Human genome stored on 'everlasting' memory crystal | Hacker News Reader

Human genome stored on 'everlasting' memory crystal

southampton.ac.uk

59 pointsbreck32 comments

This is kind of my idea for how to update funeral rites in the time of science: When someone passes, fully sequence a number of samples of their genome and put the data into a really good archival medium. To me, this feels like a great way to preserve information about loved ones worth caring about (and potentially useful to their descendants), more so than the physical remains.

A family mausoleum full of ancestral DNA would be quite nice and meaningful, even if many other things about the person are lost. It's probably how I'd like to be "buried".

Maybe this is the suitable medium.

I really like the concept. But it also sort of makes me sad - what about all the DNA we haven't archived, which could hold so many secrets about solving diseases? Of course we don't all want it sequenced when we're alive because of the privacy concerns.

i expect in the future all information perhaps could be recovered.. everyone possibly revived.. so its a question of how early

I foresee a future where people obtain genetic samples of their long-dead ancestors and they decide to clone and gestate them in artificial wombs.

Imagine a weird youtube channel that is a combination of urban exploration / it's just a prank bro / DIY science where they break into a crypt to dig up the bones of some historical figure to grow a clone in a vat for clout.

Scribble there best quotes on the tombstone. Nobody remembers names, besides those who already knew a guy. But good recipes, good quotes, they are memes, glider guns they will see heat death.

I think it would also be good to keep info on what the person was like, video, writing etc. They you could use AI to bring them back in the style of a Hogwarts portrait perhaps.

This is the coolest thing I've seen here in a while. Not to spoil it, but Liu Cixin goes into durability in the final book in the Three Body series, it left me thinking for a while about just how transient we are. How exciting that we're working to solve that problem.

Which human? Despite large sections shared by all mankind and even other species, each individual has an unique genome, except identical twins.

I was unable to find a scientific article explaining the data source in detail. Likely, they uploaded the reference genome.

It is worse than that. There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes.

https://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw0726

Also chimeras exist (even natural ones)

> There is drift within an organism. The genome on your scalp is different than the genome on your toes

> Also chimeras exist

This provides a deep insight into the nature of multicellular life. People think that a "unicellular organism" eventually turned into a "multicellular organism". But they're not so distinct. The latter is really still just a bunch of cells coordinating, but their coordination is so deep, and the number of cells and functions so large, that emergent properties arise.

Worse than that, by count, only a minority of the cells using a person's DNA make up that person. The number of other cells are 10x, but being smaller, only make up 1% to 3% by mass. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/nih-human-micr...

any human differs less than 1 % (although it really depends on how you count differences). It would make sense to store one reference, and then everybody is stored as a delta relative to that (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRAM_(file_format) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_of_genomic_sequenc...)

I feel like I've been reading about variations on this concept (storing data in crystals using a pair of lasers) for my whole life. I've never seen articles about anything other than research stage work though... no companies trying to commercialize, no engineering prototypes, etc.

I could just have missed them, but the longevity of the idea compared to lack of product makes me wonder what the hold-up is... too expensive to make? Bad data transfer rates?

On its surface (pun not intended) a super long-lasting high capacity, write-only storage medium seems to have all sorts of good use cases, so I can't imagine a lack of demand would be a problem.. without some deeper technical holdback.

If anything exists to read and use this data it probably won’t be all that exciting to bring back legacy humans.

You never know. In the pre nuclear age, human genome were slightly different.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/15/health/superbugs-antibiot...

We could use it to restore our own genome. The Y chromosome may become extinct in as little as 5Myr[1], such a record may allow our descendants to refresh it. We'd be avoiding a pretty common scifi trope (although the trope usually arises due to cloning).

[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58997-2

Urban legend. Almost all of the gene loss happened 200 million years ago in early mammals. In the past 40 million years, our ancestors lost one Y-chromosome gene one single time about 20 million years ago. In the 7 million years since we separated from chimps, there have not been any genes lost from the Y.

Note: a similar shrinking pattern is seen in birds, where females have a small W chromosome and males have two large Z's.

Sounds a bit like the voyager 1 golden vinyl disks

The human drawings on the crystal are actually the same as the ones on the voyager 1 disks.

Edit; the human drawings were on the metal plate, not the disk.

Team mentioned this as homage to Pioneer's plaque https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque

Is it me or the arrows suggests that the data can only restore a male? Does it comes with its other half?

Enough space to store all of my mom's whatsapp video chains. Sweet. :o)

> Unlike marking only on the surface of a 2D piece of paper or magnetic tape, this method of encoding uses two optical dimensions and three spatial co-ordinates to write throughout the material - hence the ‘5D’ in its name.

Ummmmm.......

I guess wavelength and polarization of light? (I guess I have no idea how that's even possible to encode into a crystal, but it's two optical dimensions I suppose.)

Yeah. That and

> a revolutionary data storage format that can survive for billions of years

Clearly it hasn't been verified to be able to survive for billions of years, but it is thought to be able to survive for billions of years based on extrapolation from tests done over time scales multiple orders of magnitude smaller.

Diamonds are forever, but they fare poorly when they meet a hydraulic press (source: Hydraulic Press Channel) or a chemist who wants "real diamond water" (source: NileRed).

Not holding my breath but I'll take one of these 5D memory crystals in 5¼ drive bay form factor thank you. Imagine a 100TB disc for a few bucks. Hell, I'd settle for 1TB.

You can get 1tb SD cards for a few bucks today.

Will they retain my data for billions of years reliably? How about reliably for 10 years? Answer is "No."

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