#84 The 150-Terabyte Moment No One Talks About

Every human carries the most advanced backup system on Earth — and it’s not your phone, your cloud account, or anything designed in Silicon Valley. It’s older, denser, more durable, and capable of moving more information in a single moment than most companies store for all their customers combined.

In this episode, we explore the staggering information inside DNA, why one human cell holds hundreds of megabytes of data, and what it means when biology quietly outperforms every digital system we’ve ever built. Featuring insights from Microsoft Research, dry humor, and a few critical-thinking questions that will shift how you think about data altogether.

And if you want to go deeper into the philosophical side of this conversation, check out Episode #80, DNA and the Soul · The Architecture of Continuity. It pairs seamlessly with today’s episode.

Think first… laugh second.

Chapters

• 0:00 The Wildest Storage On Earth
• 2:29 Numbers That Reframe Data
• 5:20 DNA As A Physical Data Medium
• 9:50 Tech Hype Versus Biology’s Scale
• 12:14 The Philosophical Tension: Data And Self
• 17:10 Practical Takeaways And Cultural Framing
• 20:30 Questions To Carry Forward
• 22:47 Closing Reflections And Sign Off

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:00

There's a storage device on this planet that makes your iPhone look like a McDonald's Happy Meal toy. It can survive thousands of years if you treat it right. It stores more information in a space smaller than a grain of sand than most companies will generate in their entire lifetime. It's cheap, self-repairing, runs on breakfast, and builds its own backup copies without asking permission. You don't buy it from Apple. You don't subscribe to it monthly. You don't need a charging cable. In fact, you've been carrying it around your entire life, and if you're a guy, you've disposed of terabytes of it without a second thought during some very private moments. Now, if a tech company built this device, there would be press conferences, keynotes, hype videos with slow-motion shots of aluminum edges and someone whispering revolutionary over a piano track. Instead, biology just shrugs and calls it Tuesday. Let me give you three numbers. 1. Inside a single human sperm cell there are about 3.2 billion base pairs of DNA. 2. Each base pair is like a tiny little 2-bit code. Put it all together, and you've got around 800 megabytes of raw information in one cell. 3. In a typical ejaculation, there are roughly 200 million of those cells. Do the math, and you're looking at around 150 terabytes of data in one go. Not a meme, not a joke. Real boring biological math. That's the equivalent of about 161 terabyte hard drives or 3,000 plus Blu-ray discs or enough 4K movies to betray all your secret taste in cinema. Several times over. And if you zoom out to a lifetime, the average man will produce on the order of 50 to 100 petabytes of genetic information. That's Facebook level, not your cousin's Etsy shop level. All of that in a body that still forgets why it walked into the kitchen. So here's the question I can't shake. If this is what's happening every day in real time, inside ordinary people, what else about information and data and who we are have we been trained not to think too hard about? Today, we're going there. This is Think First, where we don't follow the script. We question it. Because in a world full of poetic truths and professional gaslighting, someone's got to say the quiet part out loud. Now, before we go any further, I want you to hear something, not from me, from one of the people actually building the future of data storage. This is Jake Smith from the Microsoft Research Podcast. And listen carefully, because he's about to describe DNA exactly the way you describe the world's most advanced hard drive.

SPEAKER_01: 3:03

So you mentioned it earlier, Karen, that this really starts from the fundamental data production, data storage gap, where we produce way more data nowadays than we could ever have imagined years ago. And it's more than we can practically store in magnetic media. And this is a problem because we have data. The data that we do produce, our video, has gone from substantially small down at 480 resolution all the way up to things at 8K resolution that now take orders of magnitude more storage. And so we really need a denser medium on the other side to contain that. DNA is extremely dense. It holds far, far more information per unit volume, per unit mass than any storage media that we have available today. This, along with the fact that DNA is itself a relatively rugged molecule. It lives in our body, it lives outside our body for thousands and thousands of years, if we, you know, leave it alone to do its thing.

