http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/01/ ... -per-gram/

They're talking about very long term storage in DNA, 50 - 5000 years. One benefit is that:



It's the access times that bother me. Although faster methods of scanning may be possible in the future, at the moment we rely on chemistry. These reactions can't be rushed too much, so read times are likely to be hundreds if not millions of times slower than magnetic or optical media. However, this may not be a problem for the sort of data archiving they're talking of.

I have always been worried about how long those Instagram pictures of cats will be around for. I feel slightly more rested now.

By the sound of it, in the future instragram pictures of cats will actually be stored on cats.

Will cats become fully portable media or do you have to start worrying about your data wandering off?

*looks at cat, then at USB cable* so where do i plug this in?

Being serious, it's going to be a very long tim before you have a DNA drive in your house. I imagine for now the <s>cats</s> DNA will be stored in a data centre with a laboratory, and you'll have to send your data request by email and wait for the results in the post.

I wonder what the maximum storage capacity is for matter?

If you could build a chip that was made of single atoms (say carbon) and you could create it so that each atom has an on or off state. What is the capacity of it per weight?

Given that 1 mol or carbon weighs 12 grams. 1 mol contains Avogadro's number of atoms which is... 6.02 x 10^23.

That many bits is equal to...

6.7 x 10^7 petabytes.

That's 67,000,000 petabytes.

Which is 5,500,000 petabytes per gram.

Lol! That's quite a bit then

You could theoretically go smaller than that. All subatomic particles have spin which, effectively, means 1 or 0 (clockwise or anticlockwise). However, our current understanding of the universe is that the state of any particle's spin is 'fuzzy' and in any case observing the spin would change it. If we could overcome these limitations, you could store several bytes of information on one carbon atom.
Quantum data storage. Very Star Trek.

Yeah, I was thinking of going sub-atomic or quantum but then Heisenberg kind of breaks it all.

Lol!

Yeah, if we could just figure out how to break the Uncertainty Principle, we'd be rocking .

Don't knock it, there is actually some progress of a kind. It's kind of like looking at somebody out of the corner of your eye so they don't notice you're looking. I read it in New Scientist or similar last week.

So to send petabytes of data just put the cat in a box and mail it to destination. Though I guess if you had a cat with one movie encoded in its DNA and another cat with another movie in its DNA you could theoretically do mash ups very easily.

Why do you have to do this, Oliver? Why? (8+(

Mark

Cats are evil and should not be given data, that's a feline Skynet right there