What's A Human In Gigabytes?

What's A Human In Gigabytes?

The human genetic code is an incredible thing, it's a building block that exists in every cell in our bodies, it's fantastically complex. With that in mind, surely it'd be almost impossible to quantify the amount of data it'd take to make a human being?

Not so much. Turns out a human being's entire genetic code take up just 1.5GB. Not bad considering the game Watch Dogs was over 40GB in size.

It's from here that things start to get a little mind-blowing because actually, that 1.5GB counts for just one copy of the code, in fact your body has a copy in every single cell in your body, all 40 trillion of them.

The result of that is a cool 60 zettabytes.

To give you some idea of just how big a number that is, by 2020 all of the digital information in the world will amount to around 40 zettabytes.

Your body contains more data in it than every single line of code in the world, and it'll continue to do so for many years.

How do you get this figure? Well you can thank the science blog Veritasium which used some serious maths to calculate the exact amount in data it'd take to store a human's genetic code.

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