Space Journey

What follows is an exploration of the financial implications of Bioinformatics and Stellar Exploration in the 21st century.

To begin with, there are currently around 8 billion people on Planet Earth. Using database compression, the collective genomes of every last person could currently be stored on 32,000 terabytes of information (4 megabytes per person). If all the information were stored on the Secure Digital Storage of micro-SD Cards, that would amount to 528 cubic centimeters worth of data, at a cost of $3.2 million. In total it would weigh 8 kg, or 17.5 pounds. This could be launched into near-Earth orbit at a cost of $21,000 ($1,200 per pound).

There are also 8.7 million species of plants, animals and microbes on the Earth. The largest known genome of any one of them could be stored on 37.5 gigabytes of data. Taking this as an upper bound, the collective genomes of all species on the planet could currently be stored on 326,000 terabytes of information. In terms of Secure Digital Storage, this corresponds to 5,400 cubic centimeters worth of data, at a cost of $32.6 million. It would weigh a total of 178 pounds, and could be launched into near-Earth orbit at a cost of $214,000.

The cost to sequence a genome costs around $400 per 3 billion base pairs, which corresponds to $0.53 per megabyte. Again using database compression, this amounts to $14.8 billion to sequence every human being on the planet, and $173 billion to sequence every species.

This means that a comprehensive database of all life on this planet would weigh 200 pounds, cost $188 billion dollars to create, and cost $235,000 to launch into near-Earth orbit.

To launch such a payload to Mars would cost an extra $250,000 per pound, or $50 million more overall.

These costs are expected to drop dramatically over the course of the 21st century. In the last 20 years alone, genomic sequencing has dropped from $2.7 billion per genome in 2003 to only $400 today. That means every year, the cost decreases by close to a half. At that current rate, by mid-century the entire above cost will likely decline from $188 billion to just $1,400.

Meanwhile, the cost per pound of launching to Mars has decreased from $6.5 million in 1997 to half a million dollars in 2012, or by 84% per year. At that rate, by mid-century launching to Mars will cost only $1,700 per pound, or $340,000 total for the above 200-pound payload.

Moreover, the payload itself will also decrease, as storage technology becomes more affordable. Storage capacity doubles every 2.5 years, which translates into a 32% increase in capacity per year. This means that the weight required to hold 358,000 terabytes of information will decrease by 24.2% per year, and by mid-century the payload size will decrease from 200 pounds to just 0.021 pounds, or 9 grams.

All this means that what would cost over a hundred billion dollars to assemble and a hundred million dollars to launch today will likely cost only a few thousand dollars to assemble and a couple hundred dollars to launch to Mars by mid-century.

And that, my dear reader, is what we call progress!