Re: FTL COMMUNICATIONS

If the technology to read protein chains becomes a million time faster,
it will still take almost a minute to read the human genome.  However, a
cubic array of 10km spools of optical fibres(thirty on each side),
formed in a ring (interspersed with 300 repeaters) is not overly large
(fits inside a cube ten metres on each side, albeit much larger than one
cm^3), but will not only store 5*10^12 bytes within the next five years
(2*10^11 bytes, a few months ago), but has a transfer rate equal to its
entire capacity in one second (plus repeater delays).  If you have
multiple taps on the fibre coil, the transfer rates get even better
(with a thousand taps, it becomes a really big hard drive
that spins at 36,000rpm that manages to store all of the data in one
cylinder).  Bizarre materials that have obscenely high indices of
refraction (light is really slow) allow for space savings (recent
experiments have have produced materials where light travels at less
than 100 metres a second), so that light-second of fibre may not be
3*10^8 metres long, after all.

The really neat thing is that you can read to/write from this storage at
full data transmission rates.

B Lin wrote:

> That's using today's technology.  In the future there may be lasers
tha read the major and minor groove of DNA, kinda like reading pits on a
CD.

Lasers with that level of resolution are not guaranteed to correctly
read on the first pass and the molecule will be destroyed by the first
scan.  Even if the wavelengths are not so short that the molecule is
obliterated (we are talking about X-rays), lining up the molecule with
the beam is problematic.

>  Or Nanomachines that encircle the DNA and run up and down it like a
read head, measuring the charge on each base pair as it passes by.  At
that scale, you might be able to fit thousands of read heads per strand.

This moves the problem up one rung.  Now we have to interface the
nanomachines with a computer, and they do not have the excess power to
directly drive an input.  There is also the problem of writing the
memory.

> The statement below is kinda like a 19th century inventor trying to
imagine a flying machine

They imagined a kite with an engine to supply forward motion to replace
the wind-- and they were right!

> - you could make one, but the steam engine powerful enough to drive it
would mean it would never get off the ground.  There will be leaps in
bounds in technology that will allow stuff to happen, what they are is
anyone's guess right now.
>
> --Binhan
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Richard and Emily Bell [mailto:rlbell@sympatico.ca]
> > Sent: Tuesday, February 26, 2002 4:45 PM
> > To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
> > Subject: Re: FTL COMMUNICATIONS
> >
> >
> >
> > The access times are a real bitch, though.	The human genome
> > project took some time, even with a warehouse full of the
> > fastest available sequencers.  If you cannot read it
> > electronically, it takes too damn long.  You also have the
> > problem that you have to copy it millions of times and chop
> > it into bits to read it.
> >