That's 35 bits per electron...

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2009/january28/small-012809.html

That means that something weighing the same as a current flash memory chip could contain information on the order of 10's of exabytes- depending on how many electrons per atom you could realistically use to store information.

Nevermind that the apparatus for reading and writing to it- including LN2 cooling and power supplies- would fill someone's entire cubicle. Still, even though it would be the world's biggest drive, it would also be able to hold all human created information accumulated thus far. One of these drives would even be enough to hold the complete and non-compressed genetic sequences of every person living today- a silly proposition since our sequences are 99% similar and could be highly efficiently compressed or reduced anyways.

With this and the recent succesful quantum teleporation of information over 1 m distance ([link]http:// http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/40133/title/Quantum_information_teleported_between_distant_atoms[/link]) I wonder how long it will be before we are actually storing information in some type of quantum memory system. The quantum teleportation experiment does have implications for quantum communications, but being able to move quantum information from atom to atom without destroying it is also a fundamental requirement in most any quantum memory or processing system.

So what do you think- 40 years and the largest governments and companies will have their own 40 exabyte storage systems?

1/30/2009 1:27:54 AM

It works 1 out of a 100 million attempts? Sounds like an area Microsoft should invest in!

1/30/2009 1:43:34 AM

^ Well I think they do donate a lot of money to Stanford... so I guess you called that one.

1/30/2009 2:27:14 AM

So you could fit all the porn ever put on the internet into a flashdrive the size of my dick.

Me rhycky!

1/30/2009 8:23:41 AM

you just admitted to having a micropenis!

1/30/2009 8:43:01 AM

lol, beat me to it

1/30/2009 8:50:51 AM