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What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest? (lemmy.world)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

53 comments fedilink hide all child comments

we need teleportation frankly

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

... if we could figure out scanning and printing at the atomic scale, with zero defects

I think this is a bigger issue currently than sending large amounts of data across the globe. Though I wonder how much data a full copy would demand.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (2 children)

You just made me curious and we're not alone in wondering

To have a scanner that can record the position of every atom in the body to an accuracy of the order of the size of a hydrogen atom would require position accuracy of about 10-10 meters. To get that accuracy over a distance of order 1 meter, this would require 30 decimal digits, which would be about 100 binary digits per atom. However, there would be a lot of redundancy in this data, so let’s be optimistic and assume you could compress this down to 1 bit per atom, so we still need approximately 1027 bits of data to just specify the positions of all the atoms in a human body. According to Wikipedia (Exabyte), the approximate data storage capacity of all the computers and storage devices in the world today is roughly 1 zettabyte = 1021 bytes = 1022 bits. Therefore, the data for the scan of one human would require at least 10,000 times the total storage of all the data stored on Earth right now.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/05/is-teleportation-possible.html

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I was getting incredibly confused because the copy/paste didn't copy the superscript for the exponents. I was like, "there's definitely more than 1027 atoms in the body.. wait, how are there supposedly only 1021 bytes of storage in the whole world? Oooh.."

[–] [email protected] 0 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Now I'm wondering how long it would realistically take for that to become a not-insane demand. I know data storage multiplies pretty rapidly, but not that rapidly, so are we talking decades or centuries?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 10 months ago

Apparently we can already do it, a gram of dna can store 215 petabytes and we can encode to dna at 18Mbps.

Gonna be a long upload.