In Case Humans Go Extinct, This Memory Crystal Will Store Our Genome for Billions of Years

If humanity ever goes extinct, scientists now have a backup plan: a coin-sized crystal storing the entire human genome. Future species could use this record as an instructional manual to recreate humans some millions—or even billions—of years from the present.

It sounds like science fiction, but it’s very real, according to a statement from England’s University of Southampton. Scientists inscribed the genetic data into a 5D memory crystal equivalent to fused quartz, a type of glass that in 2014 won the Guinness World Record for the most durable data storage material.

“We were inspired by the potential of 5D memory crystals to provide ultra-durable, high-density storage that can last billions of years,” lead researcher Peter Kazansky, an optoelectronics expert at the University of Southampton, tells Technology Networks’ Molly Coddington. “We were also inspired by the possibility that this technology could assist in the reconstruction of a person using stored genetic information, thus providing a form of information immortality that could safeguard human identity long into the future.”

In its largest size, the crystal can store up to 360 terabytes of information for billions of years—even when exposed to damaging conditions. It can survive cosmic radiation, weather extreme temperatures well below freezing and up to 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit and withstand a direct impact force of up to ten tons per square centimeter. At room temperature, the crystal can remain stable for 300 quintillion years, according to Guinness World Records—more than 21 billion times the current age of the universe.

Our @orctweets researchers have stored the full human genome on an ‘everlasting’ memory crystal.

They hope it could provide a blueprint to bring humanity back from extinction billions of years into the future, should science allow.

Read more https://t.co/DUBBaknPd7 pic.twitter.com/weiXTAdXPe

— University of Southampton (@unisouthampton) September 19, 2024

Kazansky and his team transcribed the human genome using ultra-fast lasers that encoded the data into tiny voids in silica as small as 20 nanometers. “The information is translated into five different dimensions of its nanostructures—their height, length, width, orientation and position,” Rosa Rahimi writes for CNN. Hence the 5D.

Etched onto the crystal’s face is a visual key, containing depictions of hydrogen, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen atoms, as well as the DNA double helix and its four nucleotide bases. The team included a breakdown of a chromosome’s molecular structure, as well as how it fits into a cell, and drawings of a man and a woman.

“The visual key inscribed on the crystal gives the finder knowledge of what data is stored inside and how it could be used,” Kazansky says in the statement.

In the words of Sky News, however, “there is a catch.” We have no idea what sort of intelligent species—or machines—might stumble upon this memory crystal in the distant future, or if they’ll have the means to read it. Thomas Heinis, a data researcher at Imperial College London who was not involved in the study, tells CNN the team’s work is “super impressive,” but he has doubts about the viability of the vision.

“How will they know how to read the crystal? How will they know how to build the device to read the crystal? Will the device be available in hundreds of years?” he adds. “I can barely connect my ten-year-old iPod and listen to what I listened back then.”

Scientists are not currently able to create humans—nor plants or animals, for that matter—from just their genetic information, but recent advances in synthetic biology inspire confidence that one day, it might be possible. In the meantime, scientists are brainstorming other ways of safeguarding biological information in case of disasters, such as storing frozen animal cells in lunar craters.

“I think it’s always good to be ready for the future, no matter what,” Mary Hagedorn, a senior research scientist at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute and lead author of the lunar biodiversity repository study, told Smithsonian magazine’s Carlyn Kranking in August.

The 5D memory crystal inscribed with the human genome now sits in the Memory of Mankind archive, located in the world’s oldest salt mine, in Hallstatt, Austria. Hopefully it will remain there, unneeded, forever.

Margherita Bassi | READ MORE

Margherita Bassi is a trilingual storyteller and freelance journalist with a particular interest in ancient history, astronomy and human interest stories.