How Much Data is in a Cell?- Post Thanksgiving Fun

by Bradley Miller on December 1, 2009

{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

Garrett December 16, 2009 at 3:32 pm

Holy crap! Awesome.

Lidiya December 28, 2009 at 5:40 pm

Hmmm…Never thought of it, but seems reasonable; although I have to admit that the other 10 trillion cells are just repetitive copies of a single cell. This does bring the total amount of GB data stored in the human body down.

Amazing website also…I have been forwarded to it from the forbes.com blog and like it a lot. Hope to visit it regularly also.

Bradley Miller December 29, 2009 at 6:32 pm

Lidiya – interesting opinions and thanks for visiting! I kinda understand what you mean about the 10 trillion other cells, but I’m wondering why you think that makes it all that less impressive. My bet is that we’re going to find out that the dna content in our cells aren’t all the 100% same. Through mutations and epigenetic changes that ‘same’ code can be interpreted much differently.

parascientifica.com June 20, 2010 at 12:45 pm

You can calculate how much data is stored in a given amount of Kg of Human tissue here: http://parascientifica.com/humandata.php

The amount of data in one Kg is:
Data in exabytes = 868

To give you an idea, this is equal to:
273,066,666,666,667 mp3’s,
198,581,560,284 dvd’s and
37,333,333,333 Blu-ray disks!

alexis sullivan September 29, 2011 at 12:48 pm

wow i would never of thought that 10 trillion cells are in a single cell omg !!!!!!

fiona February 23, 2013 at 3:44 pm

Thats just mind-boggling! Why and how could it assemble itself ? Even if it assembled itself slowly, how would it know what was and wasnt a mistake ? It makes me have to believe in God.. thats just awesome!

Brian K. Daniels January 5, 2014 at 9:39 pm

Assuming that the minimum amount of information to define a fully grown body is less than that in the single cell from which it originated we can conclude that once the technology for diss-assembly and re-construction is developed a capsule for low energy rapid “pseudo” teleportation could be much smaller than the nucleus of a human cell. Especially since the chromosomes are 2/3 protein and only 1/3 DNA.

Conundrum September 3, 2017 at 3:31 am

Actually human teleportation is possible without dis/reassembly using transdimensional technology. The tricky part is choosing when and where to send the information, given that both start and end point are in motion.

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