DNA: The New Digital Information Storage System?

Another example of scientists looking to God's creation to solve a problem: Long-term information storage in DNA!

As the amount of available information explodes, information storage becomes an increasingly
important area of innovation and research. Where do you store all this information and make it
accessible? Hard drives work for now, but collective human knowledge is expected to
eventually double every twelve hours! Where will this increasing knowledge be kept and how
will it be made accessible to future generations as technology rapidly changes and old storage
systems (e.g. floppy disks) become obsolete?

Well, what do many scientists and researchers do when they have a difficult problem to solve?
They look to God’s creation to see how he did it! This is called “biomimicry.” I recently came
upon some fascinating biomimicry research I thought I would share with you: long-term
information storage in DNA!

DNA, the information storage system for every living thing, stores vast amounts of information
in microscopic packages. And, incredibly, the language system is made up of just four letters.
The way those four letters are arranged tells your body how to build and repair itself, how to
function, and how to cope with changing environmental pressures. It’s an incredible system
that points to an intelligent Designer—after all, language and information systems require an
intelligent mind to create them. Information always comes from other information (in this case,
the mind of God).

Well, researchers are harnessing the incredible storage power of DNA to store the world’s
information for the future. And get this—all of the information available to us, if encoded on
DNA, could fit in the back of an SUV! Just one gram of DNA can hold 455 exabytes of
information (that’s a lot of information!) and researchers estimate if, stored in the right
conditions, this information could last several million years.

Right now this technology is very expensive, coming in at $12,500 for one megabyte of storage.
But it will likely get cheaper and more efficient as innovation and research continues. Who
knows? DNA storage may be the way of the future.

Here’s a video featuring molecular biologist Nick Goldman discussing this fascinating new
research (of course, we don’t agree with Dr. Goldman’s timeframes regarding how long DNA
has existed or survived nor do we agree with his evolutionary presuppositions about the origin
of DNA):

We continue to marvel at God’s creation and the best minds try and copy what He has done.
But our best attempts come up short to what God’s creation does each and every day, all on its
own. We serve an amazing God!

Camp Infinity

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