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This is worse than all those horribly incorrect political articles.. This joke of a paper is from 2012. They address satellite communication speed and power re

This is worse than all those horribly incorrect political articles.. This joke of a paper is from 2012. They address satellite communication speed and power requirements without even considering the fundamental issue of we can't synthesize life yet. Additionally their statement 'A cell contains enough information to replicate any other type of cell in the body' could not be more incorrect. Clearly they have never heard of epigenetics or other molecular changes unique to specific cells. Also, even if the above were possible, why would we waste time communicating in this ridiculously horrible way? We could just send a hard drive containing the genetic information of billions of people in a tiny rocket rather than whatever communication method they propose. All this would be okay if they were at least trying to make a statement or explore some futuristic dream seriously, but they're not. All they do is calculate the time it would take for 6 billion bits to be sent on a 0.5 GHz band with error checking, absolute crap. This is the scientific equivalent of linkbaiting. Source: https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/viewFile/558/380 https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/article/view... Edit: I now see why this was published. This is a fake undergraduate journal at the University of Leicester. Where undergrads write bull articles like this so they can pad their resume for graduate school applications. It's absolute disgrace to write an article about this. This isn't even peer reviewed by faculty, students peer review each other. These aren't experienced researchers, they haven't even gotten their degrees yet.

Xcelerate 13y ago
I thought the article was just a fun thought experiment; I didn't realize someone was trying to pass it off as research?
- haldujai 13y ago
  When they call it "The Journal of Special Physics Topics" and publish and blog/journalists on popular websites make the statement 'physicists state' this isn't a fun little thought experiment. Unless this is The Onion. A thought experiment would entail addressing a concept, some alternatives, having proper citations, and being more than a 2 page ramble of someone applying a basic data transmission rate formula. The only thing they cite in that are formulas, they don't even cite their factually incorrect statements about biology. To make it worse, this article is part of their DEGREE. They are being assessed on this. This is supposed to be scientific[1]. This is infuriating, this is what discredits young scientists everywhere. Obvious crap being published by undergraduate journals and those Intel Science Competition fakes that take the credit for what graduate students have slaved on for years and claim they did it in a 2 month summer. They rile the media about how some 16 year old kid cured cancer and make the public upset about how experienced researchers, HHMI fellows, and Nobel laureates with tens of millions in funding couldn't do what this miraculous 16 year old kid did in 2 months. [1] https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editor...
  - oblique63 13y ago
    While I don't have personal experience in this area (yet), everything here seems to be symptomatic of the issues within the structure of academia itself, and the students could very well just be victims of the machine. If so, bashing their misguided efforts like this doesn't seem like it would be constructive for anybody. Being passionate about a subject is all well and good, but it isn't always the best state for communication/cooperation/problem-solving, which seems to be ultimately what you want here.
vacri 13y ago
When you're criticising others for making simple errors, you probably shouldn't make them yourself. I am, for instance, unaware of any hard drive that can hold one human's data at the specified magnitude of 10^42 bits, let alone 'billions of people', let alone you saying that they need to use more data to describe the human. Hrm... also, the hard drives we have at the moment are in the order of 10^12... so you'd need 10^30 drives... at which point, it's cheaper (and no slower) to just send the person in their place.
- haldujai 13y ago
  My apologies, I should have checked the math, I didn't look too carefully and in frustration posted that number. I was also directing this at the 'physical' reconstruction, where only 1.2 x 10^10 bits are required. Clearly this wouldn't be billions but it's still thousands. 10^42 is the Bekenstein bound, you cannot possibly require more data as that represents the quantum state of the system. A billion would be ~10.37 exabytes, or ~300 petabytes with lossless compression (ideally).
- shalmanese 13y ago
  There's no reason to assume the 10^42 bits is an accurate measure. Most likely, there's significant compression that can be done on the data, both lossless and lossy that can bring the storage requirements down to a much more reasonable level.
userulluipeste 13y ago
I do not dismiss the blame you place on the article's author, but his take on the bandwidth requirement for teleportation may not be entirely useless. Consider "teleportation" in other context, like teleporting in other medium/nature in which physical transport would be too expensive or impossible. Say, a virtual world... We'd have no choice but to "waste time communicating in this ridiculously horrible way".
theoh 13y ago
Epigenetics is the least of the problems with the "reconstruct body from genome" concept. Bodies are grown in a complex environment which is totally external to the genetic code. The most obvious kind of thing you wouldn't capture would be an amputation, as a crass example, but every aspect of the body is contingent rather than described solely by the genome.