SPEAKER_02: 4:09

Dense, durable, and thousands of years old. That's not science fiction, that's biology, which brings us back to a single human cell, and the frankly ridiculous amount of information it's carrying. We live in a culture that talks about data like it's always somewhere else, in the cloud, in the algorithm, in someone's server farm in Utah, glowing in the dark like a sci-fi greenhouse. We're told, companies are data driven. AI is hungry for data. Data is the new oil. All very dramatic, all very external. Meanwhile, biology is over here quietly moving around libraries of information inside your body with no press release, no IPO, and no subscription fee. The distortion isn't that tech is lying, they really do handle massive amounts of information. The distortion is scale and importance. We're trained to see petabytes on a spreadsheet as impressive, but petabytes stored in living tissue as background. We call one innovation, we call the other health class, so I want to raise a few questions and live in them for a while. If a single sperm cell holds about 800 megabytes of data, what exactly do we mean when we say data about a person? When an average man produces 150 terabytes in one romantic evening, how should that change the way we think about too much information? If nature is already running an information system that embarrasses our best hardware, what does that say about what we really are? And here's the one that makes people squirm a little. If this much data is moving, is all of it just chemistry? Or is there something else happening that our spreadsheets don't quite capture? We're not going to preach. We're not going to pretend we can measure a soul in gigabytes, but we are going to sit in the tension between what we can count and what we suspect. Now, this is where some listeners start wondering whether I'm stretching the metaphor. So let me show you one more thing. Scientists aren't just observing DNA's storage capacity, they're using it, literally writing digital files into strands of DNA and reading them back out. Here's a moment from that same Microsoft research podcast explaining exactly how this works.

SPEAKER_01: 6:37

So, how does DNA data storage actually work? Well, at a very high level, we start out in the digital domain where we have our information represented as ones and zeros, and we need to convert that into a series of A's, C's, T's, and G's that we could then actually produce. And this is really the domain of Sergei. He'll tell us much more about how this works later on. For now, let's just assume we've done this and now our information lives in the DNA-based domain. It's still in the digital world, it's just represented as A's, C's, T's, and G's, and we now need to make this physical so that we can store it. This is accomplished through large-scale DNA synthesis. Once the DNA has been synthesized with the sequences that we specified, we need to store it. Um there's a lot of ways we can think about storing it. Bitcoin's done great work um looking at DNA encapsulation as well as you know other uh more raw, uh just DNA on glass type techniques. And we've done some work um looking at the susceptibility of DNA stored in this unencapsulated form to things like atmospheric humidity, to temperature changes, and um most excitingly to uh things like neutron radiation. So we've stored our data in this physical form. We've archived it, and coming back to it likely many years in the future, because the properties of DNA match up very well with archival storage, we need to convert it back into the digital domain. And this is done through a technique called uh DNA sequencing. What this does is it puts the molecules through some sort of machine, and on the other side of the machine, we get out a noisy representation of what the actual sequence of bases in the molecules were. Now we have one final step. We need to take this series of noisy sequences and convert it back into ones and zeros. Once we do this, um we return to our original data and we've completed uh, let's call it one DNA data storage cycle.

SPEAKER_00: 8:42

Yeah, and then you know from there, once you have that data encoded into DNA, it's the question is how do you make that data on a scale that's compatible with digital data storage? And so that's where um a lot of the work came in for um really automating the synthesis process and also the reading process as well. So synthesis is what we consider the writing process of DNA data storage. And so, you know, we came up with some unique ideas there. We made a chip that enabled us um to get to the densities that we needed. And then on the reading side, we used different sequencing technologies. And it was great to see that we could actually just kind of pull sequencing technologies off the shelf because people are so interested in reading biological DNA. Um, so we explored the Illumina technologies and also Oxford nanopore, which is a new technology coming in the horizon. And then preservation, too, because we have to make sure that the data that store the DNA doesn't get damaged.

