ED-209 – Definitely a killer robot! Get it???
This post has very little (if anything) to do with computer forensics, but who cares – I think it’s cool.
The Epiphany
The other night I had a deep thought. This event was rare enough for me that it kept me up until late in the night. The thought was this: it occurred to me that DNA, the code responsible for all known life, is made up of only four “values” – A, T, C and G. Digital information, as we all know, is made up of only two values – 0’s and 1’s (a.k.a., binary).
DNA vs. Binary
I thought about this in the context of the premise that computers might one day become “intelligent”, destroy mankind and take over the world.
Really?! I mean seriously, they want to take over OUR world?!? That doesn’t seem very intelligent, but whatever.
“Would you like to biggie-size that value meal?”
I digress.
The ‘Killer Robot’ theme has been explored for decades by more scientists and science fiction authors than you can fit into an Isaac Asimov symposium or a Trekkie convention.
Trekkies
Clearly, humanity finds this topic and the issues it raises particularly interesting (BTW: in case you didn’t catch it, that was my justification for this blog post).
Anyway, lying there in my bed, it occurred to me that, compared to binary information, DNA is an incredibly efficient system for storing information. Assuming all the other technical problems could be solved, I wondered if it would be physically possible to build a computer (robot…whatever) capable of carrying the same complexity as a living organism in terms of DNA.
Then, mercifully, an old episode of Hogan’s Heroes came on and I fell asleep.
But a couple of days later I started thinking about my deep thought again and decided to try and run the numbers. I admit I’m no Alfred Einstein, but here’s what I came up with:
Big Gloves and Big Shoes
Let’s say we want to build a single robot that is as complex as a human. Apparently the human genome contains about 750 megabytes of data. Not bad – that seems like a manageable number, right?
But wait! Copies of our DNA are contained in every cell in our body. Well, that’s not technically EXACTLY correct. There are some cells that don’t have DNA, but I’m a computer geek, not some kind of brain scientist, so we’ll go with one copy of DNA per cell in the typical human body.
So, how many cells are in a human body? Estimates range from 10 trillion to 100 trillion, but most are in the range of 50-100 trillion. We’ll stay on the conservative side and use 50 trillion.
So, 50 trillion cells. 750 megabytes of data in each cell. That comes out to…
39,321,600,000,000,000,000,000 bytes
Whoa, that’s a lot. Let’s try knocking that down to terabytes. That would be equal to…
35,762,786,865 terabytes
Hrmmmm…that’s…still a lot.
Well, the largest hard drive sold these days is a 2 TB drive, so to hold that much data we would need…
17,881,393,433 2TB hard drives
No problem – hard drives are cheap these days. Plus we can probably get a volume discount.
A Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB SATA drive has the following physical specs:
Height: 1.028 inches
Length: 5.787 inches
Width: 4 inches
Weight: 1.66 pounds
So, 17,881,393,433 hard drives would have a weight of 14,841,557 tons and would take up 408,763,677 cubic feet of space. That’s a weight equal to 41 Empire State Buildings and a volume equal to 4 ½ Great Pyramids of Giza.
How Many Daltons in a Picogram?!?
Now I’m no rocket surgeon, but that seems a little unwieldy to say the least, and all that just to hold the DNA. We haven’t even started making laser eyes or machine gun arms or rocket legs or any of that stuff yet. So now consider this: all the DNA in your body probably adds up to less than a pound, maybe less than half a pound – a very small percentage of the average adult’s total weight. So with 41 Empire State Buildings just for the DNA, we’re barely getting started. Wow, this is going to be one seriously big robot. Where would a robot that big even sit down?!?!?
Anywhere it wants!!!! [buh-dump-bump]
E. Coli bacteria – the most common species of bacteria. That’s comforting, huh?
Finally, one last thing to consider: we have bacteria that live in our body (many that are actually useful to the human host). In fact, we have LOTS of bacteria in our body. Scientists have determined that the number of bacteria living inside a human body outnumbers our own cells by 10-20 times! And each one of those little bacteria has its own set of DNA!
Deep, huh? Now you see why I was up all night!