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Tabula Rasa Promotion To Send Gamers' DNA to Space
Bridger tips news that NCSoft's Tabula Rasa, created in part by Richard Garriott, is running an unusual promotion right now. Garriott is going to the International Space Station on October 12th, and he'll take with him a digital record of the DNA of various players and celebrities. The basic plot of Tabula Rasa is that Earth was attacked and humans almost completely wiped out. Garriott's promotion is playing on that idea; the hard drive with the DNA data will be left in orbit "just in case" something happens to humanity on Earth. NCSoft has been running a variety of polls and contests to include further data about humans on the hard drive. The deadline for joining the project has recently been extended to September 29th.
They should send every last copy of the game into orbit and leave it there.
If sharing a song makes you a pirate, what do I have to share to be a ninja?
Imagine that - a world populated solely by celebrities and hardcore gamers. A superior race of shallow procrastinators.
DNA molecules are fragile, and hard drives even more so.
The DNA data will be shredded by cosmic rays, and even if it wasn't, how exactly would that save the human race in case of an extinction level event.
Wait, what? Only their DNA? Damn
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
That might give you a body, but what you really want is the person: all the memes that s/he has would need to be recorded and suitably grafted in, even then what you get won't be much like the original.
OK: I'll admit that it is a fun idea, but that is about it.
They must be anticipating the demise of the human race really soon. So far I've outlived every hard drive I've ever owned... and all of those weren't exposed to hard radiation.
On a more abstract level, I doubt you'd be able to reconstruct any living creature using its DNA only. From what I understand of biology (which is rather limited), the DNA itself only contains the blueprints for how to create proteins, but the how, when, and how much is controlled by RNA, which previously had been overlooked as "just a carrier molecule". To put it in computer terms, the DNA is the processor, while the RNA is the operating system. You'd have a tough time re-creating Linux/Windows/Mac OS X based solely on the circuit diagram of a processor.
Procrastination Man strikes again!
We know we can't. DNA is, if you like, a program; but in order to make sense of that program, you need an appropriate computer to run it on, which is a human womb.
Some combinations of animals are compatible with each other --- lions and tigers, for example --- but most animals aren't. Try to grow an embryo of the wrong species in an incompatible host and it'll crash; either it'll just die, or else the mother will abort it.
About the only thing you could do with a DNA sequence in isolation is poke through it looking for interesting protein sequences.
Nah, you're missing the upside; after the invasion, sue them for copyright infringement and get the court to award you damages. Given that they've just conquered the Earth, the damages should be quite substantial.
They're a race of evil inhuman plunderers. There's no way you'll be able to win against THEIR lawyers.
Current technology to COMPLETELY sequence a single person's DNA is still way too expensive to be practical. It cost billions of dollars for the NIH and Craig Venter's company to sequence the first human (in 2000). (Guess who's DNA they used!) Even after eight internet years It probably is still in the millions of dollars, I don't think Mr Garriot is going to fork over that kind of cash. He's probably going to pay for some people's genetic PROFILE to be sequenced, enough for certain genetic diseases to be exposed. (I think you can get this done for about $1000). Then again, aliens could also use it to pick out the (un)lucky human from a extra-terrestrial police line up! Still there certainly wouldn't be enough information to recreate the human "from scratch" even assuming the technology was available.
However, he could at least bring up Craig Venter's publicly available DNA and if stored digitally I'm sure that it could be encoded very very redundantly so that even a huge number of cosmic ray hits wouldn't effect it. Consider Voyager, with 30 year old tech., still can run its old programs.
As for bringing up the real stuff, I'm not sure that the NASA/ESA and other ISS partners would appreciate him bringing up little vials of other people's DNA for storage. (Of course some contamination has always been unavoidable, humans are basically walking bags of bacteria). Would he just take some hair samples or bring up DNA in more purified form? (Actually the previous poster's 2010: A Sperm Odyssey wouldn't be bringing up complete copies of the person's DNA because during reproduction the sperm cells only have half of the man's genes...). He could however get someone's DNA and using PCR (polymerase chain reaction) make as much of it as he wants. Milky white fluid, looks just like sperm.