(And no, its not subtle (the gaming), analytics show that Kickstarters that make the front page get more $$ so its part of the marketing campaign no doubt)
Yes, what? If you think about it like a SciFy movie, it is guaranteed to result in a gigantic, walking plant, smarter than a human, which wants to destroy us all. Also ghosts some how.
If you actually think about it, than the chances of those 30 characters, being something which will help the plant survive and thrive in the wild, are tiny. Virtually non existent.
Any one currently thriving wild plant has a better chance of mutating itself in that way. Any current wild plant could become an invasive species by sticking one of its seeds the the shoe of a human getting on a plane.
People way overestimate the chances of bio-engineering to create anything truly dangerous. And people way underestimate the chances of the regular old all natural flu to kill a huge percentage of humanity in any given year.
I was joking of course, I love biot's comment about overwriting the call stack and taking over the genome. And no doubt these world class geneticists wouldn't actually insert what looks like a garbage string of characters if the DNA they coded matched up some sort of virus or something. Of course "Copyright CEM rights reserved" is 30 chars too :-) which would make for a weird legal thing where you argued the Kickstarter was a 'work for hire' and you've got the copyright to prove it yadda yadda.
In 30 characters you can encode the ADN for very small proteins. Many of them are interesting [1]. For example, oxitocyn has only 9 aminoacids [2]. Each aminoacid is encoded in a 3-base codon [3], and most of the codons can be tranlated to an ASCII letter [4]. (You must choose carefully the aminoacid->codon translation to get printable characters.)
But you will need also at least a starting and ending signal, so in total you will need 11 characters. But it's not enough to have the information there, the cell will not produce the associated protein unless it is in some bigger regulatory structure. For example, it needs to be part of an operon [5] that is a much bigger ADN sequence. (I couldn't find the minimal size.)
I think that not even the 140 characters are enough to destroy the word or create a drug producing plant. But IANAMB.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peptide
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxytocin#Structure_and_relation...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_code
[4] http://www.righto.com/2010/06/using-arc-to-decode-venters-se...