Now, along with being a man of faith, I'm a science geek. I simply think science is an additional way that God uses to, not only give proof of himself, but also to make his children even more amazed by the Creator. Simply put, God is science. God made science. A lot of us have a blurred bias between the differences of science and faith, but really, science is just another form of faith. Scientists have faith in their theories. Men of science have faith in their leading scientists, so therefore, men of science have faith in theories that were created by scientists. In essence, men of science are men of faith, just not in the same thing. I could consider myself to be a supreme man of faith. I have faith in the theories, because I have faith in the upper knowledge of scientists themselves, but that is only because I have the utmost faith in God that he was the original being that created all these occurrences and phenomena, therefore, since God has bestowed these scientists with the knowledge they have, it really only strengthens my faith in my Father. Now, scientists nowadays have abused their knowledge and turned it for evil, chasing after the desires of their flesh (ie. money, fame, power) and have left God out of their discoveries, but that's going off of on a tangent. So, from time to time, I'll post some awesome things that have been discovered in the science realm of life, because it just helps me, and hopefully everyone else, realized just how indescribable our God is. Plus, any normal human being would get excited with whatever is being advanced in today's technological realm.
So, DNA... deoxyribonucleic acid... As, Ts, Gs, and Cs... The blueprint of our body... The step-by-step manual to our bodies running... In summary, the entire essence of how we exist. Just a couple fun facts about DNA and how pretty sweet it is.
- our entire DNA sequence would fill up 200, 1,000 page NYC phone books
- If a person typed 60 words per minutes, for 8 hours a day, it would take them about 50 years to type the human genome
- there is about 3,000,000,000 bases in an entire human genome
- if you unraveled all of the DNA in your entire body, it would be long enough to travel to the moon and back 300 times.
Impressed yet? Well, if you're not... lemme take one more shot at it. The human genome is the most complex set of instructions. In October 1990, scientists began a cooperative research program to basically map-out the entire genome of a single human being, called the Human Genome Project. It wasn't until April 2003 until they officially declared the HGP to be complete. After the completion of the project, scientists estimated nearly 140,000 different genes that could be identified within the DNA. 140,000 different steps to construct the complexity of the human body that you are currently occupying right now. That's pretty amazing if you ask me. (More of the Human Genome Project can be read here: http://www.genome.gov/12011238)
Now, here's something new about DNA. It can store data... lots of it, and not just the amount of gigabytes that you can store on some hard-drive on your computer at home.
About a cup of DNA (and when I say cup, I mean the official measuring "cup." The 8 oz cup. Not some cup you can get from Sonic), can store up to 3 zettabytes of data. Never heard of a zettabyte? Me either, until today. Let's put this into perspective compared to gigabytes.
1 zettabyte is equivalent to 1,099,511,627,776 gigabytes. That would make 3 zettabytes equal to 3,298,534,883 gigabytes. Now, that may not seem as significant to you, because a cup of DNA, in reference to how small DNA actually is, would mean that there would have to be a lot of DNA to store data. Let's get down to the small scale. (in comparison to DNA)
Think of things that weight a gram... maybe a pencil eraser? A paper clip? A piece of paper? A button? Things that weigh a gram are pretty small right? Here's a pretty cool number. 1 gram of DNA stores about 2,000,000,000 megabytes, which is equal to about 2,000,000 gigabytes. 2000000GB hard drive for ya right there, and that's only in a gram.
A top-of-the-line MacBook Pro, that can cost up to $2,800, that is used for professional video editing and uploading, contains a hard-drive worth 500 GB. Not only does this small amount of DNA have more room, but it also cost effective (assuming that DNA is essentially free, before the cost of labor, research, and process of inputting data). One MacBook Pro contains about .025% of data storage in a gram of DNA. In order for you to equal the amount of memory stored in a gram of DNA, you would need about 40,000 MacBook Pros, and for kicks, that would be equal to spending $112,000,000. I'm just going to assume that altering the sequence into binary numbers costs much less than that of 40,000 MacBooks. (I do realize that these numbers are kind of skewed, because the hard drive is not that only factor in a laptop, but all things equal here.)
I'm not sure about you, but that gets me excited about the future of technology. Who knows what we could be working on in the next 10 years. Hopefully, the cure for cancer will be long found before that. Once you begin to store the "I Had A Dream" speech, and all of Shakespeares sonnets, onto the manual for your body, that's when something amazing happens. I don't even wanna know how much memory is able to store an entire human genome of a regular human being... Too big to comprehend.
And if you think I'm lying, (which would be a pretty drawn out lie) here's a couple articles that I read about this. It's not crazy, it's science, and science rules.
Original Article:
http://earthsky.org/human-world/scientists-successfully-store-data-in-dna?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+fullsite+(EarthSky)
The Official Press Release:
http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Information/News/press-releases/press-release-01232013-DNA_storage.html
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