Just out of curoisity, how many bits would it take to include all the people that have ever lived? Also, how many to realistically cover the the future?
According to… http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=how+many+people+have+li... http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=106+billion+in+binary
37 bits
However, 33 bits is a simplification. You can express 8.5 billion different values with 33 bits, but unless those 33 values map to well-distributed discriminators, the number is meaningless...
For instance, knowing that a person lives in the US reveals a little under 5 bits of information (there are a little over 2^28 people living in the US, according to Google). The entropy is just a measure of the amount of information that gives us in narrowing down a population; not an exact encoding.
*Edit - s/science/theory/i
People have been disputing how many people have ever lived on the earth for decades. Some anthropologists have thrown out numbers as high as 70billion-120billion, although other scientists have admittedly said the number is probably around 7-10B.
How many people to calculate how many people have ever lived?
That's just a log2( X ) number of bits would be needed. As the author of the blog says, 6000 billion people could be written in just 43 bits.
An interesting debate, regardless. I had no idea it could be so hard to calculate. At any rate, as you say, 43 bits would have humanity covered for a long, long time.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Number_of_huma...