[bobdsmith]

I doubt that it's possible to store the complete design for a human being in 12 gigabytes of data The entire human genome can be stored in three gigabytes, and a lot of that is redundant and there is no compression involved. So I reckon it would be quite possible to store the complete design for a human being in less than 1 gigabyte.

[defenderSD]

"So I reckon it would be quite possible to store the complete design for a human being in less than 1 gigabyte."

You have no idea what you're talking about. There are 15 billion brain cells in the human brain, all with specific connections to hundreds or thousands of other brain cells. (If they're not connected correctly you can end up with a disfunctional schirzophrenic person.) I'll esimate very low and say that it takes 1 kb of data to store the correct connections for each cell. That's 15 gigabytes of data required just to store information on how brain cells connect to each other, not to mention the design of the brain cells themselves.

[defenderSD]

My calculation was incorrect. IIRC, a gigabyte is a billion bytes. So at 1 kb per brain cell you would need 15,000 gigabytes of data just to store all the connections between brain cells. If you could compress this data down to 100 bytes per cell through some kind of algorithm, then you'd need 1,500 gigabytes of data to store brain cell connections.