The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence M. Krauss Page A

thousand typewritten
     pages of information (again on the generous side)or about a megabyte. Then all the
     information in all the books ever written would require about 10
    
    
     12
    
    
     , or about a million million, kilobytes of storage. This is about sixteen orders of
     magnitudeor about one ten-millionth of a billionthsmaller than the storage capacity needed
     to record a single human pattern! When numbers get this large, it is difficult to
     comprehend the enormity of the task. Perhaps a comparison is in order. The storage
     requirements for a human pattern are ten thousand times as large, compared to the
     information in all the books ever written, as the information in all the books ever
     written is compared to the information on this page.
    Storing this much information is, in an understatement physicists love to use, nontrivial.
     At present, the largest commercially available single hard disks store about 10 gigabytes,
     or 10,000 thousand megabytes, of information. If each disk is about 10 cm thick, then if
     we stacked all the disks currently needed to store a human pattern on top of one another,
     they would reach a third of the way to the center of the galaxyabout 10,000 light-years,
     or about 5 years' travel in the
    
    
     Enterprise
    
    
     at warp 9!
    Retrieving this information in real time is no less of a challenge. The fastest digital
     information transfer mechanisms at present can move somewhat less than about 100 megabytes
     per second. At this rate, it would take about 2000 times the present age of the universe
     (assuming an approximate age of 10 billion years) to write the data describing a human
     pattern to tape! Imagine then the dramatic tension: Kirk and McCoy have escaped to the
     surface of the penal colony at Rura Penthe. You don't have even the age of the universe to
     beam them back, but rather just seconds to transfer a million billion billion megabytes of
     information in the time it takes the jailor to aim his weapon before firing.
    I think the point is clear. This task dwarfs the ongoing Human Genome Project, whose
     purpose is to scan and record the complete human genetic code contained in microscopic
     strands of human DNA. This is a multibillion- dollar endeavor, being carried out over at
     least a decade and requiring dedicated resources in many laboratories around the world. So
     you might imagine that I am mentioning it simply to add to the transporter-implausibility
     checklist. However, while the challenge is daunting, I think this is one area that could
     possibly be up to snuff in the twenty-third century. My optimism stems merely from
     extrapolating the present growth rate of computer technology. Using my previous yardstick
     of improvement in storage and speed by a factor of 100 each decade, and dividing it by 10
     to be conservativeand given that we are about 21 powers of 10 short of the mark now one
     might expect that 210 years from now, at the dawn of the twenty-third century, we will
     have the computer technology on hand to meet the information-transfer challenge of the
     transporter.
    I say this, of course, without any idea of how. It is clear that in order to be able to
     store in excess of 10
    
    
     28
    
    
     kilobytes of information in any human-scale device, each and every atom of the device will
     have to be exploited as a memory site. The emerging notions of biological computers, in
     which molecular dynamics mimics digital logical processes and the 10
    
    
     25
    
    
     or so particles in a macroscopic sample all act simultaneously, seem to me to be the most
    promising in this regard.
    I should also issue one warning. I am not a computer scientist. My cautious optimism may
     therefore merely be a reflection of my ignorance. However, I take some comfort in the
     example of the human brain, which is light-years ahead of any existing computational
     system in complexity and comprehensiveness. If natural selection