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How much data to record atoms?
I am writing a SCI-FI novel and I would like to know if it was be possible to understand how many atoms there are if you were able to count them 1 atom at a time through specific section of the earth (including the atmosphere)
What I mean is if you were able to bore a hole (the size of an atom) in the Earth from one pole to the other how many atoms where there be. Is there a formula to work this out?
I would then like to calculate the amount of computer data required to store the position and type of each atom encountered.
I know this is probably the weirdest question ever on Yahoo Answers.
Wow! I didn't really expect someone to answer but that is fantastic. Thanks very much for the info.
Now I have to muliply this data by the number of microseconds for the last 2,500,000 years. :)
1 Answer
- billrussell42Lv 71 decade agoFavorite Answer
The diameter of an atom varies. Most of the earth is iron, which has a diameter of about 250 pm (from wikipedia).
Diameter of earth is 6,400,000 m
divide the two and you get 6.4e6 / 0.25e-15, for a total of about 25e21 atoms, ignoring changes with density, etc.
"amount of computer data required to store the position and type of each atom encountered"
Depends on how accurately you want to store the info. If you use 4 bytes for each of 3 coordinates, and 1 byte for type, that's 13 bytes per atom
so you need 13 x 25e21 bytes or 3e23 bytes, a huge amount of data.
BUT, the position from one atom to the next varies very little, so all you really need is 3 bytes of position and 1 of type, so now we have 4 x 25e21 or 1e23
But again, most of this data is redundant. Depending on why you want the data (and don't forget the positions will change rapidly, so your data will be out of date in a fraction of a second) you could probably reduce this by a factor of 1000 with data compression. So now we have 1e20 bytes, still a huge number, 100,000,000 Terabytes. But there are plenty of Terabyte disks around, so this is doable.
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