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Be kind to your elders
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2025
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When I was a kid, Commander Data from Star Trek TNG was the height of technological possibility. TNG was set in the 2300s.
It looks like hard drives are selling for about 20 bucks a terabyte now. Commander Data had a storage capacity of 100 petabytes.
So today, to buy hard drives equivalent to the capacity Commander Data would cost about $2 million. You would have to be very wealthy to afford that as an individual, but the cost will only get lower. It will still be quite awhile before a random laptop will have a Commander Data's worth of storage space. But you're talking decades, not centuries.
Though, this calculation is for the Data that appeared in the original TNG run. His more recent appearance in Star Trek Picard may be different, as his specifications there may canonically differ.
This calculation was only meant to detail the capacity of the original Commander Data, not the more recent Big Data.
I like to re-read my favorite science fiction classics and giggle at the author's mistakes.
In "The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress" a self-aware computer struggles over creating a CGI face for him/herself. Also, iirc, the computer uses tape.
William Gibson has done essays about how much he got wrong in 'Neuromancer," but my personal favorite is the spaceship pilot who never heard of a computer virus.
My favorites are in Asimov. In the Foundation series, one product the traders sell is a nuclear powered ash tray. They employ advanced nuclear plasma manipulation to...quickly atomize cigarette butts.
Or the time there's this couple. They are traveling to another planet, and they get aboard their personal interstellar spaceship. The society is advanced enough, that that is just something you can own.
What happens as soon as they get onboard their personal FTL interstellar ship? The husband commands his wife to get dinner started.
You have a powerful computer you use to look at cat memes.
I hate to be brutal, but you forced me to take extreme measures
jk
To me, the storage isn't the impressive part; it's the logic, "thinking", fine motor control, etc.
For what it’s worth, the capacity of Commander data did very a little bit during the show, but I just chalked that up to a few upgrades.
Besides, I think it’s important to mention that data was not built for storage capacity. He only had as much storage capacity as he realistically would need during his lifetime. Until he could get an upgrade, I suppose.
JESUS HAYTCH CHRIST. I'm watching TNG with my daughter at the moment. Did you have to do me that dirty?
Still, given modern video compression algorithms it's a solid 93,000,000 hours of video recording at 1GB per hour at decent quality and surely that's only going to get better with time.
Approx 10,000 years
Nitpick, I do believe just like the storage for the actual computer in the ship (isolinear optical at first then more complex in TNG), positronic brain storage is not one to one comparable to what we use. Or rather, a bit may be the same (again, maybe not, I don't think it's binary) but how it's used is a lot different than our slow versions.