The Computers of Star Trek by Lois H. Gresh Read Free Book Online Page B

Making one LOC equal to 10 14 bytes.
    Dertouzos estimates that all the information in the world, including all movies, sound recordings, individual data files, government files, corporate databases and so on, is approximately 10,000 LOCs, or 10 18 bytes. This is the same as one kiloquad. Quite a coincidence.
    Jumping three hundred years into the future, we’re informed that the Federation consists of approximately 150 star systems ( First Contact ), with a population of less than one trillion beings (“The Last Outpost,” TNG , and other episodes). Assuming that a number of those star systems have more than one inhabited planet, there might be 250 total worlds in the Federation, with approximately four billion people per world.

    Many of those worlds have much smaller populations. Moreover, many of them began as, or still are, colonies of various space-going races. Still, even if we assume that every planet in the Federation has the same history and population of today’s Earth, the total knowledge of those worlds would be 250 kiloquads. Now, since three hundred years have passed and interstellar exploration has added huge amounts of information to our knowledge of the universe, let’s multiply that information by 1,000. Giving us a universal library of 1,000 * 250 kiloquads (which is the same as 2.5 x 10 23 bytes).
    Each isolinear optical storage chip contains 2.15 kiloquads. Now, 250 kiloquads divided by 2.15 kiloquads per chip yields 116 chips. And then, multiplying by 1,000, we get a total of 116,000 chips required to store the universal library. Fortunately, each redundant computer core of the Enterprise contains over 290,000 chips, a more than ample amount.
    Of course, if the ship’s computer is in constant contact with other Federation computers, there would be no need to store all information in the known universe. In our world today, someone wanting a dose of Brazilian music need only hop onto the Internet, search for Brazilian music, and launch an audio player. There’s no need to store Brazilian music on your PC. Why can’t people do this sort of thing on Star Trek ? If Picard can talk to another starship captain with realtime visual and audio clarity, why can’t he listen to a concerto that’s stored on another starship?
    We need to mention that in the Voyager episode “Twisted,” the ship contacts a strange being that exists as a spacial distortion. After some unusual plot turns, the creature exchanges information with the ship’s library. We’re told that the entity has written twenty million gigaquads of information into the ship’s computer.
    Here we go again. What the heck is a gigaquad? And how much information is in twenty million of them? Does this episode make sense?

    First, giga means 10 9 , and we remember that a quad is a quadrillion, 10 15 bytes. So one gigaquad is 10 9 x 10 15 bytes, or 10 24 bytes. Twenty-million gigaquads means that we have (2 * 10 7 ) (10 24 bytes). We’re in the neighborhood of 2 x 10 31 bytes of information. That’s more than the 2.5 x 10 23 bytes available in the ship’s library. Remember that 116,000 of the available 290,000 chips are used to store the ship’s library. But even if we store two entire libraries in 232,000 chips, the Voyager computer wouldn’t come close to having 2* 10 31 bytes of information. There’s no way that the entity can write to more storage space than Voyager has. It would take roughly ten million Voyagers to store twenty-million gigaquads.
    Since we’re discussing information, we ought to mention that despite a communications system that somehow works instantly between star systems (impossible by all known physical laws, even on Star Trek ) it’s still inconceivable to expect the database and memory files of one starship to be redundant—that is, exactly identical and always up to date—with that of another ship. Or with all the ships in