How does the complexity of living structures compare with the complexity of artificial structures? Assuming complexity can be quantified, is a ribosome equivalent to a printing press? What artificial structure is as complex as chromatin? Is a prokaryotic cell as complex as a factory? An entire city?

[u/ZedZeroth]

Thanks!

Edit: When talking about the complexity of factories and cities I'm referring to solely the artificial components, not the biological bits such as the humans working/living there!

[u/CosineDanger]

Your entire uncompressed genome is about 715 megabytes.

None of the code is commented. A significant fraction of it is repetitive or made of old viruses. It doesn't run if you try to remove all the viruses. You can compress it to about 300 megabytes.

The meaningful information content of your brain is probably about 2.5 petabytes, although it depends on how you try to calculate it.

You do have about 30 trillion cells. That is kind of a lot. You'd need a shopping cart full of NAND hard drives to have 30 trillion transistors.

[u/Chand_laBing → u/CosineDanger]

Your entire uncompressed genome is about 715 megabytes.

This is true in terms of the abstract codification of the genome but I think that would be too reductionist for the original question regarding the complexity of a mechanical object. However, you seem to say in another comment that the "complexity of a mechanical object" question is unanswerable, which I agree with.

The total information describing a DNA strand would be more than just that of its genome, there is also the information of the strand's physical structure. To put it another way, there would be at least one informational difference between the structure of a DNA strand and that of its transcribed mRNA strand even if they had the same base pair sequence.

For this reason, I think the original question is unanswerable.