Ancient civilizations already knew that the transmission of information between generations was vital, and so they left papyri, tablets and ceramic inscriptions so as not to lose the knowledge acquired.
Thanks to the materials used, in addition to their natural conservation, history was frozen in different symbols tied to a medium, something that with current storage media it would be complicated.
The invention of the printing press in the 15th century helped preserve the history and culture of different civilizations, although books also have a limited life, since the passage of time takes its toll on them, unless they are preserved as a relic under a display case.
With the unstoppable advancement of technology in recent decades, each user can save – at a very reasonable price – their entire history in a pocket-sized device, such as solid state drives (SSD) and mechanical hard drives (HDD).
However, as with any technology, this type of storage device has a problem that, in the future, could lead to the loss of information, such as its useful life of approximately 10 years.
Fortunately, humans have been able to create the hard drive of the future, with what is known as DNA storage, a technology that was proposed many years ago, but still has a long way to go.
DNA storage, a future that never ends
Currently, the storage configuration is not the most efficient, since beyond external drives, very expensive servers and structures are needed for everything related to the cloud.
Although it may seem strange, DNA storage is capable of solving all these limitations, without the need for data centers and, of course, with a useful life that could reach 1,000 years.
To make this a reality, this type of storage uses the same structure as a DNA sequence, divided into 4 bases: adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine (ATCG).
Now, machines do not understand a language made up of 4 different structures, but their understanding is organized with what is known as binary code, that is, strings of 0 and 1 that can be interpreted in order to function.
In this sense, storage in DNA divides the ATCG structure into 2 pairsto ensure that each string represents a 0 or 1, in the same way that can be seen in the DNA of human beings.
Mark Bathe, associate member of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University, explained in an MIT press release all the advantages of this type of storage as follows:
«DNA is 1,000 times denser than flash memory, and another property that’s interesting is that once you make the DNA polymer, it doesn’t consume energy,» he said. «You can write DNA and then store it forever.»
At the moment, there are some companies specialized in computing with DNA, even publishing books with this type of storage, an anthology by Asimov Press, through the launch of 1,000 DNA capsules.
The limitations of storing data in DNA
Although this type of storage was theoretically proposed at the beginning of the millennium, the costs of scaling DNA storage are extremely high.
According to the researchers’ calculations, considerably exceeds the cost of mechanical unitswith a price of 1 trillion dollars per million gigabytes, the first obstacle in the short term.
Another drawback, after having encapsulated the data, is being able to extract it, something that is not so simple; Bathe and his team tried to solve this by using barcode labels on mini silica capsules.
For this reason, at the moment experts assure that DNA storage, although it is a reality, would rather serve to store the so-called «cold» data, those that are not usually used, since speeds barely reach 1 kilobyte per second.
In this case, the coming decades, with the improvement of DNA for saving files, could lead to a scenario in which SSDs are complemented by this technology, which would mean having a reliable and ancient backup copy.