SPEAKER_02: 9:46

So this isn't a metaphor anymore. DNA isn't just a biological instruction manual, it's a functioning data medium, one that researchers can write to, read from, compress, preserve, and archive, which makes the next part of our story a little harder to ignore. If you judged by the commercials, you would think the future of humanity is happening in conference rooms and code repositories. We get dramatic videos about AI models with deep voices, data centers rising out of the desert, people staring intensely at dashboards. Nobody runs a Super Bowl ad for the gonads. Yet, quietly, every second of every day, bodies are copying, editing, and transmitting biological information on a scale Google's analytics team would envy. The story we're sold goes like this: your phone is a miracle. Your cloud storage is advanced. Your genes, just a set of instructions. The phone gets the reverence, the body gets the diagram in chapter 3 of a textbook that everyone laughs about and moves past as fast as possible. We use soft language too, we say reproductive material, genetic code, cell division, clinical, detached, almost boring. We don't say multi-terabyte bio packets launching at highway speed, even though that's closer to how the math works. There's a kind of poetic truth operating here. The poetic truth says the real action is digital, biology is just the meat vehicle. It feels modern, it flatters our tech, it makes us sound advanced, but it quietly shrinks what your body is doing from staggering information architecture down to plumbing, and once you frame something as plumbing, nobody writes poetry about it. Let's walk through the numbers slowly, because this is where it gets fun. One sperm cell. Humans have about 3.2 billion base pairs in a haploid genome. Each base pair is effectively two bits of information. So 3.2 billion times two bits equals 6.4 billion bits. Divide that down, and you're at roughly 800 megabytes of raw, uncompressed data in a single sperm. Now, biologists will tell you there's a lot of redundancy and repetition in there, so the unique information is more like 30 to 100 megabytes. But let's stay uncompressed for now, because everybody overstates their storage. What can you fit in 800 megabytes? About 200 high-quality Spotify songs, one pretty decent chunk of your photo library, a small indie video game, or a surprisingly large folder labeled Taxes you haven't opened since 2017. Now multiply that by an average of 200 million sperm in a single ejaculation. Suddenly, you're sitting at roughly 150 terabytes of raw data in one event. To translate that, 150 terabytes is like having 150,000 gigabytes on tap. That's around 161TB external hard drives, which, if you stacked them, would impress your friends and deeply worry the NSA. It's roughly 3,000 plus 50GB Blu-ray discs, enough to build a small, weird video store that no one would want to explain. It's in the same ballpark as 1604K movies. So, one enthusiastic weekend of streaming for a dedicated introvert. And that's just one time. Over a lifetime, depending on health and age and frequency, we're talking 50 to 100 petabytes of cumulative genetic data produced by one man. To put that in context, Facebook's entire data footprint has been estimated in the tens of petabytes. Mid-size cloud providers operate in that same range. So, in raw biological terms, an ordinary guy can casually move as much genetic information as a social media empire stores in people's vacation photos and conspiracy memes. Now, are those apples to apples? No, of course not. But that's the point. Once the numbers get this big, you start to feel the ground shift under words like data, information, important. You realize the universe has been doing extreme scale information work in ways we barely have language for, and speaking of language, there's a sentence almost no one on Earth has said out loud. I generated 150 terabytes of genetic data last night. No one says that. Because romantic moments are not typically measured in terabytes, we measure them in candlelight, chemistry, awkwardness, regret. The math is there, we just don't frame it that way. And that's where the think first piece comes in. Let's steel man the obvious objection. Someone might say, okay, sure. A sperm cell has a lot of information, but it's just chemistry. Base pairs, molecules, there's no mystery here, it's all zeros and ones in a different format. Fair. We don't want to turn science into magic. DNA is a molecule. It follows physical laws. We can measure it, sequence it, edit it. But here's the tension. On one level, DNA is very much like code, instructions, if-then statements. Turn this on, turn that off. On another level, it's doing something our code still can't touch. It builds a person, not a profile, not a feed, not a recommendation list for shoes you don't need, an actual, living, breathing, thinking human. The same data structure that quietly moves 800 megabytes in a single cell is part of the system that will eventually generate a laugh. A preference for mint chocolate chip over vanilla, the way someone's eyes crinkle when they're trying not to cry. We can describe all that in terms of atoms, but that description doesn't quite scratch the itch we have to say there's something more. If you come from a religious background, you might call that soul. If you're more secular, you might talk about consciousness or personhood or the mystery of self. And if any of this feels familiar, the tension between biology, information, and whatever we mean when we say self, we explored that from a