Apr 7, 2009 12:20 PM
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Wed Feb 10
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You want to back up your brain and upload it to a cylon body, just the way they will in Battlestar Galactica spinoff Caprica. Luckily, brains in the Caprica universe are pretty small. Spoilers!
Here's a bit of the Caprica script, capturing a dialogue between Joseph Adama (Admiral Adama's dad) and Daniel Graystone (inventor of the cylons) which was recently posted in the Syfy forums:
INT. GRAYSTONE ESTATE - NIGHT
Joesph is sitting at a work table while Daniel carefully takes a SMALL ELECTRONIC DEVICE out of a durable, shock-proof case. He's treating the device like it's extremely fragile.
DANIEL
Gotta hand it to Vergis... it's an elegant design. Fortunately, it's close enough to our preliminary work that it shouldn't be too hard for Cyrus to construct a convincing paper trail...He barely breathes as he carries the MCP and sets it into a small CRADLE on the table. Then he seals it behind a GLASS CASE. Once it's sealed, Daniel lets out a long breath. Joseph is unmoved.
DANIEL
You know this has more raw computing power than the three supercomputers at Apollo university combined?JOSEPH
(flat) Does it work?DANIEL
I won't know that until I try to put it into a robotic body and try to download Zoe-A into it.JOSEPH
How long?DANIEL
Couple days. Got a surprise for you, though.Daniel gestures to the FLASH stick over on the work bench, where it's enmeshed in a maze of circuitry and connections.
DANIEL
Tamara-A is ready to go.JOSEPH
What.....?DANIEL
I used Zoe's original avatar program to search and download any data on Tamara Adams — school records, medical, DNA — well, you've heard the list. About 300 megabytes worth.JOSEPH
(shocked) You mean... she's... in there?DANIEL
(barely hearing him)
You know, the more I work with Zoe's code, the more I realize she was nothing short of a computer genius... can't believe I never noticed...JOSEPH
I want to see her.He gestures to a Holoband.
DANIEL
I thought you would. Go through the yellow door.Joseph looks over at the Holoband like it suddenly turned into a snake that might bite him. He gingerly picks it up and puts it on...
After this, we see that Daniel has created an entire human personality out of that 300 mb of data. So basically what that means is an entire human consciousness can fit into 300 megabytes. (Also, apparently, it can be cobbled together out of Google searches and DNA information.) So the real question is, what does this say about how easy it would be to carry around a human brain or two in your pocket?
Just to give you some perspective, you can easily buy a 1 gigabyte USB drive for under $25. A gigabyte is 1000 megabytes, so that means you've got three brains right there. Now consider this: A sweet little external hard drive can give you an entire terabyte of memory for about $150 bucks. That's 1000 gigabytes, and roughly 3333 human brains. So for $150 bucks, you could store 3333 people's brains in your backpack. Nice!
Also, consider this: A typical 3-minute song takes up about 5 megabytes of space. So that means your brain, according to Caprica, can hold about 60 songs. You are therefore suckier than almost every iPod in the universe.
Send an email to Annalee Newitz, the author of this post, at annalee@io9.com.
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
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