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by stenl 1510 days ago
DNA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_digital_data_storage

It will last 10k years if stored reasonably. Storing GBs is no problem. Won’t go obsolete - the technology has been around for nearly four billion years.

2 comments

> It will last 10k years if stored reasonably.

I've heard people bring up the half-life of DNA in topics of longevity (e.g. why it'd be problematic even if we'd solve many other problems), which is apparently around 500 or so years? https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-02/whats-half-li...

Wouldn't you also have to contest such eventual decay, unless you'd pick some very stable materials? Though the page you linked has "in vivo" as a separate category (only one of approaches), so maybe this is not as applicable with the alternative methods.

500 years refers to the chemical stability of DNA exposed to the environment. Under protected conditions it would last longer, and if inserted into a living genome, it could be replicated each generation and readable hundreds of thousands of years later.
I don't think it fares very well against any kind of radiation.
There is a good cyberpunk shortstory here with biotek graffiti artists releasing a virus in the underground with I_WAS_HERE encoded in it. Perhaps with a variant released as a cure for the ensuing pandemic that is eventually discovered to have HERE_I_WAS encoded in it too.