how many bytes make a human?

From: Damien Broderick (damienb@unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Tue Apr 08 2003 - 20:59:50 MDT

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    At 05:13 PM 4/8/03 -0700, Robert wrote:

    >the problem does arise that the atomic structure of the
    >human body is a *large* amount of information -- I've
    >never done the calculation

    Greg Egan might well have done. His stories suggest an exabyte, if you're
    frugal. In `The Planck Dive':

    < Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be packed into
    less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few milliseconds
    long. If you wanted to simulate an entire flesher body — cell by cell,
    redundant viscera and all — that was a harmless enough eccentricity, but
    lugging the microscopic details of your “very own” small intestine
    ninety-seven light years was just being precious. >

    2^60. A billion gigabytes, approx.

    Damien Broderick

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