Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by KronisLV 1512 days ago
> 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.

1 comments

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.