You just made me curious and we’re not alone in wondering
To have a scanner that can record the position of every atom in the body to an accuracy of the order of the size of a hydrogen atom would require position accuracy of about 10-10 meters. To get that accuracy over a distance of order 1 meter, this would require 30 decimal digits, which would be about 100 binary digits per atom. However, there would be a lot of redundancy in this data, so let’s be optimistic and assume you could compress this down to 1 bit per atom, so we still need approximately 1027 bits of data to just specify the positions of all the atoms in a human body. According to Wikipedia (Exabyte), the approximate data storage capacity of all the computers and storage devices in the world today is roughly 1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes = 1022 bits. Therefore, the data for the scan of one human would require at least 10,000 times the total storage of all the data stored on Earth right now.
I was getting incredibly confused because the copy/paste didn’t copy the superscript for the exponents. I was like, “there’s definitely more than 1027 atoms in the body… wait, how are there supposedly only 1021 bytes of storage in the whole world? Oooh…”
Now I’m wondering how long it would realistically take for that to become a not-insane demand. I know data storage multiplies pretty rapidly, but not that rapidly, so are we talking decades or centuries?
You just made me curious and we’re not alone in wondering
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/05/is-teleportation-possible.html
I was getting incredibly confused because the copy/paste didn’t copy the superscript for the exponents. I was like, “there’s definitely more than 1027 atoms in the body… wait, how are there supposedly only 1021 bytes of storage in the whole world? Oooh…”
Now I’m wondering how long it would realistically take for that to become a not-insane demand. I know data storage multiplies pretty rapidly, but not that rapidly, so are we talking decades or centuries?
Apparently we can already do it, a gram of dna can store 215 petabytes and we can encode to dna at 18Mbps.
Gonna be a long upload.