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How To Store Your Data For 1 Million Years
Whiteox writes with Fast Company's article about Robert Grass and his team, which is exploring how to use DNA as a data storage mechanism, along with others working on truly long-term storage. Both commercial interests and academic researchers are interested in protecting data not just for years or decades, but for multi-century stretches, right out into the millions. From the article: The idea of storing information on DNA traces back to a Soviet lab in the 1960s, but the first successful implementation wasn't achieved until 2012, when biologist George Church and his colleagues announced in the journal Science that they had encoded one of Church's books in DNA. More recently, reports the New Yorker, the artist Joe Davis, now in residence at Church's lab, has announced plans to encode bits of Wikipedia into a particularly old strain of apple, so that he can create "a living, literal tree of knowledge. "Impressive," writes Whiteox, "but I wonder if our future selves can make life from our archived data?"
Where animals instinctual behaviors come from?
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
...which states that this has already happened.
Our _past_ selves created life from the archived data....
http://longnow.org/
DNA mutates when alive and degrades when dead, there have to be other options
Wherever You Go, There You Are
but I think that my opinion of this may evolve over time.
1) Put our collective knowledge into edible form and grow it on trees.
2) Put them in the Forbidden Garden for security, with stern warnings against eating the apples.
3) Adam and Eve wonder what the apples over in there yonder trees taste like.
4) *CRUNCH* *MUNCH* *SLURP* Mmmm...would be good baked in a nice crust with some cinnamon and sugar...
5) Bake-off and Pie eating contest!!
6) Angry lord of the orchard evicts Adam and Eve
7) Perpetual guilt and ignorance ensue.
This sounds like the makings of a good book, especially if one could work in some nudity action between Adam and Eve.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
They're having a hard time trying to restore from 8,000 year old backups (wooly mammoth).... 1 million is way beyond DNA specifications.
Carbon crystal storage is probably most likely to meet 1 million year MTBF requirement
Please, PLEASE encode windows in a fungus, that way can see how monstrous it truly is, whether Xp evolves in 7 (Mother Nature would skip Vista), and study real, live, organic networking.
I art more snarky, and terse than thou. I art Slashdot!
Just wait until their system gets infected with a virus!
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
As per a 'The Simpsons' episode, I want our future selves to make life from our graffiti. Then use that on the overseer's graffiti on the Pyramids in Egypt.
Now, they will start programming us from birth. There is nothing keeping us from killing ourselves.
This sounds like the makings of a good book,
Rape, murder, incest, bigamy. Aliens come down from space and brainwash the population. Do you think it would sell?
Have gnu, will travel.
Before encoding Wikipedia into that apple genome they put it through a sequencer and analyze it for data content and find half a million years worth of back copies of "Raunchy Reptile".
Some things about theropods should have been left to imagination, but curiosity caused the cat to not be able to unsee things.
I have an Apple IIci they can use.
Have gnu, will travel.
I just want to send foreward to my grandkids Audio, Video, and photos in digital form. photos I can get printed, but video and audio has no formats that will last that long. we were lucky and had simple records to carry audio forward 100 years, and film lasted a while but is already falling apart.
Honestly Digital is going to cause a dark age. Very few people can read 9 track EBCDIC tapes from the 60's, who the hell is going to have a USB slot in 2065? even if my archival storage sandisk memory vault actually does last the 50-100 years it claims it's data retention is.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
The obvious answer is storing it in Twinkies.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Obligatory reference.
I wonder if this could one day lead to a form of genetic memory containing all the basic knowledge that a person would normally receive in school through the first few years of college... if given to an entire population we could rid ourselves of the need to study for many years to become proficient at basic concepts... perhaps allowing the human race to evolve into something greater.
Already done, stones and a hamer!
This was the idea behind the episode of TNG "The Chase". The premise of the episode is that someone stumbles across a code hidden in the DNA of certain organisms, and then a race ensues to reconstruct it. The only use I can see for this kind of long-term storage is to safeguard important information from any event that can wipe out whatever is used for traditional data storage at the time. Any information worth keeping will be transferred periodically to another storage medium to prevent losing it, so something like this seems only useful for safeguarding certain pieces of information from disasters. The long-term viability of DNA aside, storing it on DNA would completely obfuscate the fact that it was there, and any future generation would need complicated technology to even accidentally stumble on it. Why not inscribe your data on the most resilient material at the time, encase it in something protective, and then make it large and obvious enough such that any future archaeologist knew that they had just found our equivalent of the Rosetta Stone? I find it funny they mention the Rosetta stone in the article because that is a much better choice than using DNA. Imagine if the Rosetta Stone had been inscribed in our DNA instead; we would not have deciphered it until scientific knowledge had progressed to the point where we understood DNA, had the physics and materials science knowledge to even construct a device capable of imaging something on the molecular scale, and then have the blind luck to find it in the first place. I think this technology might be neat if feasible, but there are much better choices when it comes to long-term data storage.
After looking at TFA, it looks less stupid to me than it did at once.
Indeed DNA changes very easily, mutations and viruses are common. But here they want to store DNA at temperature where biological interaction does not happen anymore. We are left with just mutations from radiation and replication errors, but that may be covered by DNA built-in repair systems. Hence perhaps it makes sense after all.
No, didn't RTFA yet, but the summary itself is enough to make me ponder for a while... crazy shit. We could all be carrying around yet to be discovered messages from distant relatives. I know this has been the subject of movie plots. Didn't realize it was completely feasable.
Nobody's going to need your data in 1 million years, considering that by then humanity will have been extinct for about 999,900 years.
You are welcome on my lawn.
yup, and in the 90s the message was "live in harmony future children". Nowadays i'm sure it would translate to "buy the new iphone 8"
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Some real science has been done on DNA data storage as relates to evidence of panspermia. The theory goes that if intelligent life deliberately seeded the universe it may have used DNA or RNA sequences that could be decoded into a message. So far science's tendency toward conservatism has prevented anyone from coming out and saying it but I think available evidence is more than sufficient reason for optimism and intense study.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Scientology.
Why is Snark Required?
You can't go wrong with stone tablets. So far, they have the longest proven record of anything we've tried.
Wait, so we've been in the garden the whole time? Gee, I guess we should be pretty pissed that we've wrecked the place.
Og just paint Ogwina and deer on cave wall. Or carve in stone. Og find carving in stone always works.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Post it on Facebook.
What? Everyone's always talking about how once your give your information to Facebook they'll keep it a million years.
Do you really think the human race care what happens in a MILLION years? Homo sapiens will have evolved to some other species 2-3 times.
Sadly all these fancy methods is still outperformed by humble clay tablets, cave paintings and papyrus scrolls....
Clay tablets... for fuck sake!
Take high fire clay or porcelain, write your shit down, fire it at 1250C - 1280C and be done with it. Will last you 10000 years easy
Signal your data to space in many directions, later invent faster travelling then light and collect your data.
Maybe we should try to read the apples that we have already and see if there is any knowledge already in them? It would suck if they already were imbedded by the ancient astronauts with the secrets of FTL drives, cancer cures, the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, etc... and we overwrote them with Bieber.
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
I wonder if he'll just store some of the core data?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
Who needs it.
First: Our DNA contains a lot of "useless" information, which is not used or changed. Nobody knows what it does, maybe it just lost the sequence on the active part of the DNA, which activates it.
Second: Don't think of the DNA as a pure data store. Think of it as an program. Then write a program, which reencodes itself into each new instance in a robust manner. Your child may have mutated the data, but its organism reads the data and reconstruct it from some redundancy and writes unmutated data into the DNA of your grandchildren. Again with redundancy and repair program.