London () – Scientists in the UK have stored the entire human genome in a “5D memory crystal”, in the hope that it can be used in the future as a model to lead humanity back from extinction.
The crystal, which was developed by a team of researchers at the University of Southampton’s Optoelectronics Research Centre, could also be used to create a record of endangered plant and animal species.
It can store up to 360 terabytes of information for billions of years and can withstand extreme conditions including freezing, fire, direct impact force, cosmic radiation and temperatures of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius, the university said in a news release published Thursday.
In 2014, glass was awarded the Guinness World Record for “most durable digital storage material.”
Kazansky’s team used ultrafast lasers to inscribe human genome data into gaps as small as 20 nanometers (a nanometer is about one billionth of a meter).
They describe the data storage in the crystal as 5D because the information is translated into five different dimensions of its nanostructures: their height, length, width, orientation and position.
“The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to build a permanent repository of genomic information from which complex organisms such as plants and animals could be restored if science allows in the future,” said Peter Kazansky, professor of Optoelectronics, who led the Southampton team.
The team had to consider who – or what – would be recovering the information in the distant future.
It could be an intelligence (species or machine), or it could be in such a distant future that no frame of reference exists for it. To help whoever finds it, the researchers included a visual cue.
“The visual key inscribed on the glass gives the searcher knowledge of what data is stored inside and how it might be used,” Kazansky said.
“Their work is impressive,” said Thomas Heinis, who leads research into DNA storage at Imperial College London and was not involved in the study. But he says questions remain about how such data might be read in the future.
“What Southampton is presenting is probably more durable, but that begs the question: for what? Future generations? Sure, but how will they know how to read the glass? How will they know how to build the device to read the glass? Will the device be available hundreds of years from now?” he added. “I can barely plug in my iPod from 10 years ago and listen to what I listened to then.”
For now, the crystal is stored in the Memory of Humanity archive, a time capsule inside a salt cave in Austria.
In 2018, Kazansky and his team used memory crystal technology to store Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy of science fiction books, which were then launched into space aboard a Tesla Roadster. The technology has also been used to store important documents from human history, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Magna Carta.
Earlier this year, scientists unveiled a plan to safeguard Earth’s species in a cryogenic biorepository on the Moon, intended to save species in the event of a disaster on our home planet.
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