I find the way William Gibson‘s mind works fascinating. Always have. I read only two science fiction authors with any regularity: Gibson and Bruce Sterling. And I’ll read pretty much anything they write. It’s not that there aren’t other really good science fiction writers, it’s just that I don’t much care for the genre. I’m one of the few unfortunates who never understood the popularity of Star Wars, a not-even mediocre western set in outer space.
The thing that Gibson and Sterling have in common—and what I find so interesting—is that they write about dystopian futures that are entirely believable possibilities, even eventualities. Their works read more like possible future scenarios than novels.
With that in mind, Gibson apparently spent a goodly portion of the day contemplating the information carrying capabilities of net bandwidth compared to human ejaculate:
“... the average amount of information per ejaculation is 1.560*10^ 9* 2 bits * 2.00*10^ 8, which comes out to be 6.24*10 ^17 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.”
But wait, it gets better. Gibson goes on to rhapsodize about the comparative signal-to-noise ratios of both mediums, concluding that an average ejaculate’s signal-to-noise ratio is higher than that of a cable modem but lower than an OC-96 line.
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