- How many Libraries of Congress
can dance on the head of a pin?
(energetic music)
Anyone remember good old zip drives?
Or hey, hey, how about these guys right here?
Or hey, hey, hey, here's an old favorite.
Right, you remember these?
No, it's not a 3D printout of your Save icon.
This is a 3 1/2 inch floppy disk,
and this little sucker could hold
a whopping 1.44 megabytes of information.
Wow, those were the days.
Today, I carry around a device
that has more than 44,000 times the storage capacity
of this sucker right here.
And the only reason this thing isn't
smaller than this thing is because
I'm old and I need a big screen
in order to read all those messages on Twitter.
It turns out the future isn't just about thinking big,
it's also about thinking small.
For example, what if we wanted to fit 150
of my smartphones, that would be the equivalent
of about 10,000 gigabytes on the head of a pin.
We can do that, if our storage medium is DNA.
DNA is the programming language of our genetic code,
and it depends upon four building blocks.
Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine.
And you can think of them as being similar
to the 0s and 1s we use in machine language.
It actually encodes information
that our cells depend upon for all their behaviors.
And DNA can store a lot of data in a very small space.
The theoretical limit for data storage in DNA
is an exabyte of data per cubic millimeter.
So you could store a billion gigabytes of data
in two ten-thousandths of a teaspoon.
This stuff can survive for up to 500 years,
even in harsh environments.
Compare that to the traditional storage media
we've used in the past, like CDs or floppy disks.
Those might last five or ten years
before being corrupted.
Even magnetic tape can only last between 15 and 30 years.
A few teams of computer scientists around the world
have been experimenting with ways to store data into DNA.
And they worked with bio-engineers to synthesize data
and build it block by block.
Back in April, 2016, a group of scientists
with the University of Washington
collaborated with Microsoft Research
to come up with a new means
of encoding information in strands of DNA.
They took the binary data of the file they wanted to encode,
and they converted it into base 4,
to match those four building blocks of DNA.
They then included ID tags that allowed them
to access any byte within a large pool of data.
They encoded four large files,
and they were able to access them almost perfectly.
Now the real barrier to adopting DNA storage
is that it takes a lot of money and time
to synthesize and sequence that DNA.
But bio-engineers are bringing those barriers
down every single day,
because they have incentive to do so.
In past episodes, you've heard us talk
about how much data we produce all the time.
Every day, it's about 25 billion gigabytes.
And there are companies that make money
by parsing all that data.
And there's a huge incentive to go
from enormous super center data reserve
to the size of a sugar cube.
It's pretty sweet.
But I've got a question for all of you guys this week.
If you encoded all of your computer's data in DNA,
and that DNA were then evolve into a life form,
what would that life form look like?
I'm prepared to be terrified in the comments below.
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(mellow music)