The bandwidth of a spermatozoa

[electricfox]

The human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long; half of that is in each spermatozoa, so that's 1,560,000,000 base pairs.

Each side of these base pairs can either be an adenine-thymine or a guanine-cytosine bond, and they can be aligned either direction, so there are four choices. Four possibilities for a value means it can be fully represented with two bits; 00 = guanine, 01 = cytosine, and so forth.

The number of sperm in the average male human ejaculation can be anywhere from 50 to 500 million. Let's assume around 200,000,000 sperm cells.

Putting these together, the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*109 * 2 bits * 2.00*108, which comes out to be 6.24*1017 bits. That's about 78,000 terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the entire text content of the Library of Congress to be scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. DSL/Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th of that.

[jmbeach]

at first glance, bizarre.

at second glance, very clever...

I can hear men all across the world saying "see, we are the superior ones!"

[admin]

LoL, Yea I thought it was kind of on the edge at first the after reading... Well I am man.. hehe Need to get the word out.. hehe

Wow, talk about data density! IBM, MaXtOr, and Quantum, Westen Digital, Fujitsu, and Samsung all combined with their best efforts can't even beat that data density record.

[Brangwyn]

I just hope Maxtor/Quantum et al don't decide to base their next generation Harddrives on "sperm" rather than mag-optical storage !

[dwhite]

Wow, I can see the next popular pickup line for nerds being "Want to go to my place and do some data dumping?"