Encyclopedia Galactica – Here we come.
A DNA hard drive has been built that can store data for 1 MILLION years
http://www.sciencealert.com/a-dna-hard-drive-has-been-built-that-can-store-data-for-1-million-years
For any of you who are fans of Asimov’s Foundation series, here is the first step towards the Encyclopedia Galactica. This article in Science Alert talks about using DNA sequences as coding to store information. Seems simple enough, just use the DNA code as 1’s and 0’s and write the data.
I have an organic processor in my Series SIMPOC and in my soon to be released series Virus, but I never considered using DNA as the storage media, seems like this is great fodder for some Sci-Fi stories.
As it turns out, it is doable and in fact, the amount of data that can be stored is immense. If the DNA is stored in glass beads, the media can last a long time, perhaps millions of years. Today we’re able to buy small drives that give us Terabytes of storage. To put DNA storage in perspective, 1 gram of DNA material can store 455 Exabyte’s of data, which is one billion gigabytes. In a practical comparison, that is ALL of Google, Facebook and just about the rest of the internet combined.
Apparently, most of the biological and physical limitations are surmountable and we might see this type of storage used sometime in the future. We could put everything we know in a cupful of DNA, send it off to the moon or Mars and have a good start at an Encyclopedia Galactica.
This is onne more example of how amazing the early Sci-Fi authors were.
Can you imagine trying to find that one lost file in 455 Exabytes of data?
Ray Jay Perreault
