I've frequently heard it stated that the simplest bacterium is far more complex than anything humans have ever built. I care to differ.
Note that on the biological side we are restricted to the simplest cellular organism - I'll use Mycoplasm genitalium - whereas on the human-created side the scope is unbounded: we can look at the most complex system ever created by humans. To me, that would be the internet. But I feel that the internet as a whole - consisting of such things as hardware (server farms, client machines, routers, etc.), software (web servers, web browsers, operating systems, database servers, web applications, etc.), and protocols (TCP/IP, XML, HTTP, HTTPS, etc.) - is far more complex than the simplest bacterium, so I will start off with a much more limited scope....something smaller and easier to get a grasp on than the whole internet: the Windows XP OS.
So, which is informationally more complex: Mycoplasm genitalium or the Windows XP OS?
M. genitalium’s genome is 578 kilobases.
(578 x 10^3 bases)(2 bits/base) = 1.156 x 10^6 bits (maximum)
And a quick Google search turned up this for the Windows XP OS executable...
Quote:
"When Microsoft did make the Windows XP SP2 binary itself available, it was dispatched to the Windows Beta site: rather like those Len Deighton spy exchanges where the captive is blindfolded and taken on a mystery ride before being released. However, this is emphatically the final release.
But here we are, and here's what you do. The English language version WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe weighs in at 266.01 MB and is available from servers in Redmond, London and Japan." (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/0...eekend_release/)
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So, the Microsoft Windows XP executable is 266.01 MB. In the computer world, MB can represent either 10^6 or 2^20...to make sure not to overstate this, I'll assume they used the smaller of the two.
(266.01 x 10^6 bytes)(8 bits/byte) = 2.128 x 10^9 bits (maximum)
And a comparison of the two...
Windows OS = 2.128 x 10^9 bits
M. genitalium = 1.156 x 10^6 bits
indicates that the information contained in the Windows OS executable is far more than that contained in M. genitalium: about 2,000 times as much.
