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Comment by LinuxBender | Hacker News Reader

If ones goal was to preserve DNA, might it be more feasible to build a digital representation of the DNA and create multiple copies with parity data stored in multiple mediums and distributed to reduce risk of physical damage? Could the DNA be regenerated from the digital data? If not now, in the future perhaps?

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you could absolutely make enormous numbers of stone tablets with tiny lithography marks to encode information. Combined with replication and a redundancy code, you could store enormous amounts of information for enormous amounts of time.

But it seems better to just make a dark dry cold repository and store DNA in a matrix that lasts for a long time.

Do we know the half-life of a digital record?

I suspect that depends on the chosen stored medium. I am assuming perhaps incorrectly that we could find a medium more durable than genetic material with known degeneration rates.

The first thing that comes to mind is the fictional society from the planet Krypton. They stored data in crystals, likely artificially created diamond material. I suspect we could do this today without consideration for cost.

As far as I'm aware stone doesn't erode in space, so we could always just laser in bumps on a stone and read it like a CD. The primary concern then becomes avoiding getting hit by micro debris.

Sorry if my parent comment came of antagonistic.

I was really just asking.

Either way there must be advantages in multiple backups: - DNA - Digital sequence - Crystals - Stone etching

Even with different decay rates they won't all decay in the same way. We can diff multiple records and reproduce a probable original.

(I think - I'm not expert in digital storage or the mechanics of DNA)

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