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Comment by barking | Hacker News Reader

Very thought provoking. The file size is 1.93 MB. I wonder what dimensions would a disk just big enough to store that much have? Not long ago I read of a suggestion to archive information as DNA (for its durability iirc). But in terms of physical space required to store stuff, is DNA more or less efficient than today's disks?

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A good question. Here are the answers from a HN comment thread couple of months ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17422950

There are 512 GB micro SD cards on the market today. So at that density roughly:

2 MB / 512 GB * 100 mm2 ~= 400 um2

400 square micrometers is an area of a square with 20 micrometer sides. Approx. 1/100th of the cross-section of a human hair.

Shakespeare: "Alas! Mine own quill is too bawbling f'r mine own parchment"

Thanks, I like that comparison. Now I wish I could think of a way to mesh this with the infinite monkey theorem!

So Borges' Library of Babel -- every possible 3200 character book from a 25-character alphabet; essentially the 'space' equivalent of the infinite monkey theorem's 'time' domain -- is sufficiently large that if we took this universe and shrunk it down to the Planck length (the smallest length there is) and filled another universe with these femtouniverses, and then scaled that one down likewise, and repeated this process EIGHTY times, we'd be able to fit all the books in.

And Hamlet would be split amongst dozens of these books.

25^3200 is a large number.

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