FYI -- "[We] place ultimate bounds on the ***speed*** at which information can be erased." "This tape with self-destruct in five seconds. Good luck, Jim." -- Mission Impossible TV series. We should now be able to determine an upper bound on how much information was stored on the tape. http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14538 http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14538.pdf A general derivation and quantification of the third law of thermodynamics Lluís Masanes & Jonathan Oppenheim Nature Communications 8, Article number: 14538 (2017) doi:10.1038/ncomms14538 Quantum information Thermodynamics Received: 31 March 2016 Accepted: 09 January 2017 Published online: 14 March 2017 Abstract The most accepted version of the third law of thermodynamics, the unattainability principle, states that any process cannot reach absolute zero temperature in a finite number of steps and within a finite time. Here, we provide a derivation of the principle that applies to arbitrary cooling processes, even those exploiting the laws of quantum mechanics or involving an infinite-dimensional reservoir. We quantify the resources needed to cool a system to any temperature, and translate these resources into the minimal time or number of steps, by considering the notion of a thermal machine that obeys similar restrictions to universal computers. We generally find that the obtainable temperature can scale as an inverse power of the cooling time. Our results also clarify the connection between two versions of the third law (the unattainability principle and the heat theorem), and place ultimate bounds on the speed at which information can be erased.