Gadgetory

we have a problem we need to talk about there are too many cat videos well it's more than that we have too many baby photos too many tweets Google Docs videos gifts networks journals logs reports trackers we as humans are producing a crazy amount of data at this pace we are generating more data than we have the capacity to store on hard drives and that's why right now for much of our digital archives we are still relying on magnetic tape yes the same kind of tech we used for VHS and cassettes tape takes up space and it can start to go bad after 10 years and needs to be replaced anyone got a pencil but science found a new way to store our information on synthetic made in a lab DNA the same DNA that makes up the building blocks of life and it can last hundreds of thousands of years not to mention it takes up a whole lot less space I am Bridget Carey let's break it down go to illustrate this concept I shall use a jelly bean this jelly bean weighs about three grams but say you have three grams worth of DNA scientists can pack 600 million gigabytes of data in something that weighs as much as this jelly bean that means you could just store all the rolls data in a swimming pool of jelly beans and if you think that's pretty sweet it gets better there's a company that already figured out how to turn this into a business it is using DNA to store Bitcoin passwords what is in this vial exactly it is a twelve word passphrase that would give access to a cryptocurrency wallet so inside a little drop of liquid is a cryptocurrency wallet keep correct I spoke to Vishal boo-yan he's the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Carver the way he sees it the safest place to store the key that unlocks your digital money is inside a drop of DNA is this what did this vial the same thing that is in our DNA it's synthetic DNA so it's not from a human or anything but it is identical oh sure you could be a boring person and write down your a Bitcoin information on a piece of paper or save it on a computer file but think of how fast technology changes what if you store important information on a thumb drive but 20 years from now no one is using thumb drives I found this floppy disk in my parents house it was mine when I was a kid but what if I saved something important on it will I ever find a way to see what's in this historic treasured memory or maybe it's just some old middle school homework I really don't know technology changes but DNA will always be around it's durable and can last thousands of years in a cold dry place I feel like I can damage this is it fragile like like today yeah like like like how well can DNA beast like you can like a like bad you can shake it around like it's good DNA is the only thing that won't ever become obsolete sequencing technology is getting faster and cheaper just every couple of years and so and it's always relevant as long as we're alive DNA will always be a relevant medium but uh about that whole cost thing making synthetic DNA for data is not cheap Carver customers pay $1,000 to get this done and that's just for really little bit of data to me I think to pay the thousand dollars to do this is absolutely worth it as insurance policy on my current holdings and where I think they could be in the future Nate is one of Carver's customers I met him in his apartment on the first day he got his DNA data in the mail which he keeps in the freezer for him the DNA is a backup to his backup in case something happens to the computer he stored it on and if that day comes he'll need to send it to a lab to read the DNA sequence it's the final insurance policy in the last line of defense in case the other solutions fail am I am i holding your retirement plan maybe I should give this back to you I hope you are that that's that's the goal that one day this will be their retirement Carver says it has 28 clients so far and in time you may see competitors pop up with different storage ideas while this may sound very new and very bizarre I think this is going to be and especially over the next five years ten years this is going to be a lot more commonplace than people think so how does data a bunch of ones and zeroes get turned into DNA the concept is pretty simple let's start with the DNA rungs of a strand are made of four nucleotide bases abbreviated to be a TC and gene so you can simply translate the binary into the language of the four DNA letters a could equal 0 0 T 0 1 C is 1 0 and G is 1 1 so your string of zeros and ones is now DNA code and the lab prints out the chemicals to stitch it all together as synth da I spoke with one of the scientists that mastered this method Deena Zielinski it's just like any other data we can read copy and write DNA now so it's not as it's not as crazy as it sounds zalinsky co-authored a paper on how to do it and in the research successfully store different files into DNA including one of the first films ever made an 1896 french short black-and-white film of the arrival of a train it was only 50 seconds long we also encoded an old operating system and an Amazon gift card which has been spent I feel like I always have to say that some people don't get too excited in total her team put two megabytes of data on DNA and the process cost seven grand so DNA storage is too expensive now to be practical putting the family photo album on DNA will have to wait and another downside it takes time to access your files you may have to wait a day or two for a lab to read it and convert it all back to data but even so the potential is pretty cool also there's one question in all of this that was on my mind if data can be turned into DNA can we store data in ourselves inside the DNA that lives inside of us that's probably the most common question actually I mean the answer is yes we could do it but it's there's still a lot about our own DNA that we don't know and it's a lot safer to just store it in a tube in a refrigerator or a freezer somewhere so right now we're only at the Bitcoin in your freezer stage of this technology but hey thumb drives as actual thumbs not recommended but still in the realm of possibility way to go science thanks for watching list know in the comments what would be the first thing you'd back up into DNA subscribe like and ding the bell to keep up with my latest breakdowns and let me know what other topics you'd like me to explore in a future video and if they involve jelly beans go