Scientists have stored the entire human genome on a five-dimensional crystal that’s capable of digitally storing up to 360 terabytes of information

5D ‘eternity crystal’ stores 360 TB of data for billions of years

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2024-09-20 14:00:15

Scientists have stored the entire human genome on a five-dimensional crystal that’s capable of digitally storing up to 360 terabytes of information and is built to survive for billions of years. The tech could be used to create an enduring record of human, animal, and plant genomes.

Some might remember the ‘Pioneer plaques,’ a pair of gold-colored metal plaques carried aboard the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft that launched in the early 1970s. The brainchild of American astronomer Carl Sagan, the plaques were etched with a visual message – including a naked man and woman and a schematic of our Solar System – in case one of the craft bumped into intelligent extraterrestrial life on its travels.

Now, researchers at the University of Southampton in the UK have created a 21st-century version of the Pioneer plaques using a 5D memory crystal that stores vast amounts of information for billions of years without degrading. They’ve stored the complete human genome – about three billion Gs, As, Ts and Cs – on it.

“We know from the work of others that genetic material of simple organisms can be synthesized and used in an existing cell to create a viable living specimen in a lab,” said Professor Peter Kazansky, who led the team of the University’s scientists. “The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored should science in the future allow.”