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It’s funny that you say all this. DNA (and many actual living things like plants) last a REALLY LONG time under correct conditions. We haven’t got any kind of d
by noodlesUK 6y ago
It’s funny that you say all this. DNA (and many actual living things like plants) last a REALLY LONG time under correct conditions. We haven’t got any kind of digital storage with even remotely that level of information density that would last that long without extreme degradation. DNA can last hundreds of years at non-freezing temperatures and still be read, and for thousands of years frozen.
- adrianN 6y agoThe point of digital storage is not that you etch it in crystal and store it in a vault somewhere, but that you can make redundant copies for free.
- FractalParadigm 6y agoAs someone with a very rudimentary understanding of biology, how much data are we talking about in terms of a DNA sequence? I.E. if we wanted to store a human's complete set of DNA digitally, are we at a point where we can definitively say "this will take X GB of storage"?
- silleknarf 6y agoFrom elsewhere on the internet (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-storage-would-be-required-to-store-a-human-genome https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8954571/how-much-storage...): "The 2.9 billion base pairs of the haploid human genome correspond to a maximum of about 725 megabytes of data, since every base pair can be coded by 2 bits. Since individual genomes vary by less than 1% from each other, they can be losslessly compressed to roughly 4 megabytes."
- MagnumOpus 6y agoA complete haploid human genome is 3 billion base pairs. One byte encodes four basepairs, so that's 750MB in total; and it losslessly compresses to less than half that amount. If you store more than one genome, any additional genome is only 4MB because human genomes are 99% identical. So you could store the genomes of an entire city on your hard drive.