How To Store Your Data For 1 Million Years 110
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?"
Ever wonder (Score:2)
Where animals instinctual behaviors come from?
Re: (Score:2)
Where animals instinctual behaviors come from?
Wikipedia in their genes?
Re: (Score:1)
Hopefully the backup includes Encyclopedia Dramatica.
1.2 million years from now... Excited scientists huddle over the display monitor. A new paper has been released, one based on data from the Ancient Knowledge. The study appears on the screen, "A Treatise on 'Poop is Coming Out Now.'" Life will never be the same...
There is another theory... (Score:1)
...which states that this has already happened.
Our _past_ selves created life from the archived data....
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah, I saw it on Futurama
http://futurama.wikia.com/wiki... [wikia.com]
Ask these folks... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://longnow.org/ [longnow.org]
DNA mutates when alive and degrades when dead, there have to be other options
Re:Ask these folks... (Score:5, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
And how the hell could you fix the spelling errors?
Sigh.
Re: (Score:2)
Store a data for a million years, how about finding some spare planets, say a couple of hundred to store the computers to store a million years worth of data. The whole egoistic arrogance that future generations, already pretty pissed off by the state of the planet we left them give a crap about the bulk of the data being produced today. They will of course want to revile those most responsible, be able to look upon them and curse, try to see the evil in their eyes that they would leave a planet in that st
Re: (Score:1)
I also find that it's often people that live in the city, and are young, that have this view.
They've never encountered nature, don't know how to live with it, and all of their fear, concern and horror about the state of the environment isn't from direct experience -- but instead, from information they've absorbed 3rd, 4th, or 1000th hand.
This may not be true of you. However, I wonder, do you live in the middle of the country? Do you live surrounded by thousands of acres and acres of forest? Do you have y
Re: (Score:3)
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 h
Re: (Score:1)
...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...
You would still need the tool chain.
--
History is just a highlight reel.
Re: (Score:2)
[......] 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
Good luck reading data stored in DNA under those circumstances!
Re: (Score:2)
I dunno, could it be expressed in patterns of camouflage or foliage?
Re: (Score:2)
It doesn't matter what it's expressed as - or if it's expressed at all - to get the data back out of the DNA, you need complex equipment to sequenes the genes. Then you have to find the data among all the "noise".
Re: (Score:2)
*to sequence the genes*
Re: (Score:2)
The medal box is empty at the moment, but we're expecting a shipment any day. Yours will be on its way to you as soon as they come in.
(I also live in the country - in northern Australia - and my water comes from the sky, via my roof and a rainwater tank. There's millions of acres of savannah woodland around here, and very few people, no town water or sewerage. I'm close to 60. And, no, I don't want a medal, thanks.)
Re: (Score:1)
To be fair, there are exceptions. I live on the side of a mountain, have a real artesian well and have a dug well that was here when I got here. It is only two tiles deep but near a stream. Neither have ever run dry. I can not have any neighbors move in, I own all the land around me. I have an embarrassing amount of acreage so just suffice to say, I am not going to have neighbors that can impact my water. Ever... I have crops growing, trees. (I have a large garden but that is not what you intended.) I am tr
Re: (Score:2)
Our future generations will probably not even know about global warming, or that the threat even existed. After all, do you know anything about events, which were averted, 500 years ago?
Tbey also may not know about the deforestation and soil erosion, but they'll live with the consequences of it - just as we do today.
Re: (Score:2)
And then?
Our thinking is egocentric. The nuclear catastrophe will be a desaster? yes. For us. We might die out.
What, we're destroying the nature together with us? Define nature! We may "destroy" much of that, what we define as nature, but this definition is egocentric as well. There is nothing, which defines, that humans and animals more worthy nature than the cold "dead" planets out there. It's even unclear if they are as "dead" as you think or if it may be some other form of life.
Use your fantasy. Maybe t
Re: (Score:1)
Frankly, we're on the cusp of unlimited, pollution free energy. With it, will come unlimited prosperity, and the ability to live without the destruction you think occurs, which only barely occurs, right now.
Our future generations will probably not even know about global warming, or that the threat even existed. After all, do you know anything about events, which were averted, 500 years ago?
How do you even sleep at night with that sunny/bright-sided disposition?
You DO realize that the energy crisis is an ent
Re: (Score:1)
"The first world has been engaged in a sado-masochistic game of auto-erotic asphyxiation with their own economies(for the benefit of the economic rent-seeking behavior of the top 10 most profitable corporations on the globe) for the past 40+ years."
Best. Comment. Ever.
Re: (Score:2)
...and I have read that we cannot clone mastodons because the 10,000 years that the DNA has sat in a frozen dry environment has caused too many data errors
a millions years... good luck. You are either expecting very long telomeres to be fixing it during replication or having it stored near absolute zero
Re: (Score:2)
So the Kardashians my represent some alien's long-ago attempt to communicate with us?
Re: (Score:2)
Yes. It's their way of saying "go fuck yourself".
Re: (Score:1)
DNA is surprisingly robust, in any case portions of our own DNA are very, very old, and still the same.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:1)
You have portions of your DNA that is likely to be 45,000 years old or more, rather the "same as" Homo sapiens from 45K years ago.
