That hard drive you use to store all your important documents won’t last forever. Neither will the servers holding those family photos you uploaded to the cloud. If properly stored, paper documents can last for centuries, but they can also be easily destroyed by mold or fire.
But scientists in Switzerland think they’ve come up with a method that could theoretically store “all of civilization’s knowledge… within a few cubic meters” for an almost unlimited amount of time.
Researchers Robert Grass and Reinhard Heckel of ETH Zurich are aiming to translate information into DNA and store the code in small glass capsules, essentially fossilizing human knowledge for future generations. Here’s Dr. Grass explaining the process:
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