A Human Being in GB?

There are some questions that will always plague us. For instance, you've probably lost sleep trying to discover the meaning of life...for others of you, that question might actually put you to sleep. Or what came first, the chicken or the egg? Here's a good one: how many miles do the wheels on your office chair travel in a year?--No...perhaps the biggest question perplexing us today is why don't eyebrows grow quickly, like our head hair does?--not taking into account every girl named Bernice, Bertha, or Olga, in which case her eyebrows seem to keep up with her moustache fairly competitively. I joke, I joke. I once met a really cute girl named Olga...however, the name quashed any feelings.

J: Hey, I'm Josh.

O: Hi, I'm Olga.

J: Oh..darn.

Those questions are good. But they do not perplex me today. On this day, I am most concerned with answering a Lingering Question that occurred to me as I stacked apples many months ago at work:

How many gigabytes is a person?

Some of you might say, "Shut up Josh. Don't you even know what a gigabyte is?"

Calm down. I understand that a gigabyte is just a term used to quantify storage space on a computer (if you didn't know that...now you do).

All I mean is, how many gigabytes would it take to store ALL the information that is necessary to create an identical copy of one person as if they were a file? This is a very abstract question, and the answer (if it is at all possible to draw a conclusion) would not come easy. I mean, you're taking into account the physical aspects including dimensions, tactile values, the networking between various body parts, colours, tastes and smells of the body, the chemical reactions, muscular/skeletal/etc systems, cell processes, ...on and on. But then there's the whole other side of emotions, memory/recognition, and every other brain function --most of which are not yet even known or understood yet..which makes it impossible to quantify.

I'm neither tech savvy enough nor biologically/philosophically/intellectually savvy enough to even fathom a guess...but I'm betting it's ..um...big.  Some scientists claim up to 10 Terabytes can be stored and used in the brain alone. Like a bowl of Rice Krispies with milk, I just snap-crackle-and-popped a few brain cells trying to figure this out.

Oh em gee I could go for some good ol Rice Crispies...mmm..

(Ah there we go..back to regular thinking patterns)

I have a good story about police and scams and your every-day-hero Josh. But that'll have to wait til tomorrow. I've got a date with myself to watch Cast Away. It's just one of those nights.