Heart of glass: Human genome stored for 'eternity' in 5D memory crystal Whether or not some future entity will want to bring humanity back after its eventual extinction is now a theoretical if improbable option, thanks to boffins at the University of Southampton in the UK. Researchers led by optoelectronics professor Peter Kazansky have used an ultra-fast laser to inscribe the human genome in a 5D …
Good luck recreating people without also storing the genome of all the bacteria and viruses
I was thinking that you would also need instructions on the synthesis of the non nucleic acid, mostly peptide, components of cells involved in transcription (DNA->mRNA) and translation (mRNA->peptide) just to bootstrap. Without even contemplating chromosomal structures and mitochondrial DNA.
I suspect alien lifeforms based on entirely different chemistries given this record without a living example of our nucleic acid/aminoacid biochemistry would be completely flummoxed.
Personally I would hope this exhibit is labelled NOT Mostly Harmless
See The Monster* - A. E. van Vogt (1948)
* aka Resurrection
Look up the RNA World Hypothesis, RNA can be both info store & enzyme. It likely came first, the things which break down naked RNA in this world did not exist back then. Experiments which removed all the proteins and the later added RNAs from the ribosome made a ribosome which self assembles and makes protein. It’s slow and buggy but it works and life probably wasn’t that fast back then and buggy can be a feature in exploring morphospace.
So the sequences of those RNAs along with the RNA Pol III mRNAs should suffice.
I had a related discussion recently in the pub and my friend's wife pointed out that even with ingredients and instructions I can't make a decent Yorkshire pudding! You could analyse a Yorkshire with, say, a mass spectrometer and know all the elements and compounds that it contains, but you'd be a long way from being able to re-create one as good as my mum makes.
Our DNA contains the info for building a human body inside another, so that's likely a showstopper right there.
Aha, but.. The DNA also contains the instructions for building a womb and all the ancillary equipment. Might take a bit of trial and error, or just inserting the reconstructed DNA into a tin of primordial soup and waiting a bit.
I believe this to be incorrect. Although some people do in fact refer to the memory crystal storage capability in Windows65536 and later as "6D", it is actually a Summer Coding Project spin off based on Memory Crystal 4D without the massive MC 5D fixes and additions and with some quite incomprehensible additions of its own. The actual (draft) 6D standard has been stalled in an IETF committee for 13 years.
Yeah. So "eternity" is probably what... a year or so until that is repurposed or broken or forgotten?
"This glass has interesting refraction patterns. It was probably used to for personal decoration or religious purposes"
("religious purposes" being "archaeologist" for "we don't f*cking know")
We already sent a plaque on a probe telling the enemy fleet exactly where we are. How long before someone thinks it's a great idea to give the fleet out entire genetic code so they can tailor bio-weapons ready to soften us up[*] for the invasion?
* or wipe us out in one fell swoop. Nothing like undercutting the other mercenary forces by making the invasion as low cost as possible :-)
Right on! Next up they'll be sending out the Cleveland Clinic's manual for how to create a successful zombie apocalypse!
"We already sent a plaque on a probe telling the enemy fleet exactly where we are."
Well, there are TWO probes we launched into space - and on these plaques we told them where we were, "when" it was launched (and just gave our planets position withing the Solar System, plus a few markers out to various stars).
But since then the Solar System has moved around the Milky Way a little bit and it will continue to do so, for many aeons to come, so any one (or thing) will need to do a lot of searching within the MW to find out where we are.
And by then it might be too late anyways, if the human species hasn't either nuked itself (due to some depot with his/her finger on the trigger) or starved or warmed itself to extinction due to a lack of food and/or someone leaving that electric fire switched ON 24/7 :-)
Alien Wife: Well, we're lost again...nice going. You ruined the holiday.
Alien: According to the map it should be here.
Alien Wife: Yeah, 2 billion fucking years ago.
Alien: Hey, I didn't want to come here, I just wanted a weekend away somewhere on our own planet. You insisted!
The enemy hardly needs biological weapons. A space-faring civilization capable of spanning the mind-boggling distances between stars will just chuck a 20km-wide asteroid at our planet and wait two (twenty ?) years for the fallout to wipe eveything out.
Then they can colonize and mine our planet for whatever it is they think they're looking for, or just use the planet as another host for their ever-growing population.
Exactly whose DNA did they sequence to make this thing?
Ah, well-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project#Genome_donors
It was one of those FUN! projects where the UK did a lot of the work at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge. Then some additional FUN! when this happened-
The statement sent Celera's stock plummeting and dragged down the biotechnology-heavy Nasdaq. The biotechnology sector lost about $50 billion in market capitalization in two days
After Celera decided it was going to try and patent a lot of our sequences. Which the USPO seemed happy to comply with, even though there are several billion copies of prior art wandering around the planet. So the public labs published first and spoiled Celera's cunning plan to charge a licence fee every time people made copies of their 'work'. Which would then build on the work of Cleese, Chapman, Jones et al and prove that not only was every sperm sacred, but allowed for the collection of royalties.
