Headline Aug 09, 2015/ ''' DIGITAL ETERNITY '''........ FOR STUDENTS '''

''' DIGITAL ETERNITY '''........ 

FOR STUDENTS '''

HISTORY must record,  -that the cue and insight, when it came, was from nobody less than-

The great American President Barrack H Obama: '' Be heard,'' was his political campaign advise. 

The World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless, lovingly and admiringly called, !WOW!, - belongs to every single student in the world: ''One Share : Peace-Piece''  

GREAT!...  1WOW!   -[mark, how it is now configured. With a 1 before the honour],  is a gift from the entire human race to the future generation of students.

And  Thousand Years hence, when each single one of us has been dead for hundreds and hundreds of years-

When the future Students, Professors and Teachers would comb the Ecosystem 2011, with awe and maybe offer, a prayer with gratitude for:

Students Mariam, Rabo, Dee, Saima,  Haleem, Malala[Nobel Prize],  Haider, Hussain, Ali, Paras, Shazaib Khan, Sorat, Salar Khan, Umer Khan, Qasim Khan, Vishnu/India, Toby/China, Aqsa, Hamza, Bilal Malik, Reza/Canada, 

Enam, Hufera, Danyial, Rhym/UK, Haanyia, Meriam, Ahsen, Hazeem, Zaeem, Armeen, Talat, Sarah, Ghazi, Nina, Mustafa, Eman, Ibrahim, Faizan and Maynah, Sannan.

MEANWHILE,  the Japanese engineering conglomerate  Hitachi  has also begun to develop its own method of recording  digital data on glass.

Company representatives say their product can store data for  100 million years.

But both Southampton and Hitachi are stymied by a problem that, in classical digital storage, was solved a long time ago : space.

Hitachi and Southampton's storage mechanism both top out at:

40 MB per square inch.

That's better than a CD  [which can store a max of 35 MB in the same space]  but not nearly as good as a  standard hard disk, which can hold at max a terabyte per square inch.

One promising proposal comes from inside your body:

At great magnification,  your DNA  -or that of any other living organism   -looks live a lovely double helix    -composed of four organic molecules.

You might remember them from high school biology: adenine, guanine, thymine, cytosine.

What's interesting about A, G, T, and C is that they can be rearranged in patterns to represent language    -English or Mandarin, Python or Swift    -much like the way we used  dashes and dots   -in Morse code  -to send sentences across countries.

Because  DNA  is such a tightly packed array of code, it can outcompete all conventional storage. It can hold a mind-blowing  700  terabytes  per gram.

Bio-artist Joe Davis,  for example, recently used synthetic biology to stick DNA-encoded version of the entirety of Wikipedia inside an apple. 

George Church, the chemist who invented DNA encoding, has stored  70 billion copies of his book,   Regenesis, in a drop of synthetic DNA smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.

Under ideal conditions, says Church, those books will last  700,000  years. To give a sense of that  time scale, the first printed book  Gutenberg Bible, was produced just  560 years ago.

Right now, the process is too slow to be practical. With current-day sequencing technology, one can read, at most,  12.5GB per day, from DNA, that's about 16 hours of film, which sounds like a lot until-

You consider how fast your current-day computer can download a movie [hint: it doesn't take an hour to process 90 minutes of screen time]. In addition, both writing and reading-

 DNA encoded data require complex machinery that only a few specialised labs can access, and it's just as subject to human and natural volatility as NASA's magnetic tapes.

Long Now, states the researcher, a nonprofit organization for data preservation, may have a solution that could help our information survive a digital  [or other] apocalypse- 

And maybe help our survivors rebuild.

The Rosetta is a  3-inch disk of nickel laser-etched with 13,000 pages worth of linguistic information. 

Much of it is made up of parallel texts  -the same words in lots of languages, sort of like the projects archaeological namesake.

The Honour and Serving of the  ''Operational Research on Technology'' continues.

With respectful dedication to the Students, Professors and Teachers of the world. See Ya all on !WOW!  -the World Students Society Computers-Internet-Wireless:

''' In Eternity '''

Good Night and God bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless