Posted: Jan 18, 2000
I have a software engineering solution to the overpopulation problem. All we need to do is develop a compression utility, for example, one using the popular Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) algorithm, to compress people down to a fraction of their size, thus leaving room for everyone to coexist on the planet even if there's 11 billion people on it -- they'd all be compressed. In algorithmic terms, the procedure is quite sound -- catalog the patient's DNA, pipe it through to lifezip, and release the now-compressed patient (with a suitable medical bill). After all, DNA is just a huge string of A's, C's, G's and T's -- I know 'coz I saw it on CNN. Take the string TAGCGTACGGCTACGATGGCGTACG. It could be compressed to around two-thirds its size. If we could compress all the DNA this way, we could reduce the space taken up by human population to the same proportion. Thoughts, comments, research grants?
D.