*I heartily approve of efforts along this line. It's okay if the first ones don't work.
*We know all kinds of stuff about Egyptians and practically nothing about Hittites or Mohenjo Daro. It's not that well-known Egypt was that big a deal as a culture compared to those other two unknown civilizations; it's all about preservation and decay rates.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3045215/how-to-store-your-data-for-a-million-years
(…)
"The idea of storing information on DNA traces back to a Soviet lab in the 1960s, but the first successful implementation wasn't achieved until 2012, when biologist George Church and his colleagues announced in the journal Science that they had encoded one of Church's books in DNA. More recently, reports the New Yorker, the artist Joe Davis, now in residence at Church's lab, has announced plans to encode bits of Wikipedia into a particularly old strain of apple, so that he can create "a living, literal tree of knowledge."
"DNA can store a vast amount of information in a tiny amount of organic material. "You could take all the information of the world and store it in a few grams of DNA—unimaginable with all other techniques we have," says Grass.
"Under the right conditions, DNA can also last a very long time. In 2013, a complete genome was extracted from the fossil of a 700,000 year old horse found in Canada. Inspired by fossils like these, Grass’s team embedded DNA into a dense, inorganic material—microscopic spheres of silica, with a diameter of roughly 150 nanometers—in order to protect it from humidity, oxygen, and other environmental aggressors. (The researchers encoded Switzerland’s Federal Charter of 1291 and the Methods of Mechanical Theorems by Archimedes.)
" "We can prove that in these capsules, it’s as stable as in these bones, which have an excellent longevity," he says. The team also developed a type of sunscreen for the silica capsules to block the effect of light…."
