The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss
Authors: 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
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
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