Xcelerate 13y ago

I thought the article was just a fun thought experiment; I didn't realize someone was trying to pass it off as research?

haldujai 13y ago
When they call it "The Journal of Special Physics Topics" and publish and blog/journalists on popular websites make the statement 'physicists state' this isn't a fun little thought experiment. Unless this is The Onion. A thought experiment would entail addressing a concept, some alternatives, having proper citations, and being more than a 2 page ramble of someone applying a basic data transmission rate formula. The only thing they cite in that are formulas, they don't even cite their factually incorrect statements about biology. To make it worse, this article is part of their DEGREE. They are being assessed on this. This is supposed to be scientific[1]. This is infuriating, this is what discredits young scientists everywhere. Obvious crap being published by undergraduate journals and those Intel Science Competition fakes that take the credit for what graduate students have slaved on for years and claim they did it in a 2 month summer. They rile the media about how some 16 year old kid cured cancer and make the public upset about how experienced researchers, HHMI fellows, and Nobel laureates with tens of millions in funding couldn't do what this miraculous 16 year old kid did in 2 months. [1] https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editorialPolicies#focusAndScope https://physics.le.ac.uk/journals/index.php/pst/about/editor...
- oblique63 13y ago
  While I don't have personal experience in this area (yet), everything here seems to be symptomatic of the issues within the structure of academia itself, and the students could very well just be victims of the machine. If so, bashing their misguided efforts like this doesn't seem like it would be constructive for anybody. Being passionate about a subject is all well and good, but it isn't always the best state for communication/cooperation/problem-solving, which seems to be ultimately what you want here.

vacri 13y ago

When you're criticising others for making simple errors, you probably shouldn't make them yourself. I am, for instance, unaware of any hard drive that can hold one human's data at the specified magnitude of 10^42 bits, let alone 'billions of people', let alone you saying that they need to use more data to describe the human. Hrm... also, the hard drives we have at the moment are in the order of 10^12... so you'd need 10^30 drives... at which point, it's cheaper (and no slower) to just send the person in their place.

haldujai 13y ago
My apologies, I should have checked the math, I didn't look too carefully and in frustration posted that number. I was also directing this at the 'physical' reconstruction, where only 1.2 x 10^10 bits are required. Clearly this wouldn't be billions but it's still thousands. 10^42 is the Bekenstein bound, you cannot possibly require more data as that represents the quantum state of the system. A billion would be ~10.37 exabytes, or ~300 petabytes with lossless compression (ideally).
shalmanese 13y ago
There's no reason to assume the 10^42 bits is an accurate measure. Most likely, there's significant compression that can be done on the data, both lossless and lossy that can bring the storage requirements down to a much more reasonable level.

userulluipeste 13y ago

I do not dismiss the blame you place on the article's author, but his take on the bandwidth requirement for teleportation may not be entirely useless. Consider "teleportation" in other context, like teleporting in other medium/nature in which physical transport would be too expensive or impossible. Say, a virtual world... We'd have no choice but to "waste time communicating in this ridiculously horrible way".

theoh 13y ago

Epigenetics is the least of the problems with the "reconstruct body from genome" concept. Bodies are grown in a complex environment which is totally external to the genetic code. The most obvious kind of thing you wouldn't capture would be an amputation, as a crass example, but every aspect of the body is contingent rather than described solely by the genome.