Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

Illuminaso t1_j10h56g wrote

Reply to comment by NotShey in How realistic is “The future of” on Netflix? by alakeya

DNA is a pretty lossy system though. I mean hell, that's how evolution happens. If you wanted to preserve some data in DNA for thousands of years, when you came back to it it may have evolved into something completely different.

​

If you were to store it on a USB stick or a hard drive it would last forever provided it was stored properly.

6

NotShey t1_j11hmtx wrote

>DNA is a pretty lossy system though

Depends on the species, and on a time scale of thousands of years, DNA can be very stable compared to most other storage mediums. On a timescale of millions of years everything is pretty lossy.

5

Suekru t1_j10m09c wrote

I figured they write it on a plant that could live thousands of years, like a tree. That way they could access the same DNA.

USB sticks, if not plugged in once in a while will eventually lose their data. The time for this is about 10 years or a bit more.

Hard drives might be a better option than a USB stick for long term storage, but they use magnets to store data and eventually they will deteriorate. With that said I have like a 20 year old hard drive that the data on it is still readable, so they can last a while. But I doubt data would be readable after a 100 years. Not impossible, depends on the quality of the drive.

But multiple generation data storage like 1000 years, you’d need to switch the data to a new drive every so often and keep plenty of backups. So the DNA method would be an interesting work around to this problem.

1