Hi SDF

My favourite SF writer, Greg Egan, has the human brain replaced by the near-indestructible N'doli device or Jewel, which emulates the brain and replaces it neurone by neurone - you never notice the transition from 'fatware' to 'Jewelware'.

But conversely how many lifetimes can you pack into 1400 cc of the new storage system? That's 14,000,000 years of video. Perhaps with fractal compression instantaneous 'snapshots' of brain-states might be similar in size to video-files? I don't know. Perhaps a lot bigger though just how much is redundant and network noise is currently an open question. An adult man has 30 billion neurones with about 10,000 synaptic connections each. If 10% is active per cycle (100 hz?) then we're processing at about 30 trillion bits per cycle, or about 3 quadrillion bits per second. However a lot will be physiological and muscle related stuff we probably don't generate long-term memories for - it's already hardwired. We're said to learn about 100 bits/second which would be easy to store, but 30 gigabytes of memories for a 3 billion second lifetime seems kind of short-changed. The ideal will be somewhere between the two, so maybe video-file size will be enough?

Adam