Date: Thu, 11 Dec 1997 09:05:10 -0600 From: Jonathan Lemon <jlemon@americantv.com> To: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> Cc: "J. Weatherbee - Senior Systems Architect" <jamil@acroal.com>, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: This IS relevant, you'll realize why later. Message-ID: <19971211090510.50776@right.PCS> In-Reply-To: <199712111244.HAA03778@dyson.iquest.net>; from John S. Dyson on Dec 12, 1997 at 07:44:13AM -0500 References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.971211001823.29711A-100000@acroal.com> <199712111244.HAA03778@dyson.iquest.net>
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On Dec 12, 1997 at 07:44:13AM -0500, John S. Dyson wrote: > J. Weatherbee - Senior Systems Architect said: > > > > Does anyone have any numbers for the sum total amount of information > > existing in the universe? I would guess the appropriate way to tablulate > > this would be to take the total ammount of matter in the form of subatomic > > particles, and energy is photons and account for their position in three > > coordinates and velocity vector. I'm certainly no physicist, but from > > what I've read there are *NO* numbers for the ammount of matter in the > > universe just percentage approximations. My guess is that you could > > account for > > this all in less than 2^1000 bits = 10^300, what this essentially means to > > me is that it would be impractical to build a machine with a word size > > expressed with more that 1024 bits (the expression of the word size, not > > the wordsize itself). > > > I don't think that is big enough. :-). Hmm. One of my professors was claiming that with 128 bits, you would have an address space of 2^128, which would be large enough that you could do away with virtual memory altogether. Just give each piece of data it's own unique address, (ala Multics) and then never relocate it for the lifetime of the system. She pointed out that even the human genome database project is smaller than this. Somehow, I don't quite buy the argument. -- Jonathan
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