Humanity has a data storage problem: More data were created in the past 2 years than in all of preceding history. And that torrent of information may soon outstrip the ability of hard drives to capture it.It is astonishing that chance and natural selection could have produced a data storage apparatus with this degree of capacity. If brilliant engineers bringing to bear all the genius of the human species and highly sophisticated technology can't develop storage media that can even come close to what nature has produced pretty much by lucky accident, shouldn't we be askin whether it was really an accident?
Now, researchers report that they’ve come up with a new way to encode digital data in DNA to create the highest-density large-scale data storage scheme ever invented. Capable of storing 215 petabytes (215 million gigabytes) in a single gram of DNA, the system could, in principle, store every bit of datum ever recorded by humans in a container about the size and weight of a couple of pickup trucks.
DNA has many advantages for storing digital data. It’s ultracompact, and it can last hundreds of thousands of years if kept in a cool, dry place.
And as long as human societies are reading and writing DNA, they will be able to decode it. “DNA won’t degrade over time like cassette tapes and CDs, and it won’t become obsolete,” says Yaniv Erlich, a computer scientist at Columbia University.
And unlike other high-density approaches, such as manipulating individual atoms on a surface, new technologies can write and read large amounts of DNA at a time, allowing it to be scaled up.
We know that minds can intentionally produce exquisitely designed information storage mechanisms but we have no experience of such technologies being created by sheer chance. Since, we have a uniform experience of such prodigies being produced by minds, and since, as David Hume taught us, that for which we have experience is much more credible than that for which we don't, the claim that DNA and its amazing data storage capacity are the product of intelligent engineering is much more credible than the belief that it's a fortuitous accident.
Anyway, here's a four minute video which gives a brief explanation of the sort of research being done on using DNA as a data storage medium:
