In 2025 the world will generate 160 zettabytes of data. Stored in conventional digital media, this would fill many data centers, each the size of a corporate campus consuming enormous amounts of energy. DNA molecules offer an attractive alternative. DNA is a million times more dense, can last hundreds and even thousands of years, and has been around for 3.5 billion years as an integral building block of life. Using DNA, 2025’s bytes will fit into a few shipping containers.

But there are even more exotic applications for DNA data storage. The Arch Mission Foundation, created in 2015, seeks to “back up” planet Earth through extraterrestrial libraries with durability on billion year timescales. DNA data storage provides a significant technical solution. Arch Mission already delivered a payload into solar orbit in the glove compartment of Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster and crash-landed a 30 million-page Lunar Library on the Moon, with Space IL.

Nova Spivack is the co-founder of Arch Mission Foundation. In the near-term, Arch Mission serves as an educational project, promoting awareness of our fragile ecosystem and the contributions to humanity’s knowledge by all cultures. In the long-term it may be the only remaining trace of human civilization.

Among the questions to be probed:

• How can biological “wet-ware” provide such an efficient and rugged data storage application?
• How will this technology impact our silicon-based information and communication systems?
• Could DNA serve as “seed” for long distance interstellar exploration or colonization?
• Are there concerns that extraterrestrials might discover and decode an Arch?.