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If humans are annihilated by an asteroid – or our own madness – what will remain of us? Our data, at least, if the plans of the Arch Mission Foundation are unfolding. The non-profit organization based in Los Angeles says it will launch the texts of 20 "important books" chosen by Project Gutenberg (a voluntary effort to digitize print materials), as well as 10,000 images from a crowd. . The project organizers hope to eventually include all of Wikipedia, as well as maps of the genome and much of the world's greatest artistic, musical, literary and scientific knowledge.
To record such a large amount of information, the foundation is turning to a new form of data storage: the DNA. New technologies use the four basic nucleotides, or "letters", of the genetic molecule (adenine, thymine, guanine, and cytosine) as digital bits to encode the data, in the same way that computers convert information to zeros and binaries. The foundation aims to make the first tranche of the Lunar library the largest collection of data ever written in synthetic DNA.
The first stage of the lunar library will be launched in 2020 aboard an Atlas V rocket and delivered to the lunar surface by a robotic landing gear called Peregrine, manufactured by the private start-up Astrobotic. The trip will be Peregrine's first mission, and the Arch Mission Foundation's books and images, in their digital DNA form (enclosed in layers of metal armor in a small container), will be among his first payloads.
American scientist Recently, he spoke with Nova Spivack, co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation, about the practicality of his plans, the intended audience and the benefits of DNA storage.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows].
What is your overall goal for the Lunar Library?
We have formed the Arch Mission Foundation after many years of research on the question of how to preserve human civilization on geological time scales – millions or billions of years. When you look at the history of civilizations on Earth, it turns out that most of them are not, statistically. There could be a solar flare, a kind of impact of an object that we did not know to be there. With all these threats, it seems prudent to develop an insurance policy to back up our data. Our plan is to land a giant library on the moon. He will be there forever, literally. We try to convey the largest message possible during the longest period.
Why did you decide to use DNA to store your data?
We discovered that there is no modern media capable of doing it. SSDs and optical disks have a life span measured over several decades. Not only are actual physical materials degraded, but the hardware needed to access the data also has a reduced life. Our constraints are unique. We need to store petabytes [a petabyte is a million gigabytes]. By using DNA as a building block, you can write and store information in an extremely small volume. A tiny droplet of liquid could hold the entire Amazon data center. You can then reproduce it inexpensively to create billions of copies.
We use synthetic DNA. It does not code for a living organism – it's just data storage. We take the DNA, in liquid or powder form, and encapsulate it in a special material that can then be encapsulated in a film on the thickness of the paper. We "write" 20 famous books and 10,000 images. We believe that it is the largest library written in the DNA of this type.
DNA can be fragile and prone to errors. Why is this a good option for long-term storage?
A large number of DNA errors occur when you reproduce them using sexual selection. In this case, we do not have this problem. When we reproduce it, we make fairly exact copies. The fragility of DNA molecules is a challenge, but they are actually quite stable and durable on Earth in a controlled environment. They do not degrade over millions of years, we found DNA preserved in amber dinosaurs.
We need to experiment to evaluate its effectiveness in the space environment and in the lunar environment. There are extreme temperatures and you have cosmic rays. But the key to DNA is many copies in many places. And if the moon explodes? We need to place it in other places around the Earth and in many other places in the solar system. We can statistically guarantee that this dataset will be there if someone finds it in several billion years.
Even if this dataset manages to survive for billions of years, what are the chances that whoever finds it can read it?
We have to make some assumptions. It must be a form of life that is at least as intelligent as we are and that has eyes and can see in the visible spectrum. If the microbial civilization is so small that these things look like them, that will obviously not be the case.
We start with a primer layer, which is millions of images, which teaches [whoever finds the library] what they need to know to assemble computers and other devices to read the deeper data layers. The primer consists of visual data etched on nickel or quartz at approximately 300,000 dots per inch using special laser technology. You do not need a computer to view it and the images are not digital – you can see them through a low power microscope (we provide the microscope, of course). From there, we teach what you need to know to understand this data. Then we teach what you need to know to extract and understand much larger digital data.
When Voyager probes launched their famous "gold discs" [of sounds and images] in the 1970s, they were conceived as art projects as much as a practical message that extraterrestrials would be likely to read. Do you think your library is primarily functional or symbolic?
There is one aspect of this great gesture that brings together our hopes and dreams of becoming a civilization of space. Like all great monuments, it is a cultural and symbolic gesture. But we are also trying to do our best so that it can be used in the future. According to the assumptions that we made, I think in fact that it is reasonable to believe [future life-forms] will be able to understand that.
The benefit of this is not just for potential hypothetical beings in a million years. It's also now. We are like a privately funded DARPA that focuses specifically on preservation and the technologies that enable it. We stimulate research that generates potential benefits today.
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