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AnonTechie writes:

How much information is stored inside a human? Not as much as you think. All you need is a mere 1.5 gigabytes to fit your entire genetic code. Veritasium did the math in his latest brain tapping video and cooked up that number using bits to understand the molecules that make up a person's genetic code.

Of course, we have a lot of cells in our body (around 40 trillion) and each of those cells contain the full 1.5 GB of our genetic code. So a real person has about 60 zettabytes (60 with 21 zeroes after) of information in total. That's huge. Veritasium says that in the year 2020, all the digital information in the world will only tally up to 40 ZB. So turns out, there's a lot of information necessary to make a person.

But! 99.9% of our genetic information is shared with everyone else on Earth. What makes us unique is much, much smaller than a ZB. In fact, it takes less than a megabyte to make a person different from the next.

So there it is. A reasonable 1.5 GB of information for our genetic code. A ridiculous 60 ZB flowing in all our bodies. And an embarrassingly tiny megabyte that makes us believe we're a unique snowflake.

1. "AnonTechie" - https://soylentnews.org/~AnonTechie/
2. "information is stored" - http://sploid.gizmodo.com/how-many-gigabytes-does-it-take-to-make-a-human-1600123081
3. "atest brain tapping video" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUDqI9PJpc8

printed from SoylentNews, How Many Gigs of Data in a Human? on 2024-05-04 23:17:11