Evolution give humans roughly 25 megabytes of optimization. If aliens understand evolution well enough to know what it’s optimizing us for, that means that, given a list of 2^2000000 possible reproducing organisms with human DNA, they’d have a 50:50 chance to spot the human. It would take vastly more than 25 megabytes of code to specify a specific human cell minus DNA, or even one that passes for human. However, if you’re limited to organisms that could actually reproduce, and you ignore unreasonably compex organisms, I think it would be enough, and you’d still have enough left over to specify how the womb works. You could even specify evolution, so the aliens only have to know it’s the result of some optimization process. As such, aliens, given only our DNA, ungodly computing power, and the knowledge that they were handed more than random bits, would be able to work out what we are.
Evolution give humans roughly 25 megabytes of optimization. If aliens understand evolution well enough to know what it’s optimizing us for, that means that, given a list of 2^2000000 possible reproducing organisms with human DNA, they’d have a 50:50 chance to spot the human. It would take vastly more than 25 megabytes of code to specify a specific human cell minus DNA, or even one that passes for human. However, if you’re limited to organisms that could actually reproduce, and you ignore unreasonably compex organisms, I think it would be enough, and you’d still have enough left over to specify how the womb works. You could even specify evolution, so the aliens only have to know it’s the result of some optimization process. As such, aliens, given only our DNA, ungodly computing power, and the knowledge that they were handed more than random bits, would be able to work out what we are.