5 ms·

All the Data on Earth Can Fit in a Cup of DNA in MIT's Jurassic Park Project

20 points by poopcat 2y ago

jedberg 2y ago
One of my favorite facts is that the average male ejaculate contains 220PB of data.
- leslielurker 2y ago
  Could liquid hard drives be the next big thing?
  - jedberg 2y ago
    Storage is only 1/2 the problem. You still have to access it in an organized way.
- loloquwowndueo 2y ago
  Never underestimate the bandwidth of… (the rest is left as an exercise to the reader)
- croes 2y ago
  Total? Then it has a lot of redundant information.
- devsda 2y ago
  Quick search says, a single sperm contains around 787MB of data. The average speed of one of those swimmers is around 5mm/min and on an average there are around 280 million of them in the race. Curious folks can calculate the bandwidth themselves.
  - bibanez 2y ago
    So, it will definitely _load_
    - daveslash 2y ago
      Yes, but it's more like UDP than it is TCP. TCP has acknowledgements and retries. UDP is "fire and forget".
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
gbolcer 2y ago
If you've ever watched the movie Zero Theorem, their data analysts use data captures in fluid dynamics to manipulate and process the data. I always that that was a really interesting concept.
amelius 2y ago
Now if only we could build a molecular Turing machine that can replicate and distribute the data so it is processed in an ever increasing parallel way.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  Something similar has been done! https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0899 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.089...
kjkjadksj 2y ago
DNA data is interesting but I have to figure that it would be more interesting to encode information into protein. DNA is 4 bases, more information than binary certainly, but with protein chains you could use all the amino acids there are. Apparently 500 have been found in nature so far although us humans personally use far fewer. It would also seem to me you could engineer a stronger protein structure then how DNA is structured.
- jryb 2y ago
  Sure, but existing protein sequencing and synthesis technologies are severely limited. You'd lose so many orders of magnitude in scale, speed and cost that the increase in the number of characters wouldn't be worth it.
_puk 2y ago
We don't need perfect retrieval if we've got plenty of replica space. Usenet solved degradation with PAR[0] files. Extensive replication and error correction could go a long way to making this at least remotely viable. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive

20 points by poopcat 2y ago

jedberg 2y ago

One of my favorite facts is that the average male ejaculate contains 220PB of data.

leslielurker 2y ago
Could liquid hard drives be the next big thing?
- jedberg 2y ago
  Storage is only 1/2 the problem. You still have to access it in an organized way.
loloquwowndueo 2y ago
Never underestimate the bandwidth of… (the rest is left as an exercise to the reader)
croes 2y ago
Total? Then it has a lot of redundant information.
devsda 2y ago
Quick search says, a single sperm contains around 787MB of data. The average speed of one of those swimmers is around 5mm/min and on an average there are around 280 million of them in the race. Curious folks can calculate the bandwidth themselves.
- bibanez 2y ago
  So, it will definitely _load_
  - daveslash 2y ago
    Yes, but it's more like UDP than it is TCP. TCP has acknowledgements and retries. UDP is "fire and forget".

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

gbolcer 2y ago

If you've ever watched the movie Zero Theorem, their data analysts use data captures in fluid dynamics to manipulate and process the data. I always that that was a really interesting concept.

amelius 2y ago

Now if only we could build a molecular Turing machine that can replicate and distribute the data so it is processed in an ever increasing parallel way.

bongodongobob 2y ago
Something similar has been done! https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.0899 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2020.089...

kjkjadksj 2y ago

DNA data is interesting but I have to figure that it would be more interesting to encode information into protein. DNA is 4 bases, more information than binary certainly, but with protein chains you could use all the amino acids there are. Apparently 500 have been found in nature so far although us humans personally use far fewer. It would also seem to me you could engineer a stronger protein structure then how DNA is structured.

jryb 2y ago
Sure, but existing protein sequencing and synthesis technologies are severely limited. You'd lose so many orders of magnitude in scale, speed and cost that the increase in the number of characters wouldn't be worth it.

_puk 2y ago

We don't need perfect retrieval if we've got plenty of replica space. Usenet solved degradation with PAR[0] files. Extensive replication and error correction could go a long way to making this at least remotely viable. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parchive