OgreMkV
Posts: 3668 Joined: Oct. 2009
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I've been reading a series of books (Star Carrier by Ian Douglas aka Keith Williams Jr (the bastard) if you must know).
In this series nano-technology is a mature tech with the ability to replicate food, building materials, even complete star fighters given time and raw materials.
This actually makes one wonder, what would the information content of a peanut butter sandwich be? I mean, to build a peanut butter sandwich from raw material (without the intervening steps of growing wheat and peanuts and cows, etc, etc, etc) you need to have a complete molecular description of the entire sandwhich... so how much information would that take?
We're talking the location of every atom, molecule, and ion in a 15cmx15cmx4cm structure.
If we assume that the entire structure is water at 4C. That's 900ml, which masses about 900grams. (Yes, much heavier than a PB sandwhich, but the sandwhich is also much more complex than a glass of water.)
900g divided by 18g = 50 mols of water
50 times 6.02X10^23 = 3 x 10^25 molecules of water
If one byte is required for each molecule... and I can easily see it taking more than that. You need the location of the molecule in 3 axes. Hmmm... do you need orientation? hydrogen bonds with which other molecules?
Anyway, 1 byte for each of 3 x 10^25 molecules. Well, that results in 300,000,000,000,000 terabytes of information in a PB sandwhich (and I maintain that this is on the very low side).
I'll have to think about compression. Obviously many of the molecules in a PB sandwich are the same... and many of the molecules actual location may not matter, provided that they are homogeneously mixed and in a specific ratio. So, the formula for peanut butter is just make 1 x, then 2 y, then 1 z, then 1 x... repeat for v volume of peanut butter requested. Yes, that's much better.
Joe, that's a really good question. How do you deal with compression in Intelligent Design?
Good grief what am I saying? Joe doesn't know dog turds about information, compression, or Intelligent Design. He's still fuming because he can't find an answer to my simple question. You know that if he actually had an example of design being detected using Demsbki's... ahh... work, they would all be screaming about it every second of the day.
Oh well... I think I actually have some work today. back to the salt mines.
-------------- Ignored by those who can't provide evidence for their claims.
http://skepticink.com/smilodo....retreat
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