Throughout history, man has been fantasizing about interstellar travel and interstellar migration, such as those science fiction or movies about fantastic spaceships, thrilling adventures, or popular greetings of "live long and prosper". Currently, we are in the midst of a new stage of aerospace engineering, characterized by rapidly developing technologies and the capacity to support more deep space explorations, it's exciting to say that what once only laid in our dreams seems accessible and foreseeable just around the corner and the infinite space is due for where our civilization finds its way.
However, when it comes to interstellar information transportation, it raises the concern of how information can be transported efficiently and securely in order to successfully update earth 2.0. In order to ensure a sustainable civilization on a new planet, we use DNA storage technology, a spore display system, and special radiation-resistant compounds (Melanin and Dsup proteins).
We have successfully stored a huge amount of information with a little space and at an affordable cost, and managed to ensure information security and stability amid a harsh cosmic environment, supporting accurate transport with our DNA storage technology, spore display systems, and special radiation-roof substances (melanin and Dsup proteins). Traditional methods like radios and lasers are required for sophisticated infrastructure with constant emitting to ensure receival, while silicon or tape is too heavy and too spatial to carry about when mass still rules out any human missions in the near future. Thus, our DNA storage technology has an overwhelming dominance over traditional strategies.
In design, we hope to put our spores in a capsule-like space for storage in the cargo ship. Cargo ship has less protective and defending structures than the spacecraft with human on and make it more economical if we have to transport lots of them. In a capsule, for example, people can store information in the same category to make it easy to find apart from our tags linked in the sequence. For example, the very first photo people shot for the black hole composed of 5 petabytes of data. This was impossible to be emitted with radios and finally took astonishing a half ton of hard drives to transport. However, calculated by the average information density, only 2.15*10^(-6) g DNA are required to place the data and this can be transported in vivo to store for a much longer time at a much more stable stage. In this regard, less than 20μg of spores (in dried state) shall be used to contain the information.
Even in daily life, people can choose spores as a tool for information communication, as an alternative for USB flash disks, writing, etc. It can be used to preserve cold data, such as documents and archives that need to be kept for a long time and are not often accessed, such as scientific documents, financial documents, government reports, historical records, family trees, and personal genetic records.
Despite our project's design for interstellar information transport, scientists, entrepreneurs, aerospace industries, corporations, government administrations, or individuals, anyone interested in DNA storage could be our client.
DNA synthesis and sequencing industries around the world have developed rapidly in the past decades, a good example is there're a few startup companies in China focusing on commercial DNA storage (C-ATOM, etc.). However, among them, few pay attention to improving the way of storing DNAs in a safe, stable, high-density as well as convenient way, and this is what our project is focused on. With our little spores, we are trying to guarantee a storage manner with high density, high fidelity, and high stability of the DNA data inside. Therefore, anyone who is interested in storing information in DNA can choose our product as a carrier to contain their precious information.
In the future, with the rapid and forseeable development of DNA data technology, there will certainly be more application senario clients for our design.
The emergency of DNA storage technology in interstellar information transport brings synthetic astrobiology to the frontier of public notice. While our project promotes the public reflection of life's origin and our civilization, it also brings the consideration of our responsibility to the universe in people's eyes. Cosmic biology has raised many big questions regarding from ethnics to the origin of life, such as what if we bring a bacterium to another planet, such as Mars by a rover or human microbiome, will it cause irreversible contamination? or will it be a seed of life that will finally bring a civilization? It is up to each of us to contemplate the above questions.
Besides, it is also worthwhile to consider the possible risks brought by accidental release of those little spores. It is potentially an anti-microbial issue since we have increased the resistance of our B.subtilis and its spores. To tackle this problem of contaminations, we have taken a few procedures in our project design and we believe we can manage to solve this problem. For more information about our safety issue, please visit our safety page.
Storing DNA in vivo is one of the five possible methods nowadays, it has low cost and can offer biologically stable environment for the exogeneous DNAs[1]. However, it is relatively less in information density and there's very likely to exist a limitation for how large the information stored. Therefore, our project in the future will try to polish our origin design. The genome of B.subtilis may be modified by cutting off the sequences with no need in sporulation and genomic protection[2], and thus spare more space for exogeneous DNAs to insert and exist.
Cost issue is also what we are confronting. Compared to data stored in silicon, DNA data storage especially for cold data can save lots of money because of its durability[1]. However, if we can't load all the data on earth or there’s extra data produced in the space, how to synthesize DNAs, how to store them and how to produce spores or how to retrieve our information are what challenge the real-world implementations. However, we get confidence and inspiration from the current experimental advances in the International Space Station and China's Tianwen Module[3]. The first ever DNA sequencing experiment has taken place in ISS in 2016 and 'demonstrated the feasibility of sequencing analysis and microbial identification aboard the ISS'[4]. With the rapid development of DNA synthesis and sequencing technology, especially de novo synthesis[5] and solid phase sequencing, we believe that implementing our design in the space is not only possible but also meaningful.