The Perfect Code

We've created some pretty clever ways to store things.  Let's consider information storage.  It's not uncommon to see hard drives that can store a terabyte or more.  A terabyte is over 1 TRILLION bytes.  And we can fit that all into a drive that fits in the palm of your hand.  So does that mean that we are efficient at storing information?  Well, let's compare it to a form of information storage that is already in the palm of your hand - over 3 billion times.

DNA is an incredible form of information storage.  A long chain of molecular "bytes" that fits inside of the nucleus of a microscopic cell.  It stores enough information to make an entire human being - every mark and feature; every cell on and in your body as well as every facet of your mind, intelligence, and personality.  A human being is incomprehensibly complex.  And yet the information to make one is stored in a structure so small we need an atomic-force microscope to view it in detail.  But even more than its small size, what is really astounding about DNA is its efficiency.

Human DNA has about 3 billion base pairs.  There are four possible base pair combinations.  We need two bits to get four different possible combinations, so 1 base pair = 2 bits.  Hence, one byte (8 bits) is equal to four base pairs.  So if we do the math, human DNA with its 3 billion base pairs would have
3,000,000,000 base pairs / 4 base pairs per byte = 750,000,000 bytes.

750 million bytes is equal to 0.698 gigabytes, or only .000682 terabytes.  So you could fit all the genetic code of 1.5 thousand different people onto your 1T hard drive!

Compare that to storing movies on your hard drive.  A two-hour movie is about 5.33 gigabytes.  So on your 1T hard drive you could store a mere 187 movies.  If you thought that our man-made information storage is efficient, think again.  Human engineering makes movies that are 10 times bigger than your entire genome - talk about inefficient!

Seeing how impossibly perfect our genetic code is makes me wonder why our man-made encoding is so inefficient. It would seem that as good as our best programmers and engineers are, they're still not the best out there.