Are we sliding into a dark age of information? True, there are some three thousand billion billion bytes of recorded digital information on the planet, and the figure is rapidly rising.
However, most of this will be lost to future generations as we use ephemeral recording media and soon-to-be-obsolete storage devices, and rely on software whose business models depend on planned obsolescence and compulsory upgrades. If we’re not careful, historians will know more about the beginning of the past century than the start of this one.
But perhaps one solution is the one used by nature. After all, we already know that DNA is a robust way to store information, because we can extract it from the bones of extinct humans dating back tens of thousands of years.
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Read the full, original story: Can DNA reign supreme in the digital dark age?
Additional Resources:
- Harvard cracks DNA storage, crams 700 terabytes of data into a single gram, ExtremeTech
- Wait, Could We Make a Computer Out of Our DNA?, Pacific Standard
- Half a Million DVDs of Data Stored in Gram of DNA, ScienceNOW