different angle back in episode 80, DNA and the Soul, the architecture of continuity. That episode asked a related question. If DNA carries the blueprint, what carries the rest? Today's episode just adds another layer to that puzzle. Whichever language you use, these sperm-level numbers raise an awkward, beautiful question. If this much information is being written, copied, and passed forward, is all of it just mechanics? Or is DNA the wiring diagram and something else, call it soul, spirit, spark, whatever your tradition allows, is what animates the circuit? We don't have to pick a side today. In fact, I don't think a podcast can settle that. But we do need to notice that our culture has quietly nudged us toward one side without saying it out loud. The modern poetic truth says, you are your data, your search history, your DMs, your engagement metrics. Biology, on the other hand, seems to be whispering, no, your data is part of you, but there's more going on here than bits. Because if you strip a person down to only what you can store on a server, you end up with something that can be copied, backed up, compressed, and eventually deleted. If you believe there's a soul, you're saying there is at least one thing about you that cannot be turned into a file. And now we're back to 150 terabytes. Because if that much data can be created in one shot, and that data is involved in the creation of an entirely new conscious being, then life is bigger than a very lucky chemical error. At minimum, it's weirder. And in a world that loves to flatten everything into material explanations, just noticing the weirdness is a small act of rebellion. So, what do we do with this besides making you slightly self-conscious about every biology class you ever slept through? Three simple cues to notice in the wild. One, when someone says, it's all just chemistry. Pause. That phrase is often used like a period at the end of a very complicated sentence. Is chemistry involved? Absolutely. But if DNA is just chemistry, it's chemistry operating at a scale and sophistication we barely understand. Noticing that complexity doesn't prove a soul exists, but it also doesn't exactly scream, nothing to see here. 2. When people talk about your data as if it all lives on devices, remember, the most consequential data about you is stored in a medium that predates every hard drive on Earth by a few billion years. Your body is not a dumb container waiting for apps, it's running code and storage that makes our best tech look like scribbles. 3. When information about a person gets flattened to labels, male, female, non-binary, straight, gay, bi. Just remember, every label we have is trying to summarize something that sits on top of vast, ocean-deep layers of biology, experience, choice, and mystery. The fact that we can't fit a person into a spreadsheet cleanly is not a bug in the system. It might be the single biggest clue that there's more to you than what can be indexed. Two things to watch in the years ahead. 1. DNA storage tech. You're going to see more headlines about. Companies literally writing digital files into strands of DNA and reading them back. When you do, remember that they're not inventing a new medium. They're trying, clumsily, to borrow one that's already in use. 2. The way we talk about life in policy debates, whether it's abortion, IVF, genetic editing, or gender medicine, pay attention to how often the language moves from mystery and person and sacred to material, sample, and product. The more something is framed as a product, the easier it is to control. You don't have to land on one specific theology to notice this. You just have to be awake when the framing shifts. Before we wrap, I want to leave you with a few questions you can take with you into the rest of your day. If a single human cell can hold hundreds of megabytes of data, why do we talk about data as if the important kind only comes from our devices? If biology quietly moves petabytes across a lifetime, why does our cultural imagination still treat the human body as primitive, simple, or outdated? If the raw information transfer in one intimate moment outweighs what most companies will ever store for all their customers, what does that say about how we measure value? If DNA is data, but a person is clearly more than data, where does that more begin? And if the world keeps telling you that your worth is in metrics, what happens when you realize your biology is already operating on a scale that metrics can't capture? These aren't questions with easy answers. They're questions that make you think first. So, the next time you hear someone brag about how many terabytes their company handles each day, you can smile quietly and think, that's cute. Because somewhere in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday, in an ordinary house, two ordinary people might be creating more raw information in one intimate moment than that company will ever store for you. You are not just your data, you are not just your code, and you are definitely not just your browser history. You are a walking, talking, laughing, suffering mystery sitting on top of a biochemical storage system we barely understand. You don't need all the answers, but you should question the ones you're handed. Because when it comes to the biggest download in human history, the real miracle isn't the data, it's the someone it might be pointing to. For all our talk about cloud storage, the universe's wildest vault apparently is your shorts. Until next time, stay skeptical, stay curious, and always think first.