this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] tetris11@lemmy.ml 26 points 1 week 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 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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 1 week ago (1 children)

So the tally whacker is the fastest telegraph?

[–] stupidcasey@lemmy.world 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 1 week ago (3 children)

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 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] MonkeMischief 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

9 months later:

Wife: (goes into labor)

now playing: E1M1_At_Hell's_Gate.wav 🔊

[–] Collatz_problem@hexbear.net 3 points 1 week ago

Time to run Doom on DNA.

You have a 1.6 petabyte SSD?

[–] Deflated0ne@lemmy.world 9 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] spankmonkey@lemmy.world 7 points 1 week ago

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

[–] propter_hog@hexbear.net 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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

[–] ouRKaoS 2 points 1 week ago

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

[–] over_clox@lemmy.world 5 points 1 week 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 1 week ago
[–] xia@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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

[–] oftheair@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 1 week ago

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

[–] TauZero@mander.xyz 2 points 1 week 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.

[–] kibiz0r@midwest.social 1 points 1 week ago

What’s the data rate on a spworm?