Caprica (extremely minor spoiler)
No, not a review or anything. I mean, the series pilot is great and I highly recommend seeing it. It was excellent except for one really blaring, bizarre, and ridiculous notion, that the capacity of the human brain is roughly equivalent to 300 megabytes.
The human brain contains roughly 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it, it’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality, there’s no way to translate the data. But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases.
Actually, conservatively guessing, a human brain would be more around the order of 1,000 terabytes. I could believe, however, that perhaps 300 MB might be an average sum of the pure raw data available from all digital records of a person...
Medical scans. DNA profiles. Psych evaluations. School records. Email. Recordings. Video. Audio. CAT scans. Genetic typing. Synaptic records. Security cameras. Test results. Shopping records. Talent shows. Ball games. Traffic tickets. Restaurant bills. Phone records. Music lists. Movie tickets. TV habits. Even prescriptions for birth control.
But even in an advanced society where all such digital records could be harvested and used to help create an avatar or virtual simulation of a person, such data represents the tiniest sliver of what makes up a person, not even considering the sentient aspect. I'm just talking about pure data. 10 seconds of the average dream I have at night contains more data than all those harvestable digital records combined. 300 MB might be enough to create the most basic recognizable avatar of a person, a digital shell or whatever, but nowhere near a believable simulated sentience. 300 MB might be the brain of a praying mantis or something.
Hopefully the 300 MB silliness will be cleared up in one of the episodes of the series. Maybe they will explain the 300 MB figure as being the estimated total of all digital records of the average person, or something like that...
The human brain contains roughly 300 megabytes of information. Not much when you get right down to it. The question isn’t how to store it, it’s how to access it. You can’t download a personality, there’s no way to translate the data. But the information being held in our heads is available in other databases.
Actually, conservatively guessing, a human brain would be more around the order of 1,000 terabytes. I could believe, however, that perhaps 300 MB might be an average sum of the pure raw data available from all digital records of a person...
Medical scans. DNA profiles. Psych evaluations. School records. Email. Recordings. Video. Audio. CAT scans. Genetic typing. Synaptic records. Security cameras. Test results. Shopping records. Talent shows. Ball games. Traffic tickets. Restaurant bills. Phone records. Music lists. Movie tickets. TV habits. Even prescriptions for birth control.
But even in an advanced society where all such digital records could be harvested and used to help create an avatar or virtual simulation of a person, such data represents the tiniest sliver of what makes up a person, not even considering the sentient aspect. I'm just talking about pure data. 10 seconds of the average dream I have at night contains more data than all those harvestable digital records combined. 300 MB might be enough to create the most basic recognizable avatar of a person, a digital shell or whatever, but nowhere near a believable simulated sentience. 300 MB might be the brain of a praying mantis or something.
Hopefully the 300 MB silliness will be cleared up in one of the episodes of the series. Maybe they will explain the 300 MB figure as being the estimated total of all digital records of the average person, or something like that...