Kinda adds new dimension to the tech term "fat pipe", no? :] ] The human genome is about 3,120,000,000 base pairs long, ] so half of that is in each spermatozoa -- 1,560,000,000 ] base pairs. ] ] Each side of these base pairs can either be an ] adenine-thymine or a guanine-cytosine bond, and they can ] be aligned either direction, so there are four choices. ] Four possibilities for a value means it can be fully ] represented with two bits; 00 = guanine, 01 = cytosine, ] and so forth. ] ] The figures that I've read state the number of sperm in a ] human ejaculation to be anywhere from 50 to 500 million. ] I'm going to go with the number 200,000,000 sperm cells, ] but if anyone knows differently, please tell me. ] ] Putting these together, the average amount of information ] per ejaculation is 1.560*109 * 2 bits * 2.00*108, which ] comes out to be 6.24*1017 bits. That's about 78,000 ] terabytes of data! As a basis of comparison, were the ] entire text content of the Library of Congress to be ] scanned and stored, it would only take up about 20 ] terabytes. If you figure that a male orgasm lasts five ] seconds, you get a transmission rate of 15,600 tb/s. In ] comparison, an OC-96 line (like the ones that make up ] much of the backbone of the internet) can move .005 tb/s. ] Cable modems generally transmit somewhere around 1/5000th ] of that. ] ] If you consider signal to noise, though, the figures come out ] much differently. If only the single sperm cell that fertilizes ] the egg counts as signal, you get (1.560*109 * 2 bits) / 5 s = ] 6.24*108 bits/s, or somewhere in the neighborhood of 78 Mb/s. ] Still a great deal more bandwidth than your average cable modem, ] but not nearly the 5,000,000 Mb/s of the OC-96. Penises have higher bandwidth than cable modems |