002. But, if we 
> wanted to store the complete genetic identity of everyone on hard drives, 
> we could easily do it, using data compression, because a lot of genes are 
> the same from person to person. >

Indeedly. 

A much more interesting question is how much homology is there on a
population of human minds, and how to arrive at an efficient encoding
starting with raw digitized neuroanatomy.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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