Last week I posted a thread in the Science & Technology forum about information that could be stored in DNA sequences.
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Since I wrote this thread, I now have some further information on this subject. There was an online article on the bbc news website this morning. It
now claims to have stored the equivalent of 70 Billion copies of an unpublished book in DNA code.
"The total world's information, which is 1.8 zettabytes, [could be stored] in about four grams of DNA," said Sriram Kosuri, a senior scientist at
the Wyss Institute and senior author of the paper, in a video presentation.
Four grams of DNA is quite a lot of weight in DNA terms, but when you think that contains all of the current worlds knowledge, that starts to really
blow your mind.
The Harvard researchers stored 5.5 petabits, or 1 million gigabits, per cubic millimeter in the DNA storage medium. Because of the slow process for
setting down the data, the researchers consider the DNA storage medium currently suitable only for data archive purposes.
The last sentence of the above paragraph has set me thinking a bit. If they have the capability of storing all the worlds knowledge in DNA, are they
preparing for something? Imagine this scenario, the one where mankind is all but wiped out by some catastrophe. When it comes to rebuilding, they will
have all this knowledge to start again using the information stored in this DNA.
Couple this with why did they build the millennium seed bank and you can't help but start to wonder. Are we really heading for some E.L.E?
Why would you suddenly need to store vast amounts of information unless something profound was on the horizon.
Maybe this post still belongs in Science & Technology, but I am starting to think otherwise. As we all know, we are not being told something. I need
to investigate this further and report back.
