The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss

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     my current machine and the 128 megabytes in the fast workstation I have in my office in
     Case Western Reserve's Physics Department. Thus, in a decade my computer internal-memory
     capabilities have increased by a factor of 1000! This increase has been matched by an
     increase in the capacity of my hard-drive memory. My first machine had no hard drive at
     all and thus had to work from floppy disks, which held 400 kilobytes of information. My
     present home machine has a 500-megabyte hard driveagain, an increase of more than a factor
     of 1000 in my storage capabilities. The speed of my home system has also greatly increased
     in the last decade. For doing actual detailed numerical calculations, I estimate that my
     present machine is almost a hundred times faster than my first Macintosh. My office
     workstation is perhaps ten times faster still, performing close to half a billion
     instructions per second!
    Even at the cutting edge, the improvement has been impressive. The fastest computers used
     for general-purpose computing have increased in speed and memory capability by a factor of
     about 100 in the past decade. And I am not including here computers built for
     special-purpose work: these little marvels can have effective speeds exceeding tens of
     billions of instructions per second. In fact, it has been shown that in principle certain
     special- purpose devices must be built using biological, DNA-based systems, which could be
     orders of magnitude faster.
    One might wonder where all this is heading, and whether we can extrapolate the past rapid
     growth to the future. Another valid question is whether we need to keep up this pace. I
     find already that the rate-determining step in the information superhighway is the end
     user. We can assimilate only so much information. Try surfing the Internet for a few
     hours, if you want a graphic example of this. I often wonder why, with the incredible
     power at my disposal, my own productivity
    has not increased nearly as dramatically as my computer's. I think the answer is clear. I
     am not limited by my computer's capabilities but by my own capabilities. It has been
     argued that for this reason computing machines could be the next phase of human evolution.
     It is certainly true that Data, even without emotions, is far superior to his human
     crewmates in most respects. And, as determined in “The Measure of a Man,” he is a genuine
     life-form.
    But I digress. The point of noting the growth of computer capability in the last decade is
     to consider how it compares with what we would need to handle the information storage and
     retrieval associated with the transporter. And of course, it doesn't come anywhere close.
    Let's make a simple estimate of how much information is encoded in a human body. Start
     with our standard estimate of 10
    
    
     28
    
    
     atoms. For each atom, we first must encode its location, which requires three coordinates
     (the x, y, and z positions). Next, we would have to record the internal state of each
     atom, which would include things like
    which energy levels are occupied by its electrons, whether it is bound to a nearby atom to
     make up a molecule, whether the molecule is vibrating or rotating, and so forth. Let's be
     conservative and assume that we can encode all the relevant information in a kilobyte of
     data. (This is roughly the amount of information on a double-spaced typewritten page.)
     That means we would need roughly 10
    
    
     28
    
    
     kilobytes to store a human pattern in the pattern
    buffer. I remind you that this is a 1 followed by 28 zeros.
    Compare this with, say, the total information stored in all the books ever written. The
     largest libraries contain several million volumes, so let's be very generous and say that
     there are a billion different books in existence (one written for every five people now
     alive on the planet). Say each book contains the equivalent of a