Via the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we learn of a fledging company that hopes to stave off the incidental but increasingly significant problem of cloud storage and energy-intensive data-management by enabling clients to keep their past and prognostications waiting in the wings in the form of crops whose DNA has been encoded (at density with integrity reaching two hundred petapixels per gram) within the plants themselves, and instead of consuming resources to maintain the information at one’s fingertips—we ought to mediate on the meaning of archives, curation and libraries before we decided to make everything at all times ready to summon forward whilst on the go—though the details seem rather sparse, to generate clean air and useful biomass as a by-product of perpetuating these hitchhiker genes.
Perhaps this passive form of storage could also be a substitute for the energy-hungry prospect of prospecting for crypto-currencies as well. Compare to how restrictions on memory and storage of software was supplemented on the Apollo missions by weaving the programming into a mesh by hand. Knowledge should be freely accessible but the omnipresence of it might seem to have diminishing value, considering the caprices of capacity and arbitrary limits. I wonder what it means for abstract, errant data to become part of Nature and whether that same information isn’t also party to the rules of evolution and inheritance and what we perceive as degradation, decoding errors that outside our dataset we would call mutations which in fact be taking that triangulation of statistics to the next level.
