4 ms·
It is fairly reassuring that the sum total of that which results in human development and complexity is not easily fit on a USB stick.
by otakucode 8y ago
It is fairly reassuring that the sum total of that which results in human development and complexity is not easily fit on a USB stick.
- DoctorOetker 8y agoare you talking about all our DNA together, with all the genetic diversity of the global human population? or for one specific individual? I will assume you are talking about one specific individual. Would you consider the genome of a freshly (before any cell division) fertilized egg cell to contain this "sum total of that which results in human development and complexity" ? Unless you don't I will assume so. The article states ~3.25 billion base pairs, thats ~6.5 billion bits worst case (either without compression, or for a white noise genome). Thats less than a gigabyte... fits easily on a USB stick! Of course as the article mentions this does not apply to diversity in whole populations [of humans, or of "body parts" that keep evolving within the human body (such as white blood cells), or of cells from cancerous or virally infected or irradiated tissues] The reason a single genome (i.e. the freshly fertilized egg cell) does not yet fit in 1GB is because we can not yet simultaneously reliably and cheaply sequence DNA (so we need "error bars")