A photo from open sources
Despite the fact that human civilization is intensely searching for everything new ways of self-destruction, there is a chance that our spiritual the legacy will survive. Servers, hard drives, drives and flash drives with time, of course, collapse, but a group of researchers (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) found a way encoding data in DNA. This will allow the information to survive. millennia.
One gram of DNA can contain up to 455 exabytes (billion gigabytes) of data. EMC Cloud Computing Estimates that the amount of information on earth in 2011 was about 1.8 zettabyte. Therefore, about 4 grams of DNA are enough for us. (not more than a teaspoon) to preserve everything human heritage.
DNA consists of four types of molecules that form pairs. For to program the information into DNA, experts programmed given pairs as zeros and ones, that is, they created the simplest binary code, which is the basis of all digital information in the world. However, we are not talking about a new approach: in 2012. harvard the scientists encoded the book in DNA. However, until recently save and retrieve back from the molecule the data was big a problem.
Swiss Grass Project Leader Robert Grass Offers a New Way preservation of information: it should be treated as a fossil. Scientists kept a sample of DNA in a quartz shell for several weeks at a temperature of 60 ° Celsius to test its strength.
When the sample was restored, the researchers successfully considered saved information. As Grass says, if DNA is stored at subzero temperatures, it will be possible to read data through millions of years.
Today, such a process is very expensive. To create a swiss sample encoded 83 kilobytes of data required about one and a half thousand dollars, Grass noted.
But with the development of new technologies, it will surely decrease and the cost of such coding. In this case, we can hope that our spiritual heritage will not be lost forever, no matter what happened to us. And perhaps such methods of storing information will replace modern hard drives and flash memory.
DNA time