Re: (Score:2)
If a segment of DNS is critical to our survival than I'm sure it can survive quite long without any mutation. But some arbitrary strand of DNA with no relevance to its host organism's survival can and will mutate freely.
Re: (Score:1)
How does it know what's "critical" to our survival?
It would also depend on where you put the data, what section.
DNA is well-suited for biological information storage. The DNA backbone is resistant to cleavage, and both strands of the double-stranded structure store the same biological information. Biological information is replicated as the two strands are separated. A significant portion of DNA (more than 98% for humans) is non-coding, meaning that these sections do not serve as patterns for protein sequences.
Plus there's always "error correction" and redundancy.
Re: (Score:1)
To be honest, I have a hard time accepting psychology as a science and I am not alone in this. Pseudo-science does not really make your point which means your citation is probably not the best - to me, at least. This does not mean that I disagree with you nor does it invalidate your point (if I am understanding you properly.) It simply means that you may be better served with a different citation. People may ignore your citation/point without even taking the time to read the abstract.
Re: (Score:1)
Explain how any psychotropic drug works.
Re: (Score:1)
This is one of the main reasons I have difficulty accepting it as a science. That does not mean that it is not a science, just that it is full of speculation and assumptions. It is trial and error with little success. It is, even worse, very immature.
Re: (Score:2)
How does it know what's "critical" to our survival?[......]
"It" doesn't need to know. If it's not there, that gene can't get passed on, as the organism doesn't survive.
Re: (Score:1)
To keep the data indefinitely, you could easily put the storage medium in a stable orbit around the sun or something. It would survive, but I'm not sure if anybody would ever read it.
Re: (Score:2)
I already solved it. [google.com]
There does not need to be data degration (Score:2)
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
"Library of Alexandria" Pie Recipe ..for Disaster! (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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?
Re: (Score:3)
DNA degrades, forget it (Score:3)
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
It's alive! (Score:1)
Virus (Score:5, Funny)
Just wait until their system gets infected with a virus!
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe Virii are the way to go. Bacteria mutate, virii do rather seldom.
Encode into an old Apple (Score:3)
I have an Apple IIci they can use.
to hell with 1,000,000 years How about 40? (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.
Re: (Score:2)
It's an analog world.
Re: (Score:1)
Have you seen photographs from 40 years ago? Not in some art collection kept under careful low lighting in a controlled atmosphere, but in a book in someone's attic? They're fucked. The colour is messed up, the details are starting to go, and don't touch them because they may start to physically fall apart.
So what a serious archivist does, someone who wants to preserve information, not just collect endless cobwebbed boxes they must never open, is they copy. Make backups onto new media periodically. The grea
Re: (Score:2)
The next generation will not hear the sound of their childhood.
The recorders will have uploaded it to the cloud and make it hard to download it, to sell more ads on the cloud pages. The company will finally have been bankrupt or just stopped providing the service. The parents will either not have any access or the option to backup, which they did not use or understand.
"Offline" devices may have the data, which is locked via some DRM scheme to prevent the competition to use the data in their devices. The key
Re:to hell with 1,000,000 years How about 40? (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
What I do have to aim for is brain dead easy use. The average computer user has went down in education dramatically, so if you extrapolate that out it will be even worse in 40 years.
The chances that a normal person in the future that will understand what the 25 reams of paper in that box are for, because the top pages that explain it will disappear, are very very slim.
I actually am looking at getting some 45rpm records made and including a fold up record player where you have to spin the record by your fi
Pfft....so obvious (Score:3)
Genetic memory.... (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.
Re: (Score:2)
What strange confusion of ideas has lead you to consider such a ridiculous notion?
Re: (Score:2)
What strange confusion of ideas has lead you to consider such a ridiculous notion?
My money's on marijuana.
Long term storage (Score:2)
Already done, stones and a hamer!
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
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"
Not that stupid, actually (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
You just have to warm the DNA from time to time, so that biology recovers the mutations you may have caught while frozen. And then you freeze again.
For DRAM we used to talk about refreshing the memory, here it is the samen but with warming at longer intervals
Re: (Score:2)
and why do you want to stop interaction at all, if you warm it up to allow (random) interactions? Either it does only repair itself all the time, then why freeze it? Or it does repair and reorganiziation with information loss, then it does at the warm intervals do both as well.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
And why do you warm it up?
Re: (Score:2)
You warm it up to resume chemical and therefore biological activity. This will be required to replicate the DNA, repair it (but as it was frozen and shielded from radiation, it should not be damaged) and probably to also to read it.
On the read point: most of the method we have to read DNA are chemical or biological. There are also physical methods, which may not require a warm up: for instance you can open the DNA double helix and measure the force you need for that. Since G-C and A-T do not have the same c
Re: (Score:2)
Hmm, interesting. I just doubted, if the denerating and the repair/replicate process can be seperated and have the same speed (slow/fast depending on the temperature)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, only three kind of mutations causes comes to my mind:
Hubris (Score:2)
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.
Panspermia (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It seems some cave paintings [wikipedia.org] are older.
Og Say DNA Not Do (Score:2)
The obvious choice... (Score:2)
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.
Signal to space (Score:1)
First Check Apples for Ancient Knowledge? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
Or our "junk DNA", which is doubtless compressed information.
Storing Wikipedia data in Apple DNA... (Score:2)
Not at all (Score:2)
Who needs it.