Re: 1000 humans in a grain of salt

Lee Daniel Crocker (lcrocker@mercury.colossus.net)
Wed, 21 Jan 1998 19:30:08 -0800 (PST)


> I guess that, for example, 50 gigabytes per day should
> be sufficient to describe (simulate) all the sensory
> impressions our brains receive during a day,...
> Can somebody detect a fault in this reasoning?

WAY too small an estimate, if you ask me. Graphic image
storage and transmission is something of a specialty of
mine, so I'll try to estimate just the visual component:
Just to represent my field of vision, and no other data,
to the resolution of my retina (let's call it ~50 pixels,
which would be something like an 8kx8k large screen),
assuming very good data compression (say MPEG-2 or better,
which can get down to about 1-2MB a minute for images at
about 1/100th of that resolution), and a frame rate good
to human perception (perhaps just a bit faster than 60Hz),
I get well over 100 gigabytes a day /just for the video/.

Add all the other senses: sound, taste/smell, balance,
skin pressure, temperature, pain, propioception, and any
we haven't discovered yet, I'd say you're at least two
orders of magnitude low.

--
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html>
"All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past,
are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified
for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC