Please Be Seeded (#102)
I could have gone with the obvious Wordsworth quote, but went Dad joke instead. Plus: a SciArt seed collaboration.
“Imagine walking through a park that is actually a library,” she says, “every plant, flower and shrub full of archived information. You sit down on a bench, touch your handheld DNA reader to a leaf and listen to the Rolling Stones directly from it, or choose a novel or watch a documentary amid the greenery.”
A coil, ready to burst open, burst out, and burst up into the sky - spring is almost ready to be sprung on the Canadian east coast.
Unlike our neighbours in more southern provinces or states, we’re still waiting for those promising peaks of daffodils and hyacinths to punch the last of the frost out of the crunchy soil. The incessant, Biblical rain helps, although it does nothing for our daydreams of candy-coloured buds. I stare out past the rivulets of rain on the windowpanes and try to imagine the possibilities that lay in waiting in the blank canvases that surround our house.
(This is challenging, not because I don’t know spring flowers, but because I forget what was in the multi-pack bag of bulbs I bought at Costco in the fall. And no, I don’t take gardening notes.)
But doesn’t it amaze you, though, those seeds and bulbs and the sheer amount of information tucked away inside?
For comparison, I’m looking at upgrading my external hard drive, a single terabyte of photos and random manifestos from earlier days in graduate school.1 The standard on offer now seems to be five times that size - plenty of storage for future ramblings and nature shots.
The amount of theoretical data that is encoded in a single strand of DNA? One hundred billion DVDs worth.2 And if I somehow learned to encode the 0s and 1s of my words and pictures into DNA, like this scientist who tested this concept in genetically-modified tobacco plants?
…“all of the archives in the world could be stored in one box of seeds.” Now put that box of seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, she suggests, and you could store all the world’s information for thousands of years. Seed drives, not hard drives.
I could have endless photo storage.
I could plant fields of photographs that simply need the correct command line from the sun’s rays before the information unpacks and unfurls.
All that information to tell a flower to reach for the stars.
How beautifully simple and how wonderfully complex.
I can’t wait for it to begin again.
This Week in SciArt
From the Vault
What an installation by Dornith Doherty, and “in collaboration with scientists at several international seed banks”: X-ray images of 5,000 seeds (the minimum needed to preserve a plant species), dressing the walls of a veritable seed vault.
And because they’re tiny X-rays, the light that passes through the days will change what you see, and the quality of the images over time.
For your computer aficionados, the proposed solution from the CyberHusband is something called a NAS (network area storage). 🤷♀️ As I finish this post, he is watching videos on building one, and I just smile and wave.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn22190-books-and-javascript-stored-in-dna-molecules/
Leroy cat is adorable. :).