As one part of a discussion here started veering slightly off-topic, I decided to create a new thread to attempt to discuss the subject matter more in-depth.
In episode "Seizure", Brody quoth the computer terminal: "over 900 terabytes transferred to Destiny's memory."
Since Brody is a scientist, then I can't imagine him erring at units, unless his knowledge of Ancient was lax, which is impossible, because everyone had to learn Ancient to operate the ship.
I still think terabytes is too little, because I believe the size of the human mind to be immense. One of the best estimates here, by Tony Hamm: "1,568,878,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Terabytes, ... In reality it's probably much more." So there.
A link to a 14-years-old essay describing the potential size of a human mind. (methinks the article is grossly outdated already)
I assume Brody only quoted the readout on the screen that may have meant something more specific, or that it was just "over 900 TB" per unit of computer storage, so that Rush's mind was distributed all over Destiny's memory banks (think all the redundancy on Destiny) and the readout was for just one memory bank, or that the readout pertained to just one (holographic) layer of the memory bank, or that the readout was off the charts anyway and that it was conveniently displayed as ">900 TB transferred" (the computer stopped counting after that :-).
So I guess that the "over 900 TB" could have just as well been one small layer of Rush's mind or something. Maybe the ship uses some very advanced compression (layered, I speculate) that is beyound our abilities to understand. Another thought I had was that Rush's mind could have been placed in a way like running a program off a remote X server, whereby the client only sees the UI, interacts with it and saves settings locally, but the plot doesn't quite support this.
There have in past sci-fi entertainment been errors of judgement as to the size of how much a human brain (or an artificial intelligence comparable to a human mind) can store, see these (funny) four IMDb (specific: Brain's actual capacity, gets more specific as you keep on reading) threads (reminiscing) on Johnny Mnemonic over at IMDb. At the time it was thought that one particular snapshot of memories was like 320 gigabytes in size (or was it the overall average storage capacity of a person's brain??).
The first thread mentions Raymond Kurtzweil, who wrote in "The Singularity is Near" (p.126, link only to Wikipedia article) that a human being's capacity for functional memory could be like 1.25 terabytes (10 terabits), which I think is too little. Then I read about Stuart Hameroff. And holonomic brain theory is even more interesting.
And in Knight Rider, K.I.T.T. AI's (CPU?) capacity was said to have been what nowadays is a ridiculous amount. Later the capacity was retconned to be unlimited.
In episode "Seizure", Brody quoth the computer terminal: "over 900 terabytes transferred to Destiny's memory."
Since Brody is a scientist, then I can't imagine him erring at units, unless his knowledge of Ancient was lax, which is impossible, because everyone had to learn Ancient to operate the ship.
I still think terabytes is too little, because I believe the size of the human mind to be immense. One of the best estimates here, by Tony Hamm: "1,568,878,360,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Terabytes, ... In reality it's probably much more." So there.
A link to a 14-years-old essay describing the potential size of a human mind. (methinks the article is grossly outdated already)
I assume Brody only quoted the readout on the screen that may have meant something more specific, or that it was just "over 900 TB" per unit of computer storage, so that Rush's mind was distributed all over Destiny's memory banks (think all the redundancy on Destiny) and the readout was for just one memory bank, or that the readout pertained to just one (holographic) layer of the memory bank, or that the readout was off the charts anyway and that it was conveniently displayed as ">900 TB transferred" (the computer stopped counting after that :-).
So I guess that the "over 900 TB" could have just as well been one small layer of Rush's mind or something. Maybe the ship uses some very advanced compression (layered, I speculate) that is beyound our abilities to understand. Another thought I had was that Rush's mind could have been placed in a way like running a program off a remote X server, whereby the client only sees the UI, interacts with it and saves settings locally, but the plot doesn't quite support this.
There have in past sci-fi entertainment been errors of judgement as to the size of how much a human brain (or an artificial intelligence comparable to a human mind) can store, see these (funny) four IMDb (specific: Brain's actual capacity, gets more specific as you keep on reading) threads (reminiscing) on Johnny Mnemonic over at IMDb. At the time it was thought that one particular snapshot of memories was like 320 gigabytes in size (or was it the overall average storage capacity of a person's brain??).
The first thread mentions Raymond Kurtzweil, who wrote in "The Singularity is Near" (p.126, link only to Wikipedia article) that a human being's capacity for functional memory could be like 1.25 terabytes (10 terabits), which I think is too little. Then I read about Stuart Hameroff. And holonomic brain theory is even more interesting.
And in Knight Rider, K.I.T.T. AI's (CPU?) capacity was said to have been what nowadays is a ridiculous amount. Later the capacity was retconned to be unlimited.
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