Jaron Lanier, with the collaboration of David Sulzer and Lisa Haney came up with this intriguing and highly feasible idea for a Manhattan time capsule … although you could do this anywhere.
Some of the cockroach’s genes are extremely stable. They have not changed substantially for millions of years, and are therefore extremely likely to remain stable for the next one thousand years. Associated with these genes are DNA sequences known as introns which serve no known purpose. While it is possible that these sequences serve some unidentified function, their content is gibberish.
Recombinant techniques will be used to overwrite this gibberish with the archival materials. While computer memory is made of bits, which exist in two states (zero or one), DNA is composed of four “base pairs”; so it has four states. Therefore a given sequence of DNA can store twice as much information as a similar length of computer memory.
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Within approximately fourteen years, the archival roaches will inexorably become so endemic as to become an ubiquitous and permanent feature of the island.
In order to decode the archive, a future historian would make use of Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to amplify and then sequence the fragments, turning the DNA sequence once again into the contents of a computer’s memory. In order to facilitate decoding, the archive will not make use of data compression or encryption technologies.
This sounds like a great McGuffin for a sci-fi story, or perhaps the means of transmitting secret spy messages … or a 1,000 year time capsule if you want to be practical.
