Memory Storage

In 1997 Arthur C. Clarke estimated that 1 petabyte (1000 terabytes) would be enough memory to store all the memories of a human life. It's been 20 years now, was he right? What does user think is enough to store all the memories of a human life?

I heard some quack say the human brain contained 4TB of information a decade ago. They're just pulling numbers out of their ass. It apples to oranges.

Still no mind uploading.

I don't know but let's calculate something. Firstly let's use 70 years as our time frame in which we collect data. Human is basically a bunch of sensors wired together so we can break down data collection to: visual, physical, chemical and acoustical. Starting with eyes which are roughly equivalent to 10 mega pixel cameras each, providing 3D stereo vision. Let's assume that frame rate of eye is ~60 fps and color depth is 24bit. Size of one frame is thus:

10e6 * 3B = 30e6B = 30MB/frame

Multiply that by 2 for stereo vision: 60MB/frame. Let's also apply compression to reduce storage usage. Practical limits shows that we can compress data up to 1:2 ratio so we have 30MB/frame for both eyes if we use lossless compression. In 70 years that amounts to:

30e6B * 60 s^-1 * 31556926 (seconds in year) * 70 Years = 3.9762e+18 = 3.98 EB

So if we assume all memories means documenting every single frame human eye sees numbers don't add up. I don't know if forgetting is accounted for in his theory but it said "all memories". Anyways continuing with audio perception let's model ears as stereo microphones recording at lossless 24-bit audio at 40kHz, each second takes 120KB of storage (also using 1:2 compression):

120e3B/s * 31556926 * 70 = 2.6508e+14B = 0.265 PB

That covers sound, moving on on chemical perception - smell, we need to distinguish between 1 trillion 10^12 different chemical compounds roughly 5B of information, along with intensity which we will assume is 8 bit = 1B. For simplicity we will use 1Hz as smell sampling rate, which I think is plenty fast (when someone farts there is some delay between sound and shit particles hitting your smelling receptors):

6B/s * 31556926 * 70 = 13.25 GB

Which basically amounts to fuck all when compared to visual data. Same holds true for temperature, pressure and touch sensors (there is also some bullshit humans make up from nothing, but we will neglect that). Main source of data is visual information, perhaps some more compression could be applied as humans don't have photographic memory, which means all previous calculations are bullshit.

no

lol. why did you write this shit then?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

I bet it's all very small ephemeral data and it's just procedural.

I don't know. I was bored and had to do something.

You have fewer than a hundred billion neurons. 1 PB would mean over 10 KB per neuron. That seems excessive.
Evolved computational structures often manage to be very efficient with resources because they can afford to be totally incomprehensible. People manage amazing things in submissions to the IOCC or in code golf, but those need to be understood by at least one person, while they're being created. The things your brain does don't need to be understood by anyone because they're shaped blindly. Evolution is not intelligent.
I think that you could store someone's memories in way less than a petabyte by directly translating brain structure. But good luck getting anything useful out of it without running a full simulation.

Sure, he didn't say it had to be uncompressed now did he?