But the HGP is kind of an ensemble, and maybe more accurately described as the Human Chromosome Project given it mapped all the human chromsomes. Which also got into ethical stuff, like it needed to include both X and Y sets. Which would also be a challenge for future aliens who might try attempting to reconstruct a human from the chromsomal parts.
But still a fascinating project and still delivering science, ie having a reference set of sequences, then a lot of ongoing work into sequencing more DNA and looking for genetic differences that might explain a whole slew of health conditions. Of which I'm proud to play a part in having donated DNA to explore if genes have an effect on diabetes.
And it's also a neat example of UK science, ie the Southampton ORCs have been busily doing all sorts of interesting things in the optical field.
The discussion is still open on that point. Maybe when the Sun goes into its red giant phase it will indeed swallow our planet, or maybe the Earth's orbit will have changed because the Sun's gravitational pull will have weakened.
Either way, Humanity will have to have evacuated long before, or it will already be extinct and the fate of Planet Earth will no longer be a problem.
"the fate of Planet Earth will no longer be a problem."
To humanity, maybe, but all the other species might have something to say about it!
Who knows what might have evolved to fill the niche we occupied once we've offed ourselves by whatever means.
...would it not have been useful to put a metal ring around the crystal and embed a small radioactive isotope with a long half life to make it detectable through rubble and soil? Or are the boffins expecting a perfect mint condition museum exhibit to exist billions of years into the future where this crystal is sitting on a plinth?
It seems we've found a way to store the data, but not make it discoverable by aliens sifting through the rubble and ruins of our planet, a tiny crystal will be incredibly difficult to find, even if the aliens have technology we can't imagine...boffins my arse.
It's a vanity project, and as such its life span doesn't exceed the next fad. In time terms, at most a year.
You didn't believe it might have some practical application, did you? A tiny little piece of glass, on which somebody has encoded the genome of some random person, using some mostly unknown encoding method. In 20-30 years even us humans won't know what that thingy is, assuming it isn't lost by then. Chances it will land in the recycling bin during a house cleaning well before that.
Isn't glass technically a fluid? Are they *really* sure those 20-nm sized features won't have moved in a billion years time? Wouldn't it better to have a massive, say 1m3, cube of glass and make the features a thousand times larger? It would be more impressive and harder to lose, too.
I guess it doesn't matter though. Like you say, somebody has paid for it now, so its job is done.
....that any future civilisation that has mastered the technology to recreate humans from this blueprint aren't so idiotic as to bother trying.
If we've been wiped out, there was probably a good reason: either we can't survive the conditions the planet is in (so any reproduced 'human' would be confined to a strictly controlled lab environment) or we were too damn stupid in the first place.
Won't stop a future generation Spielburg releasing a Jurassic World type film where rouge humans escape their enclosures and smash up wave-riders or whatever passes for 30th Century transport :-)
Pointless. Not the sequencing project but the fancy "archival" storage.
I don't think it is. But then it's basically a way to get media attention to otherwise fairly 'dull' storage advances. Which given our insatiable appetite for kitteh pics, can only be a good thing. Long term gets a bit more fun, but then also data stores that might be less prone to corruption in space. Plus it also gets people thinking. So storage density still isn't great, ie we can fit a greater amount of data in a smaller volume in, err.. DNA. Plus a sperm and an egg form a sorta self-replicating mechanism for reading & writing that data. Downside is storing that data would be harder.
Or future archaelogists digging up what was Florida find elaborate arrays of memory crystals, often in the centre of places of worship. They find evidence of power going to these arrays, but can't figure out how the read/write processes worked, or extract data from these crystal arrays. So they may find a crystal like this one and bin it because they've found similar silicon-based devices marked with strange symbols like 80W and 100W, but couldn't recover data from those either.
Which is a bit like some of the 'debate' around nuclear waste depositorys. People spend much time coming up with elaborate long-term warning symbols instead of just having people touch up the signs or replace them every few years. Which is like the graphics on this wafer, so how to indicate it contains something interesting. I guess they could be buried under big black monoliths though.
Over in Belgium, there is this underground Sourdough library - may be the aliens can start baking bread,,,
So what if we found a 300 million year old one of those created by a long lost intelligent species?
What would we do with it? Re-create what would be to us an alien, along with some of their technology?
Happy happy happy, Joy joy joy!
Has anyone made that film yet? There's too much sci-fi now for me to attempt to follow any of it, so I honestly don't know.
As an inherently inquisitive representative of the mainstream roach population I might, just might, consider paying to watch those funny 'humans' recreated after a catastrophi event, as they hop around their re-created cages in a local zoo. But then, isn't it a huge waste to spend state resources on such trifle pleasures?! I'm sure the other gentleroaches would agree that we face more pressing problems, like overroaching of our planet, never mind the clear and present danger from those underroaches across the sea who constantly try to infect and effectively poison our way of life! We need to focus on REAL roachproblems, and I strongly believe I have a solution to all of them!
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