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data transfer (mander.xyz)
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[-] tetris11@lemmy.ml 26 points 5 days ago

3 billion nucleotides, but each nucleotide can be one of 4 bases, meaning that it's 6 billion bits of info, or (6e9 / 8) = 750 MB of data.

But if all of the sequence was used for data, then the sperm wouldn't be a sperm. If we keep the 20,000 coding genes making up ~ 2% of the genome, that still leaves us with (750 * 0.98) 735 MB.

But an organism is more than its gene templates, it also has functional regions where things bind and block things and join other things, and we're not entirely sure what percentage of the non-coding regions this is. I'm gonna go with 80%, and that leaves us with (750 * 0.18) = 135MB

Since the sperm cell is haploid data, it has 23 chromosomes instead of the 46 (23 pairs), so it has half the data redundancy of normal DNA. We might also need to add our own error correcting codes which will reduce some of the space. I'm gonna pull a factor of 3.6 out of my ass, and thus (135 / 3.6) - voila - 37.5 MB

[-] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

That's not even true from a data science pov, it's 99.999% redundancy and no error correcting meaning you only transfer 37.5 mb/3hrs or so, with a 0.001% error rate, except that isn't true either because the data never changes throughout your entire life so you technically have. 37.5 mb/80 years I guess this depends on how many different unique clients you are transferring to so I guess you could have somewhere around ~30,000 (made up number) unique transfers so something like a tb a Lifetime so maybe ~450 bits per second?

[-] over_clox@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

So the tally whacker is the fastest telegraph?

[-] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

~~Fastest if you haven't had a Data transfer in the last 3hrs and you already have a second client lined up and ready to connect.~~

Fastest if you think you can get 30,000 unique women to ~~sleep with~~* SEX you.

*There won't be time to sleep

[-] RejZoR@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 days ago

Hey, I can fit that load on my Samsung SSD and still have space to install Doom The Dark Ages. Win win!

[-] over_clox@lemmy.world 6 points 5 days ago

Amateur, just install Doom to the sperm partition like the rest of us.

[-] MonkeMischief@lemmy.today 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

9 months later:

Wife: (goes into labor)

now playing: E1M1_At_Hell's_Gate.wav 🔊

[-] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 3 points 5 days ago

Time to run Doom on DNA.

[-] SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 days ago

You have a 1.6 petabyte SSD?

[-] Deflated0ne@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago

Anyone else remember when a 32mb memory card was a big deal?

[-] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

I remember when 32mb memory sticks were considered a chocking hazard.

[-] propter_hog@hexbear.net 6 points 5 days ago

Probably a lot of repeated data, though. Not very efficient.

[-] ouRKaoS@lemmy.today 2 points 3 days ago

Packet loss is huge as well. Very little data gets saved.

[-] over_clox@lemmy.world 5 points 5 days ago

Well yeah, but that's in RAID, so the data is very redundant and resilient to bad sectors. 👍

[-] oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 days ago
[-] xia@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 4 days ago

If that's half of it, then a "full human" could be defined by an 80mb file?

[-] TauZero@mander.xyz 2 points 4 days ago

The numbers in the meme are off. One sperm is 750MB, or about 1 CD, so full human is 2 CDs. Or a couple 1.4MB floppies if you only store the diff from the reference genome.

[-] oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 4 days ago

Well, no, because we don't know how much information is in an egg cell.

[-] kibiz0r@midwest.social 1 points 4 days ago

What’s the data rate on a spworm?

this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
317 points (98.2% liked)

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