5 ms·
This is pretty trivial - of course we can encode anything we want in DNA - people have done cool things with this since synthesis was first invented. And assumi
by Blahah 13y ago
This is pretty trivial - of course we can encode anything we want in DNA - people have done cool things with this since synthesis was first invented. And assuming DNA synthesis technology continues to improve rapidly we might even be able to synthesise bacterial genomes routinely in the next 10 years.
So you can write a computer program to a bacterium. Then you can sequence it and the code goes back to being stored on a computer.
But it ends there - the code never gets executed again. FASTA files are just text files that would rarely have executable permissions and never actually be executed by a user. Most boring and uneventful outbreak ever.
- 3pt14159 13y agoNot boring or uneventful at all! An amazing way of transmitting information across eons or under in regimes of restricted communication! If I can infect a common fly with my stenographed, encrypted message, then I can communicate with people in China! I can translate our major books in every language and hide that data in cockroaches! If we ever nuke ourselves so badly that we only have people living in bunkers, then maybe one day they will discover that we hid all of our knowledge in life! Maybe this has already happened! Maybe aliens did so with mathematical proofs when they discovered our world an eternity ago! I reject your claim of boring! THIS IS AMAZING!
- nzp 13y agoAMAZING enthusiasm! :)
- angersock 13y agoAngersock's 1st Rule of Storage: "Any sufficiently advanced compression or encoding is indistinguishable from /dev/null"
- andrewflnr 13y agoIn a "we just nuked ourselves" scenario, integrity of genetic information is one of the first things to go.