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Crystal gazing: Could we essentially preserve our species forever?
A new ‘Superman crystal’ holds a map of the entire human genome. It could live forever. But who would resurrect us? What else can the crystal do? Take a look.
In the sci-fi short story The Monster (1948), Canadian writer AE van Vogt imagines an alien race landing on a dead Earth.
In an effort to find out what happened here, which they must do before they can begin to colonise the planet, they resurrect a human being, bringing the planet’s apex predator back from extinction.
Reading the story today can feel a bit strange. Particularly since, this September, researchers at the University of Southampton took a final step in a 10-year project to encapsulate the human genome in a casing that can, essentially, live forever.
The 10-year project is led by Peter Kazansky, a professor of optoelectronics. He and his team recently inscribed the complete human genome — which involves describing all three billion base pairs of DNA — onto a nanostructured or “five-dimensional” memory crystal the size of a coin.
The crystal is made from fused quartz, one of the most thermally and chemically stable materials on the planet. Researchers used ultra-fast lasers to inscribe data into self-assembled nanostructured voids within the silica (hence “5D”).
This kind of memory crystal is called the “Superman crystal” because of its supposed ability to withstand extreme temperatures (of up to 1,000 degrees Celsius), cosmic radiation, extreme weather and a direct impact force up to 10 tonnes per cm2 (for reference, the great white shark has a bite force of about 1.8 tonnes).
Kazansky and his team published their first paper on their new data storage method in 2014, in the journal Physical Review Letters. It too them another 10 years to fit the genome onto a single unit. (They are now working on perfecting this storage method for possible commercial application.)
The crystal can potentially protect the integrity of the data for billions of years, giving humanity a shot at revival (albeit a very long shot) after all life on Earth has died out in the normal course of things, as our sun cools to a red giant, 7.5 billion years from now.
If we should go extinct sooner, amid natural calamity or a cosmic accident, the crystal would be available to whatever takes our place — whether life forms from another planet (there are scientists who believe life got here from somewhere else too), some sort of remnant AI, or potential genetic offshoots of the species.
“We know from the work of others that genetic material of simple organisms can be synthesised and used in an existing cell to create a viable living specimen in a lab,” Kazansky said, in a post on the University of Southampton website.
It’s not just humans, of course. “The 5D memory crystal opens up possibilities for other researchers to build an everlasting repository of genomic information from which complex organisms like plants and animals might be restored should science in the future allow,” Kazansky writes.
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The “Superman crystal” is only the latest of humanity’s attempts to ensure continuity beyond our own extinction.
In his book X-Risk: How Humanity Discovered Its Own Extinction, historian Thomas Moynihan traces the intellectual history of our engagement with this idea. Since the early years of modern archaeology in the 17th century, he writes, we have known what the risks can look like, and what their impacts have been.
This combined with 18th-century Malthusian population panics, 19th-century theories of evolution, and the development of nuclear weapons and environmentalism in the 20th century, to create our Modernist understanding of human extinction.
Today’s debates about super-intelligent AI and designer pandemics are all, Moynihan argues, part of this “centuries-long globe-spanning drama.”
This awareness of our own precarity, he writes, is one of the most significant milestones in human intellectual history. “[It] allows us to present a novel case for why we must expend more effort on protecting the future of the human project. Even in spite of the many failures and unforgivable sins that have blighted its past.”
In this context, Kazansky’s memory crystal represents a hedging of humanity’s bets, a Hail Mary pass to the future.
The memory crystal will be stored at the ceramicist and archivist Martin Kunze’s Memory of Mankind archive, situated deep in an ancient Austrian salt mine. Here, ceramic microfilm — modern versions of the legendary Sumerian clay tablets — and a range of other materials hold libraries worth of information, ranging from replicas of books and art to individual CVs, all of it aiming to preserve a sense of who we were and what we knew.
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Of course, there are more prosaic uses for the crystal too.
It could be used, as Kazansky has noted, to preserve the genetic data of currently endangered plant and animal species, in preparation for a future when we have the wherewithal to resurrect them.
The crystals could then be combined with de-extinction efforts such as those underway at the Texas-based Colossal Biosciences, which is working to revive four extinct species: the dodo, Tasmanian tiger, northern white rhinoceros, and woolly mammoth.
The Superman crystal has applications as a storage device too, with one disc holding about 360 TB or 514,000 CDs worth of data. Given that humanity churns out hundreds of zetabytes (that’s 1 billion terabytes) of data a year, the commercial implications of a low-cost, easy-to-produce, robust, low-energy data storage material are huge.
As for the human genome buried in the salt mine, whether future archaeologists will be able to read, interpret, or even find it is, of course, uncertain. Perhaps the only thing more uncertain is what kind of world such a post-extinction human would wake up to find themselves in.
