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?"

Comments

to hell with 1,000,000 years How about 40?

[Lumpy]

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.

Re:to hell with 1,000,000 years How about 40?

[hey!]

Forty years is easy, if you don't insist on instant-access convenience. Print your data onto low acid paper and store in a fireproof cabinet. Either (a) people will still be using computers in 40 years, in which case they'll no doubt have scanners and OCR OR civilization as we know it will have collapsed and boy will you be glad you have hard copy.

As for a million years, I think the DNA idea is terrible. While there have been instances of DNA as old as 700,000 years being sequenced, the horse bone used to sequence that genome was recovered from ancient permafrost -- almost ideal conditions. If there is unexpected warmth, water or air exposure, then your DNA molecules will start to get manky fast.

But we can look to dinosaurs for the answer. What we have of them is mineralized bone. I've personally helped a paleontologist reconstruct a triceratops skull, so I've seen it up close. You can still see the pattern of veins preserved on the surface of the frill. So some kind of engraved mineral might be the way to go. Encoding data on noble metal plates or synthetic gems would seem more promising.