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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?"

18 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Ever wonder by koan · · Score: 2

    Where animals instinctual behaviors come from?

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  2. Ask these folks... by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    http://longnow.org/

    DNA mutates when alive and degrades when dead, there have to be other options

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    1. Re:Ask these folks... by ColdWetDog · · Score: 4, Funny

      Yeah, the idea of using DNA to 'store' information for multi millennial time frames seems weird. The stuff mutates and degrades.

      OTOH, if your storing Brittney Spears and Justin Bieber, this might well be a feature, not a bug.

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    2. Re:Ask these folks... by sshir · · Score: 2

      Only parts that are vital for the organism are preserved (more or less). Everything else is trashed or/and cut out completely.

    3. Re:Ask these folks... by garyisabusyguy · · Score: 2

      I live surrounded by hundreds of miles of desert, I could drive until my tank is dry and still see nothing but desert

      If everything goes to shit I would want to be able to gain access to information about how to survive better, how to make antibiotics, where to get drinkable water, what plants to eat, how to mine and refine metals, maybe even how to operate a small number of electronic devices and repair them

      What people's opinions were, what deities they worshiped and why they went to war could be used for heat on a cold night if it was in a format that could be used that way.

      Eventually, my descendents or myself may want to learn calculus, perform surgery and generate power from the sun or radioactive fuels. It would be really handy to have a durable means to store that information that I could retrieve without having to completely rebuild an advanced technological society first

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    4. Re:Ask these folks... by MrNaz · · Score: 2

      Yes. It's their way of saying "go fuck yourself".

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      I hate printers.
  3. "Library of Alexandria" Pie Recipe ..for Disaster! by Irate+Engineer · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.

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  4. DNA degrades, forget it by Spy+Handler · · Score: 2

    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

  5. Virus by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Funny

    Just wait until their system gets infected with a virus!

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  6. Encode into an old Apple by PPH · · Score: 2

    I have an Apple IIci they can use.

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    Have gnu, will travel.
  7. to hell with 1,000,000 years How about 40? by Lumpy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

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    1. Re:to hell with 1,000,000 years How about 40? by hey! · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

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  8. Pfft....so obvious by meglon · · Score: 2

    The obvious answer is storing it in Twinkies.

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  9. Genetic memory.... by drew_92123 · · Score: 2

    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.

  10. Long term storage by RY · · Score: 2

    Already done, stones and a hamer!

  11. Not that stupid, actually by manu0601 · · Score: 2

    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.

  12. Panspermia by Iamthecheese · · Score: 2

    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.

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  13. Re:"Library of Alexandria" Pie Recipe ..for Disast by Required+Snark · · Score: 2

    Scientology.

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