You forgot about ordering.
8 binary bits in order can encode 256 states, as if every bit was capable of encoding 32 states.
Yea, that specific number fits into 2 kilobytes of memory, but it’s so large it’s hard to compare it to anything.
Which is why I suggest comparing it to the number of bits required to encode the universe. If all you wanted was to store a single arbitrary number and could read write the universe you could do anything out to 2^(10^(80 * k)) where k is larger than 1 but I suspect below 100.
The vastly bit is kind of an understatement.
Each stable isotope is indistinguishable from every other carbon isotope. So, you can probably encode a few bits per atom assuming you can somehow read this data. However they are talking vastly larger numbers of digits here. Where there are only ~10^80 digits worth of atoms in the visible universe, but hey bump that to 10^90 it does not help.
Sure you might encode 10^6 or hell I will give you 10^100 bits of data per atom or something but that’s not even close to helpful. It’s still on the order of K atoms in the universe and you want to encode 10^400+ * K bits of data. So each atom needs to encode 10^400+ bits and remember each stable isotope is indistinguishable from every other atom of that stable isotope.