Life Recording

23 December 2009

If a baby born today was given a necklace with 2 mics and a camera, can we record its entire lifetime? At what quality? Lets assume dvdrip quality with xvid4, excellent compression with great sound and visuals for 700 MB per 2 hours. If we assume an 80 year life expectancy then we have 80 * 365 * 24 = 700,800 hours in a lifetime. This amounts to about 240 terabytes. Let's say we cut off the boring half of the day and take a lower quality recording (1/5 file size as in YouTube for example) and we're down to 24 terabytes. Using smart VBR we might even be able to get some hi-def for the important parts. So according to hard drive capacity trends, this is feasible by 2015 (hard drive capacity multiplies by 10 every 5 years, see at: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg ). The only problem nowadays is the battery. Current tech would require your life recorder to recharge or replace the batteries once a day. So by 2015 all the crazy modern technologies will be ready for recording an entire human lifespan from a first person point of view without replacing any piece of equipment, except for the energy source. By the way the modern battery was invented around 1800. Us humans had 200 years to work on this thing but we're still terrible at it. Ok, so how do we tap into our bodies energy supplies? Please answer this question by 2015, thank you.